Today I talk about how you can measure the effectiveness of your communication activity using a straightforward approach. I’ll share why you should track your activities, how this approach can help support your business goals and save you money.
This is up there as one of the top things I get asked about by business leaders and comms people. So listen and learn, and hit subscribe if you are listening on iTunes and leave me a review.
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Full Transcript
Emma:
Welcome to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works with me, Emma Drake. In this episode, I’m going to talk to you all about how you can measure the effectiveness of your communication activity and how effective measurement can help support your business goals.
How do you know that the comms is working? How do you know that those activities you’re spending your money on are actually working for you? This is up there with one of the top three things that people ask me about from operators of businesses to comms experts through to leaders of growing businesses. I’m going to talk through with you today some really quick tips and tools on basic measurement of your activity, why you need it and how it can help you strategically by supporting where you spend your money and by making sure you have the right support team in place.
Measurement can be really rewarding. It doesn’t have to be super boring. I’m going to talk you through three reasons why you should measure what you’re doing, top tips for getting started and why quality, not quantity, should be your driver. Let’s get started on the three reasons why you should be measuring what you’re doing.
The first one is really simple. How the heck will you know if you’ve succeeded or not? Success in business is all different things from being really successful in selling lots of products or services, attracting more staff as you’re growing, through to attracting funding maybe, and setting effective goals is a really important part of understanding what the destination is and what success looks like, but the reason you should measure what you’re doing is you’re not going to know if you’ve reached your goal unless you are actually tracking what you’re doing, so that’s the first one.
The second one is it’s just more cost-effective in the long run and helps you budget effectively. If you think about it, if you put your money into activities that you know are working into areas where you know you’re getting the return, then you know you’re spending your money wisely. If you’re not really tracking what you’re doing, you don’t really have any idea if that money you’re spending is giving you any return at all.
The third one is you can hire the right team to support you with the right skills to support your business.
EmmaLet’s move on to some top tips for getting started. I use a really simple model that’s been adapted over the years from one that I’ve used when I worked in UK government communications actually. There are lots of tools out there, but I’m all about making it simple for you and not academic. And I’ve personally used this adaptive model and it works for me. I’ve put a link in the show notes to a really simple template that you can download. I’ve got that for you. And if you look in the show notes, there should be a link there for you.
I’ve adapted this model over the years. It’s a really simple method that involves logging the work that we did, so that’s the work we did to prepare, so that’s inputs. Then you look at the work you produced. That’s output, so that’s the actual activities. And then we look at the work and the impact that it had, so that’s the outcomes. It’s really important that you measure the outcomes as well as outputs because this is the crucial bit that means you were measuring the activity against your business goals, not just on putting content out there.
For example, an output might be delivering an actual event or online webinar. The inputs to get you to that point would be the content you produce such as copywriting, gathering assets, producing those materials, graphic design, briefing speakers if it was an event that you had speakers attending. Maybe if it was an event that you were showcasing your products out, that would be developing the stand material or the [inaudible 00:03:35] , et cetera, for that. The outcome from putting on that event and going to that event and having a presence there might be five sales leads or interested parties, or if it was a recruitment event, you might have people that would be really interested in working in your business.
Hopefully that explains a really simple way of doing it. Another element to introduce when you’ve perfected this approach is looking at the reactions and looking a little bit deeper into what do people do with the information you put out there. In the same example of an event, this might include the increase or decrease in signups of the webinar. How did they engage with your content? Did it cause a reaction? Did it have the desired effect? Things like how long did they spend on the event landing page? Did they spend long enough to read all of your content that was on that page? Did they share your content? Are they sharing it saying, “This is a great event. You really must engage or go to this event”? Or maybe simply just the number of tickets sold and bums on seats, so is your content converting?
This helps you track the relevance and effectiveness of your materials you produced against whether or not they resonated in a way that you wanted them to. There are quite a number of free monitoring tools and resources available to all of us really for free, such as analytics from Twitter, from LinkedIn, as well as Google, Facebook. If you use any kind of newsletter tool like MailChimp, for example, that also has built-in analytics that can really help you start to delve deep into how your content is being shared and how it’s working for you. And you can get really into the data side of things. If this is your thing, then there’s lots of free tools out there to help you.
Lastly, a quick word on quality over quantity. Hopefully by now, you’ve listened to a few of my episodes and you’ll be starting to understand how incredibly important it is to have a purpose to starting out with any of your communication activity. This is what I preach, and this is how I work with people. It’s really important to me. Just putting content out there can lead to so many things from feeling personally ineffective, i.e., “Why isn’t this working?”, through to cutting your budgets, but not really understanding why, through to hiring the wrong team, which, let’s be honest, leads to more wasted money, and who wants that?
On the positive side, by tracking your activity, it can help you spend your time and budget much more effectively. It can help you hire the right people to support you. And more importantly, it can help you reach your business goals. I hope this episode has been really useful for you in giving you some useful tips on how to measure the impact of your comms activity, why it’s important and given you some food for thought regards perhaps what activity you’re undertaking at the moment and whether that’s working for you.
Finally, thank you so much for listening today to the Communication Strategy That Works Podcast. I’m Emma, and don’t forget to check my show notes for those links that I mentioned. I’d also love it if you would subscribe to my podcast and leave a review and please share this within your networks if you think there’s someone that could benefit from listening, too. I’ll just say bye for now, and speak to you next time.