Welcome back to the blog!
As I am wrapping up this term in my Leadership and Media Strategies course, we have been studying how to measure the effectiveness and impact of strategic communication campaigns. How do we do this? Can it be measured by quantitative rulers? Let's talk about it!
So, let's begin by discussing some effective ways to evaluate the status of our strategic communication campaigns. Every strategic communications professional I know loves to run impactful campaigns, but how are they measuring their success?
According to contentgroup.com, there is a difference between measuring and evaluating. They explain the differences like this, "The best way to understand the two is to look at it as quantitative research (focusing on the numbers, e.g. what worked the best) and qualitative research (understanding the results, e.g. why did that work)."
Being able to understand the measurement and evaluation of campaign results simply comes down to the basic understanding of what works and why it worked for you. In order to really understand this way of thinking, here are "Three Golden Questions" to help discover the effectiveness of your campaign:
Example: I currently work for a Bookstore on a college campus. Our store-wide communications plan is broken down into 50% print, 20% radio, 20% television, and 10% social media. If I am trying to sell textbooks to college students, what is the best way for me to contact them?
While print media used to be the primary way to advertise, we are seeing a major decrease in that medium and an increase in social media and television. College students today spend more time on social media than anywhere else. I need something that will help my sales numbers magnify.
2. What needs to change to address the problem?
In order to address my problem, I need to stop taking up 50% of my communication plan with print media and increase my social media and television percentages. For example, what happens if I do 20% print, 15% radio, 25% television, and 40% social media.
3. What will you do to make these changes?
In order to make these changes, I must reevaluate my communication plan. Since my print media budget is smaller, I send out two postcards a year instead of four; I can change the social media campaigns from one large campaign to three medium campaigns across multiple platforms; or I can create television advertisements that can be shared on social media, etc.
It is super important to be able to relay the success of your campaigns to your supervisors and/or clientele. Without this data-based proof, the only thing that can be held responsible for your success is what you say; however, that sometimes is not enough.
There are many ways to collect performance data on a communications campaign.
Need to collect data for a newspaper? No problem! Many communicators collect clippings of press release articles they send to news outlets in both physical and online formats. It's can be difficult to keep up with who chooses to run your story and who does not; however, keeping a list of names of the place the press release was sent out to will help tremendously! These clippings can help you keep up with what news outlets like and dislike; that way you can revise your next press release to make it better!
Think about your last trip to your favorite fast-food restaurant. When you paid for your food and received a receipt, was there a survey link at the bottom? Typically, most fast-food establishments will offer a free or reduced-price item as a reward for completing the survey that evaluates how you feel about your most recent experience with them. These surveys help different departments within the company informed about the customer's experience with the brand. From there, the communications team can use the information collected to build their next campaign.
What about social media... Have you heard about the analytics feature offered on Facebook Pages and Instagram Business Profiles? The analytics page is a handy tool for account owners to track viewer engagement with different types of content posted (both organic and inorganic) within a certain timeframe. The analytics can be used by campaign managers to know what type of content performs best at a specific time in the day, month, or year! Social media posts can then be planned in advance with a better opportunity to widen the engagement levels on it.
The main two types of online data-based evidence measurement that I have worked with over the past few years are called Return on Investment, ROI for short, and Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS. The marketing and communications world recognizes ROI and ROAS to be positive or negative reflections on how well every advertisement is performing. While ROI can be used to measure and evaluate both organic (non-paid) and inorganic (paid) advertisements, ROAS can only be used to measure inorganic ads.
When I was working at Crazy Cool Company, we used an outside branding agency called AdGlow to help us keep up our communication and advertising campaigns. This company was great at letting us know whether our ROAS was up to par or if we needed to adjust our budget to make it better. Sometimes it is better to throw money at the post to boost the ROAS, but other times it is best to use smaller budgets to keep the ROAS in positive standing.
We would use ROI to evaluate photoshoots and determine if we would receive a large enough return on the monetary investment we would have to give in order to make the shoot a success, evaluate paper catalogs to determine if they were worth the money or if we should switch to digital, or if we needed to change the type of clothing we sold in order to make a better profit.
In Conclusion,
Every communications specialist needs to be able to provide hard evidence of their campaign successes and failures. Were there highs and lows? If so, how did you change it around? In what ways did you troubleshoot to fix the problem? Show me the number, and in them shows the true value of the communicator.
Comments
Post a Comment