As the back-to-school mentality kicks in for many of us, September is often the time businesses launch new projects and review business performance. In doing this against the backdrop of a challenging economic climate, companies will naturally be looking at their budgets.
Are they spending wisely? Do they need to make changes, cut costs, or re-distribute current spend across different departments?
It’s times like this that it can be tough for businesses to assess the value of their communications spend and it can be hard for in-house communications team to demonstrate the value they bring, especially in financial terms.
Assessing your communications spend
It’s easy when trying to assess return on investment, to jump straight to metrics. How can I measure the value of communications? What tools can I use to help me to do this? What figures can I use to demonstrate that the business is investing wisely?
Before diving into measurement it’s important to look at what you are measuring
From a PR perspective, your business could be getting lots of media coverage but if existing and potential customers aren’t reading or hearing it, or if it doesn’t include the messages you’re trying to get across, they won’t be forming the opinions you want them to have about your products and services. You won’t be building the brand awareness and the reputation you’d expect from effective public relations.
When it comes to internal communications, you could have a team that is sending out email communications daily, creating newsletters, and posting on your internal social channels. But, if employees aren’t reading the communications or don’t understand them, are your internal communications really working? And if you do regular employee surveys and employee engagement is low, what does that say about the impact your colleague communications are having?
So what should you do?
When reviewing the effectiveness of communications with clients, I always recommend starting with a stakeholder mapping exercise. We’ll consider the priority stakeholders that the business needs to reach both externally and internally and if it’s a large stakeholder group - such as clients or a sizeable employee population - we’ll break it down further so it’s clear who the business needs to reach within these stakeholder groups and why.
And then we’ll ask:
What do you want them to know about your business?
What crucial information do you want them to understand and why is this important?
What do you want them to feel about what you’re doing / your proposition or initiative?
What emotions do you want your communications to elicit? What behaviours do you want to see?
What do you want them to do?
As a result of them receiving your communications, what actions do you want them to take?
In carrying out this exercise, your business is now in better a position to develop a communications strategy with clear objectives, key messages, and outputs and in turn, measure the effectiveness of your communications.
Measuring real value
Externally, you’ll now be much clearer on the media you need to target to reach your priority audience and the key messages that you want to get across.
You can use customer surveys to assess brand awareness. Try for example, asking some simple questions to find out how people heard about you and what they know about your business and brand.
Measuring the financial value of media coverage is now also a more worthwhile exercise. There’s a range of tools you can use to measure value in a meaningful way: this article on Hubspot provides some good examples.
Internally, once you’ve decided what you are trying to communicate and to whom, it will be much easier to measure the effectiveness of your internal communications.
You can review open and click rates of your communications, break down employee survey results to explore engagement levels, and conduct pulse surveys and questionnaires to understand what is working and why.
The Chartered Institute of Public Relations has a great Communication Measurement Matrix to help communications practitioners establish the value of internal communications and generate insights to inform activity.
With greater clarity on how employees are engaging with different communications, you'll be better placed to review your spend on different internal communications channels. More broadly, you can assess the impact that your internal communications activity is having on employee retention rates, productivity, and performance; creating key metrics to assess real value.
Don’t measure in isolation
Effective communications should be the central thread that runs throughout your organisation; helping to promote and protect your reputation, increase sales, drive employee engagement and improve productivity.
Measuring it, therefore, in isolation only identifies a small part of the value that effective communications can bring. Instead, try measuring communications alongside the wider business strategy: look at the value that it brings to your marketing, HR, and corporate affairs activity overall.
A more holistic approach to communications measurement will also help your business from a resource perspective. If you’re clear on what you need to communicate, why, and how, it will be easier to identify if you have the right people, in the right roles to do this effectively, or if you need to make changes or upskill your team.
In challenging times, functions that can’t demonstrate a simple return on investment are often the ones that see their budgets cut first.
My advice?
Don’t put an arbitrary price on your brand reputation and employee engagement.
Make sure you’re crystal clear on your communications objectives and desired outputs so you can measure the real value of communications and make the right investment in your communications activity.
Need help developing a communications strategy or reviewing the effectiveness of your communications? Get in touch!