How to Quantify the Impact of Your Communications Strategy
Some common traditional metrics used in measuring impact are media mentions and social media metrics. However, this article focuses on how to measure tangible results that align with your business/organizational strategic goals.
While the above is important to measure impact, it is important that communications professionals do not have a default measurement metric, like a blanket approach that is used for every business/organizational objectives. It is best practice to leverage a particular metric to measure the impact of a communications strategy based on its relevance to the overall objective. This is a strategic approach to communications.
Strategic communication is defined as the purposeful use of communication by a business or organization to achieve its objectives in measurable terms.
~Sola Abulu
Strategic communications ensures that every communications activity is bespoke and tailored to the business goals and meets the business/organizational goals per time. It does not create communications activity to keep things going but identifies business problems and solves them through communications.
Steps to take in quantifying the impact of communications
- What Does Success Look Like? To achieve result with communications, it must be well-tailored to the organization or business, as earlier stated. Therefore, the first step will be to understand the goals/objectives to determine what the desired outcome will be. When creating a communications strategy for a client, it is important to talk from the perspective of employees (because they are your main audience) rather than from a consultant perspective. This will help to understand their expectations and what matters to them else, there would be misaligned expectations.
- Measure what matters to the core business strategy and goals. This ensures that communications deliver value and impacts.
- Set S.M.A.R.T Targets: Goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and tangible. Tangible indicators differ in contexts. In some contexts, social media metrics may be tangible but in a political context for instance, if you are developing a communications strategy around a political leader, a tangible metric should be number of voter registrations in party strongholds. If social media engagements are high and voter registration is low, it is a signal that the campaign’s success was not measured based on tangible metrics.
- Clarify Expectations:Be very clear on who the target audience is, their profile, what action should the target audience take from the communications campaign that achieves the desired goal, what should be the media impact, incremental outcomes versus final outcomes. Also, clarify their expectations on what communications can and cannot achieve.
- Know Your Baseline: This should be done after understanding what success looks like for the clients, business or organization and before the communications activity or campaign begins. In a business context, you can articulate clearly what the currently metrics are, for example, the state of relationships with stakeholders, applications, enrollment or investment leads and determine what your baseline performance metrics will be based on % improvements from the current reality.
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