What is the Performance of our Communication Efforts?
Everyone from communication experts to marketers likes to think that “content is king”. We don’t oppose that idea. But we need to recognize the king’s advisor: metrics. However, most organizations don’t know how to gather metrics or what to measure. So, in this article you will find out how to know if your communication strategy is working with a KPI Dashboard.
Figure 1. How to Measure your Communications Strategy
Source: BGH
Like an indoor regulator, you need to know that your communication strategy is at the right temperature. So here are five questions you should be able to answer to know if your communication is successful.
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Was My Communication Received?
Step one is to know that your communication was received. For this, use the analytics of social networks or your email marketing tool, in order to confirm how many saw your message (impressions).
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When Did Your Audience Access The Information?
As you know, everything in this world is time sensitive. So, you need to have time analytics that points you out the date and time of interaction with your communication.
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What Parts Of My Communication Were Consumed?
Since our target groups react to different strategies of communication. You need to be ready to bundle communications in different ways: videos, photographs, infographics, and articles. Therefore, you need to be able to measure which pieces of the digital content were opened and consumed. Now a days, is not enough to know somebody received your information (impressions/reach). You need to know they understood (respond to the call-to-action or click).
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Did My Target Audience Understand What I Want It?
What we want to measure here is: did my audience get what I was saying? In face-to-face interaction, you’ll be able to study people’s body language. But in the digital world, you’ll need to use surveys, comments, and feedback. Therefore, check your recipient’s understanding by running surveys on social media or within the emails and check their responses and comprehension. Remember that your survey doesn’t need to belong. Just a few quick multiple-choice, true/false, Likert scales, or short answers.
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Can I Improve My Communication?
What closes the circle on measuring is how viable your strategy is to constant changes. Nothing is forever. So remember that each time you pass information to a new or existing audience, their reactions may change. Therefore, you need to analyze what worked and what didn’t and make turns in your strategy.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
The funnel of Key Performance Indicators allows us to compare monthly results. So, the funnel is a set of steps that a user performs from the moment an ad is shown until he or she becomes a customer.
Here are some of the metrics that should be considered:
- Impressions: Each time a user accesses a web page where a banner is found and is displayed, it is called an impression.
- Site visits: measured through the “sessions” indicator; A session is a series of interactions with the Website that occur within a period of time.
- Engagement is the set of interactions that the user carries out with the messages of the organization.
- Consultations: are messages whose intention is to obtain more information about services by digital means such as emails and direct messages to social networks, along with phone calls.
- Conversion: effective response to a call to action.
- Expense: is the total amount spent on campaigns during a period of time.
- Savings: if there were any savings in the month, either due to negotiations or the difference between commercial costs and/or optimizations of the ads in the platforms.
- Click-Through-Rate: calculated as the number of sessions on the site between impressions of campaigns.
Figure 2. Marketing Funnel
Source: BGH
As you can see, we recommend that you have this information in a table, excel sheet, to review, and make decisions such as improving, changing, or optimizing your communication strategy, and check your KPI Dashboard at any time.
Finally, we also know that measuring the performance of any campaign and/or communication strategy is tricky, but at BGH we can help you with your KPI Dashboard. Contact us for more information.