Editor’s Note: We are using this month’s roundtable question to celebrate Measurement Month!With so much data floating around it’s easy to lose sight of whether what you’re measuring relates to your brand’s business objectives, or in the case of a nonprofit, with its mission.
So we asked senior communicators: How do you connect what you measure with your brand’s or organization’s business objectives or mission? Their edited responses are below.
Andrea Staub
SVP, Corporate Communications
Perdue Farms
It’s interesting that you ask that. I’ll give you an example. We had a big initiative on animal care. We’ve got lots of programs to make sure that people understand that we care very much about the animals that are in our care. So if we’re launching a campaign around our animal-care initiative we always tie it back to our overall business objectives.
Linking this to sales, however, is a tricky question, because it never really measures on an apples-to-apples basis. So, for example, we’ve been on national television for the animal-care initiative, but you can’t necessarily automatically track that back directly to sales. We can say we were on “Dr. Oz” and our sales increased, but we can’t say that our sales rose because of that appearance on TV. We never really see that jump [in sales] immediately. So it’s a little bit tricky to track the sales progression.
One thing we notice, though, is we track our trust scores. Trust is very important to us and we do a quarterly measurement of our scores.
Tina Starkey
National Director, Social Media
American Cancer Society
It’s very important to circulate goals internally to make sure we’re all on the same page, whether we’re trying to drive engagement with our content or drive revenue in the door. We do this with a one-pager that states everything upfront so that we understand what the KPIs are against those goals from the beginning.
For example, we’re measuring the relevance of our content. So as we publish social media content we want to keep a few key metrics in mind; this might include engagement with the content, estimated ad recall in the Facebook tool and how many times it’s being shared. Very simple things but making sure we’re always delivering those back to what the objective was in the beginning
Emily Shirden
Partner
Strategic Communications Leader
Finn Partners
When we counsel a brand or organization about connecting measurement with business objectives, we urge getting buy-in from the C-Suite at the outset about what the business objective is. In other words, building a program against KPIs that everyone agrees ladder up to an objective, such as changing positions, behavior or awareness of something. It could be attracting new clients or members, or a change in behavior. And then establishing what KPIs can be measured; and being strategic and creative around communications tactics that help meet those objectives.
We are seeing less interest in vanity metrics from clients. They are becoming smarter about what’s important to their organization. They want help getting there and determining what’s measurable.
We know some budgets are declining, but where they’re steady or growing is in digital because we’ve been successful building programs that are measurable and can be regularly scaled by performance.
Suzanne Barston
Director, Content Development
AbbVie
This is a really interesting question for us because we’re in the process of reviewing how we measure. We’re making sure all those metrics are really what we want to be seeing and what’s actually relevant to our business.
The biggest thing for us is sentiment. One of our major remits is protecting and enhancing the reputation of not only our company, but also our industry at large. That’s a tall order. So we look at sentiment as much as we can, but with the understanding that there’s a lot that can be misunderstood and is subjective. We look at the comments on our Facebook feed and we need to understand where these people are coming from; are their comments relevant to our business or are they just trolls?
When explaining this to company leaders we try to look at sentiment as a long game. We try to make them understand that every piece of content we put out is like our own long-term reach and frequency plan. So we look at every piece on each channel and the audience it was directed to. If we...share with them the strategy behind what we’re doing and pick and choose comments that show the negative and the positive, that usually gives them more of a holistic picture of how the content is being received.
Linking it back to tangible business outcomes, that’s a harder thing to do because we’re not directly related to sales. We believe we are the company stewards for the brand and the narrative. If that’s getting out there and we’re seeing it reflected with media wins and positive sentiment in that more qualitative way, then we think we’ve done our job.
Jenna Hilzenrath
VP, Communications
Birchbox
There’s no one-size-fits-all in terms of how you report [to executives] what you measure and tie to business objectives. It depends on the priorities of your company and the KPIs. But the more you can connect the dots and show how your work helped support overall company goals, the better.
While I don’t encourage sugarcoating results, if you want to show what worked and what didn’t, I think there’s room to be creative in connecting results with objectives. So, for example, instead of just saying results are down vs last month, you can say they are up vs last year.
I also think there’s a chance to translate KPIs into a narrative, manage up and educate the C-Suite on what PR can and cannot achieve. I think it’s great to get the C-Suite to think about qualitative results as opposed to only quantitative.
While you might not be able to show how a PR campaign impacted the bottom line, you can show qualitative results, such as message pull-through. You can show that a key message is coming through in, say, 90 percent of your press coverage this month. You can show we are changing the conversation about the company and getting that new brand narrative out there.
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