Measuring the stuff that matters

How do you measure the success of your comms and PR activity?

Measurement is an increasingly crucial topic as comms teams come under more pressure to prove their value in a world of scrutiny and analytics.

But this world of data is also daunting for a profession that prefers words and is pressed for time.

Where do you start? What do you measure? How do you know you are measuring the right stuff? And how can you bring it all together into something meaningful?

Lots of questions.

To find the answers, we were joined by Barnaby Barron, head of insight at Cision, for the latest masterclass for members of The Media Team Academy.

And he began by exploring how the comms world has changed.

 

The fundamentals have changed

“A lot of people have been saying for some time that the comms world has changed,” he said. “And it absolutely has.

“There has been more change in the past 20 years than the previous 100, and it is continuing and being accelerated by changes we saw during the pandemic.

“Twenty years ago, the PR workflow was quite linear. You would communicate your story to journalists, and hopefully, they would publish pieces that would engage their audiences.

“That’s completely changed. No longer is it a linear process. You can have PR professionals talking to audiences directly through blogs and socials. You get audiences talking to journalists and engaging with companies.

“And you get audiences talking to themselves – we’ve done some research that shows a viral story is more likely to start with people with low numbers of followers than big publications.”

 

Chaos

The result is a much more complex picture. Barnaby, who has a science background, calls it a “non-linear system with inter-dependent variables”. Catchy.

You’ll be relieved to know he also has a simpler term for it - a chaotic system.

“There are two big examples of chaotic systems that most people will be aware of,” he said.

“One is the financial markets. And the other is the weather system.

“With weather, there can be huge variations in systems that can grow until they have a huge impact. Sometimes those variations are so small they are immeasurable.

“And we see this in the world of comms.

“I’m sure people will have been in a situation where they have the perfect campaign, crafted in the right way and delivered in the right medium. And then overnight Donald Trump tweets ‘Covfefe’ and that is on the front page of every major national website for the next 24 hours.”

 

Managing chaos

So, how do you deal with the chaos?

Measurement is key.

Barnaby said: “With a chaotic system, you can predict what will happen in the short term to a decent degree of accuracy.

“But you can’t predict what will happen in the longer term to a decent degree of accuracy. If you think about the weather, I can’t tell you whether it will rain on a particular day in a year’s time.

“What I can tell you is the percentage likelihood it will rain, based on the rigorous measurement of what has happened previously and what typically happens at certain times.

“So, to deal with chaos, we need to think about measuring, executing what we are doing, and then measuring again. This gives us a constant understanding of what is going on in the system. And that needs to be a continuous cycle of understanding how a campaign worked, measuring, replanning and executing.”

That weather analogy makes sense. But where should we start?

Barnaby says effective measurement starts with profiling your audience, including understanding its demographics, attitudes, and media consumption habits.

Then you must ensure your comms activity resonates with the identified audience.

And then it is about the results. What went well? What didn’t go so well? What would you change next time?

Does profiling the audience include journalists?

Barnaby said: “Audiences is not just about the person reading the content. It is journalists, stakeholders, and internal people.

“But if we think about journalists, you can research how many journalists you engaged and how many pieces of content that created.

“If you engage 100 and you get 100 stories, happy days. But if it only results in two stories, there is probably something wrong with how you are engaging them.”

 

Demonstrating value

And this leads us neatly to the crucial question - how do comms pros demonstrate their value to the business, particularly when there is a lot of noise about squeezed budgets?

“There is a lot of uncertainty at the moment, and this is a question that is being increasingly asked,” Barnaby said.

“I think the first thing to understand is the value you are providing the business and that comms is not just a cost centre, it is a value centre.

“PR plants the seeds. It raises awareness and builds engagement.

“The next stage is advertising. It comes along and waters the plants and continues to build awareness and consideration.

“And then – and I say this partly in jest - sales come along, harvest the crops and reap all the benefit.

“We’ve done research showing the majority of people who click on an advert to potentially make a purchase, don’t click on it because of advertising. They say they heard about it because of PR.

“So, without the comms work, marketing would not be successful.

“And I think it is important to understand this to show the value PR creates.”

 

What should you measure?

This sounds good. But we are still left with a pertinent question - what should we measure?

There is, after all, an abundance of data. 

“There is so much to measure, this can be tricky,” Barnaby said.

“One of my former clients said, ‘not everything you can measure matters, and you can’t measure everything that matters’.

“And that understanding is important so you focus on what you should measure.

“Not everything that should be measured, needs to be reported back to the business, and sometimes there are things you can’t report through data.

“For example, it is difficult to show in data how impactful an interview on the 10 o’clock news is. But you should still report that in a qualitative way.”

Barnaby believes there are four main areas to measure.

Inputs: The actions you are taking to generate coverage. It could include outreach work with journalists, press releases, newswire content or social media coverage.

Outputs: What is generated by your inputs? This can include volume of coverage, reach, and impressions generated by those websites.

Outtakes: Think of this as how the audience feels about the coverage. What has the engagement of that coverage been like? Would someone reading that coverage feel more positive about your brand? Are they more likely to engage with your brand?

Outcomes: These are the business outcomes and results you want to achieve. It could be more website visits or product sales, for example.  

He said: “There are lots of different metrics that fall into these four categories. And you want to ensure that when you are looking at a campaign or activity, you have measures that relate to these activities.

“Because you might have a great campaign that generates coverage, but the audience does not engage with it. And you might not get the outcomes because you are selling umbrellas, and it has not rained for six months.

“Having all this information helps to create an overall picture.”

 

Actionable insights

But that overall picture is not enough on its own. What you measure needs to result in actions – or ‘actionable insights’, as Barnaby calls them.

“You want to get to actionable insights, he said. “You want data that is informing strategy. But actionable insights are only actionable if someone takes the action.

“There’s no point having a great report if people look at it and go, ‘ok, I’ll see it again next month’.”

Barnaby says the key to this is telling stories with the data. He believes people will not remember the data shown from one month to the next. But they will recall the stories about the data.