Z Connections | Edition #11 Nov 09 | WORTH THE MEASURE?
Article by Felicity Zadro

Measuring your communication activities is the best way to answer the questions all businesses face; Should I exhibit? Should I advertise? Should I redo my website? Should I continue to attend networking functions?

How do you know what is working and what isn’t?

What are you measuring?

When you consider evaluating your presence at a tradeshow for example, ask yourself what it is you want to measure – sounds simple, but it is one of the biggest trappings of business communications.

Make sure what you measure is important to you – like your business goals, people using the language of your new product, brand recognition, making new prospects, keeping a competitor out, reinforcing an angle, the confirmation of a new partnership etc. These will change all the time, so ensure your measurement sticks are updated too.

For a particular month you may not mind how many people are looking at your site generally, but the percentage increase, how many people landed on a particular product page or how long people are staying may be more relevant. For example, in professional services, hundreds of hits may not be as valuable as focusing on providing a good quality experience to a smaller, more targeted audience.

What you measure should always link to what your communications strategy is designed to achieve. Are you positioning yourself as an expert, a leader, a fountain of knowledge or a source of ideas?

It’s all in the timing

The best measurement occurs whilst a campaign is running. Retrospective analysis – although interesting, is not going to help a campaign that isn’t working when it counts most. By measuring message pick-up, hits, enquiries etc. while you are rolling out the campaign can allow you to adjust your strategy and get maximum effectiveness. If you have budget for post-campaign analysis, move it closer to the campaign and get it happening in the moment as well as after project completion.

Look left and right

Include your competitors in your evaluation and measurement. You could be doing well or poorly however it means more to compare it to how and what your competitors are doing. By tracking how your competitors and the industry are doing, you can gain insights, spot trends and keep ahead of the pack.

It’s not all about the numbers

Most people make a decision about who they will do business with based on factors such as reputation, whether they like you, a recommendation, trust - so only measuring sales or hits on websites isn’t telling the full story. Blending qualitative (comments, observations, reports on conversations) with quantitative (web hits, number of enquiries, sales increases) will give you a much richer and deeper insight into how your communications activities fared.

What are the parameters?

When you design a communications activity, ask yourself – how can we measure this? Evaluation needs to be put in at the beginning of a campaign – not at the end. Ensure you tell all your staff or suppliers what you are doing, how you are collecting information and what you plan to do with it!

What now?

So now you know if your activity worked, what needs tweaking and what didn’t work. Make sure you then feed that information to the staff group – and allow time for debriefing and implementing changes.

For more information on evaluating your communications, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .