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Clarkson on Comms

July 2010 News

THIS MONTH: MEASURING THE QUALITY OF YOUR PR AND COMMUNICATIONS ACTIVITY

Asking a company to put a figure on the effectiveness of their communications activity tends to be about as fruitful as asking the length of a piece of string.

A lot of companies simply don’t “do” corporate communications because they have no idea how to measure effectiveness and therefore can’t justify the time.

Consequently, a lot of time and cash is often sunk into direct sales activities, such as cold calling, where you either make a sale or you don’t – much simpler to quantify, but worth it from both a hard cash and corporate reputation perspective? Debatable.

After focusing on generating and promoting a good “story” in my last two columns, I thought it only appropriate to look at ways to measure the effectiveness of such activities. Any company – large or small – needs to know it’s getting a bang for its buck. And the area of communications is no exception to this rule.

But first, before delving into analytics, it’s worth reminding ourselves why corporate communications represents an important area for any business.

The raison d’etre for all of my columns is to look at building and maintaining a good corporate reputation. Reputation is the most valuable asset a company can have. And, according to industry surveys, when assessing corporate reputation honesty and integrity are the key criteria for most people these days. More than anything else, we want to be able to “trust” the companies with which we come into contact.

So, when measuring the effectiveness of communications activities, you’re basically analysing two things: firstly whether the activity concerned has ensured that more people have heard of your business; and, secondly, that more people (existing clients and non clients alike) now understand more about what your company stands for, understand what it has to offer and like what they see.

There are, of course, many companies out there that, for a fee, will do all of this for you. They will, for example, continuously monitor the media and other communications mediums, noting and assessing mentions of your company and will provide you with regular reports.

However, this isn’t going to be a viable option for most small companies. So what quick and easy, cost free options are there? A good starting point, taking a media story as an example, is to look at the number of mentions of your company in various publications. Alongside this, it’s usual to measure the “column inches” taken up by information on you and your company and compare this to the equivalent cost of advertising space in a bid to put a figure on the value of communications.

Although useful tools, these things can be quite limited in that they just focus on quantity. For a more rounded and informed assessment, such techniques are often combined with qualitative measures such as the amount of positive coverage appearing in your target publications. A target publication is basically anything that your current and would-be clients are likely to read and can be anything from national newspapers to employee newsletters.

We need to pause briefly at this point and take a step back. In order to assess the “quality” of your communications you need to do a little bit of work before even attempting to put together any communications material. To start with, it’s vital to determine the way in which you want your company to be perceived by others. Ideally, this should be an aspirational – yet achievable – thing and expressed in a single sentence. For example, you might want your company to be famous for “comprehensive, hassle-free healthcare advice”.

Next, set out two or three key ways in which your company is striving to achieve this goal. To provide some off-the-cuff examples:

• “We’re totally fee-based – no ties to any insurer”

• “We’re number one for the most up-to-date information on the entire healthcare insurance marketplace”

• “We’re trying to make healthcare more accessible to all – not just the affluent few”

Such key messages should be reflected (not necessarily word for word – more of a sentiment) in all your communications – from PR, marketing and advertising material, to your corporate website and, arguably more importantly than anything else, the very way in which your company interacts with its employees and clients.

And this takes us back to our start point. In order to assess the quality of corporate communications it’s important to ensure that your company is not only appearing in the right place at the right time but that all of your communications material reflects and supports your key messages. If not, your rhetoric and choice of medium needs to be adjusted accordingly. It’s not good enough to simply put your company “out there”. Building and maintaining a good corporate reputation requires a little more thought and focus. But the potential rewards – in terms of employee and client loyalty and new business generation – could make it well worth the effort.

Suzanne Clarkson is the former editor of Health Insurance and has held senior PR roles at Gissings, HSA and Bupa. Email your PR queries to her at news@hi-mag.com