The communications profession has spent years perfecting the art of measuring the wrong things. We built sophisticated, channel-by-channel frameworks — PR metrics for PR, social metrics for social, influencer metrics for influencers — and told ourselves we were being rigorous. But we were confusing activity for impact.
Today’s audiences move seamlessly across a vast and shifting constellation of sources — forming opinions through podcasts, peer networks, newsletters, short-form video, and channels we may not even be tracking yet. Measuring each channel in isolation doesn’t just limit your insight. It actively misleads you.
You audiences don’t experience your communications one silo at a time. They absorb everything, synthesize it, and arrive at a single perception or opinion.
We Have a Leaky Funnel Problem
Many of us were trained to see marketing and communications as a funnel, with PR at the top and ultimately some sort of impact coming out the other end. That model assumed your audiences moved predictably from awareness to consideration to action, guided by your carefully crafted messages. In today’s multimedia environment, that classic communications funnel has sprung too many leaks to be trusted anymore.
Your audiences are no longer passively waiting to receive your communications. They are mad as hell, feel unheard and unseen and they’re not going to take it anymore. Corporate hypocrisy is being called out loudly and publicly, on every channel, in real time. Whatever messages you think you need to get across are likely to be drowned out by the messages your workers and customers want you to hear or whatever your opponents or competition wants them to hear. Which means the most important shift you can make isn’t in your content strategy. It’s how you measure success and what you measure. Here are five steps to measuring impact.
Step 1: Do you know what you’re known for?
Before you can measure impact, you need to understand what’s actually on your audiences’ minds — not what you assume is there. When a major tech company took a deep dive into their target audiences, they assumed they were communicating with older, experienced enterprise buyers. Their research revealed an audience that was far younger, far more diverse, and thought Microsoft was “the Xbox company.”
Make sure you know who your audience really are — then learn from them. Instead of asking “how did our content perform?” ask the harder, more relevant question: “What do our target audiences know and believe?”
You need to find out where they get information, what they think and who they trust. Start by taking a salesperson out to lunch or asking the marketing analytics folks for their data. If you don’t have internal data, sign up for a free trial of SparkToro enter a description of your audience and the system will identify the platforms, media and other sources of information that your audience is using.
Check the social media sites, blogs etc. that SparkToro has identified. If you’re a consumer-facing organization, your fans and your critics are talking about you constantly — on Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, and platforms you may not be monitoring. Segment them as best you can by behavior: when did they last engage with you? What do they share? What do they push back on?
Ideally, if you have the time and budget, start with a short, well-designed, and tested survey (no more than five minutes) focused on how your audiences “feel” about your brand or industry. Not just how they feel about your communications, but also “What’s keeping them up at night?” “Do they feel heard?” “What’s stopping them from feeling genuinely loyal to your organization or believing your messages?”
Step 2: Establish your framework.
Every good measurement program starts with a basic framework that includes goals and actions. metrics and desired outcomes or impact. AMEC has a great tool to help you create one. ,
I like to start with the big picture organizational goals that your communications are designed to support. That way everyone is on the same page from day one. Once you’ve defined the communications goals, you use those goals to define your outcome or impact metrics. The last step is to brainstorm about the indicators or acceptable proxies (more on defining those proxies in Step 3) that show that your activities are moving the needle towards real impact. Typically, activity metrics are reviewed monthly or quarterly, while it may take longer to prove impact.
Regardless of what framework you choose, it must be agreed upon by your team, your boss and your boss’s boss and anyone else who cares about your results. Here’s an example that one state government agency used:
Step 3: What indicates “Impact?
Naturally, the definition of “impact” is different for every organization and department, given that every organization’s goals and strategies are different. So, you need a way to get your team and your leadership to define the indicators of impact.
A governmental financial institution’s goal was to be “the most credible source of financial information.
My first question, naturally was “how do you know when someone finds your credible.” We brainstormed for a while and came up with a list that included:
- Followed or subscribed to our content on social media.
- Downloaded or shared our content.
- Attended our events.
All were easily measured from their web and social analytics, and we mocked up a report which senior leadership quickly agreed to.
We developed a similar formula for a travel destination that had web analytics and survey data which revealed that people who downloaded their visitor guide were more likely to visit. We then created a weighted score for their earned media and showed the strong impact that it was having on visitor guide downloads.
If you work for a consumer brand, it is even easier to come up with an acceptable proxy because you probably have plenty of sales data. Procter & Gamble pioneered this approach back in the 1990s when in the course of our reporting, they asked if we could tell them how many women under the age of 40 in the UK had had an opportunity to see a story that included a picture and a stylist quote. They knew from past advertising data that those three elements were critical to selling shampoo. We’d been including those elements in our analysis, so it was easy for them to forecast how their PR efforts had impacted shampoo sales.
The important element in determining your acceptable proxies is to get input and data from sales, marketing and web analytics plus buy in from leadership. What you end up with is what I call a “quality score,” – in other words a numerical rating of communications output assigned by what is actually going to impact your goals.
Step 4: Who or what is your leadership comparing you to?
As Maya Angelou told us: “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” Which is why you need a benchmark if you are going to measure your impact.
There are all kinds of datapoints that get used as benchmarks, from last year’s media monitoring results to cumulative social searches. However, the purpose of a benchmark is to provide a point of comparison that everyone understands and buys into. So, to put it bluntly, in the mind of your senior leadership, to what or to whom are you being compared? I’ve seen some doozies.
I worked for a tiny startup organic juice company whose CEO thought the competition was Coca Cola because in his mind they were competing for “share of thirst.” I explained how much it would cost to gather the requisite data on Coke and was able to persuade them to focus on brands in their specific marketplace. Another new CEO of a small scientific lab wanted to use Johnson & Johnson as a benchmark because he liked their approach to PR. My advice is: Keep your benchmark within your industry and your budget.
The bigger problem is when a CMO or CFO thinks that PR should be compared to marketing since they are competing for “share of budget.” The problem with that theory is that purpose of marketing (or advertising) is generally very different from the defined role of PR. While marketing might get more “eyeballs,” communication is focused on what’s behind those eyeballs, what they believe, and are they the right eyeballs?
My recommendation is to focus, again, on your audience and the choices they are making. What other brands do they think of when they are making their choices? What do they see as your competition? If you don’t already know, that would be a good question to add to your survey.
Probably the most frequently used benchmark is time. Comparing your results to the work your predecessor did or what happened last quarter is a good backup if you don’t have budget for anything else. Essentially your benchmark depends entirely on what data you have available to you. But here’s the caveat. You can’t just count volume. Make sure you are counting quality and impact as well.
Step 5: Create a report that tells leadership what it needs to hear.
Now that you’ve established the audience you are measuring the indicators of impact and your quality score, you’re ready to start measuring impact. Start by gathering all the data you need for your quality score and/or acceptable proxies. Don’t just use earned media data, add in data from your social platform, GA4 and whatever tech your marketing department is using. Put it all into one Google Sheet or Excel Spreadsheet and sort it by quality or whatever you are using as an acceptable proxy.
Since you learn more from failure than you do from success, sort the results from worst to best – what campaign didn’t perform? Which blog post got ignored? Which spokesperson delivered the fewest messages? Your report is meant to identify weaknesses and fix them and make the whole program more effective. So don’t be afraid of bad news. People will pay more attention than if all the results go up and to the right.
The goal is not to count what you produce. It is to understand what has changed in the minds of the people you were trying to reach and what you need to do about it to improve results. Ultimately you need to craft a storyboard that informs leadership what needs to be improved, dropped or invested in to get closer to your goals. Focus on answering questions like:
- Did your target audience have enough opportunity to interact with your messages to indicate increased awareness?
- Were there indicators that they were more or less likely to trust you or more likely to act?
The future of communications measurement isn’t louder. It’s smarter. And it starts with being honest about what we’ve been getting wrong, and how we’re going to improve it.