Clear and valuable communication is something organizations of all sizes strive for — yet designing and implementing a strategic communication strategy is often easier said than done. For an organization looking to improve its internal and external communication, knowing how to measure effective communication can make all the difference.
With a better idea of the external and internal communications metrics you should be tracking, you may be in a better place to identify your company's strengths and weaknesses.
How to Land a Director-Level Role in Strategic Communication
How do you evaluate communication, anyway? Before diving any deeper, it's important to understand why any of this matters.
Improve Strategy and Effectiveness
For one, tracking the right communication metrics can be a go-to way to assess the overall effectiveness of your current communication strategy and practices. Through careful examination of these benchmarks, your team can more confidently identify which aspects of your communication strategy are working versus which areas may need improvement.
Adapt to a Changing Workforce and Industry
As the contemporary workforce changes and evolves, organizations too will need to update and revamp their communication practices to align with employee needs. For example, staying updated on key metrics can help your team identify which communication methods are preferred among modern employees. From there, you can adapt your communication practices to align with those preferences and potentially enhance communication across the board.
Track Strategic Focus and Goals
Oftentimes, communication metrics also align directly with a company's strategic goals. For instance, an organization striving to improve audience engagement may choose to track email open rates, click-through rates, and read time. In this sense, clearly defining strategic goals and the metrics used to assess them makes it possible to align communication practices with long-term objectives.
Track If Communication Reaches Target Audience
Today's businesses spend significant time and money on marketing communication that's meant to reach a specific audience. When such communications are ineffective, however, companies waste valuable resources without actually achieving their goals.
Knowing which metrics to track to gauge the success of marketing messages, it’s easier to determine which aspects of a communication strategy are working to reach the target audience — and areas that could use improvement. Then, organizations can refine their communication strategies to bridge gaps and better reach target audiences.
Employee Retention, Satisfaction and Engagement
When internal messaging is clear, employees feel heard and more connected to their workplaces. As a result of effective internal communication, they may also feel more invested in business goals, values, and objectives — which could yield a greater sense of engagement and productivity. In fact, according to one report from the McKinsey Global Institute, employees are 220% to 25% more productive when companies have an existing and effective internal communication strategy in place.
Justify Investment and Secure Resources
Ultimately, when communication metrics are properly tracked and analyzed, businesses may have an easier time optimizing the allocation of resources. Namely, through the insights gained from metrics/reporting, this may enable you to shift resources to the highest-impact communication practices — while making the most of budgets and potentially scaling back spending on less effective areas.
How Do You Measure Effective Communication?
Both qualitative and quantitative feedback can be invaluable in measuring the effectiveness of an organization's communication strategy. The key is to pinpoint which key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics should be monitored as well as how to incorporate qualitative feedback into your approach.
Defining Objects, KPIs and Metrics
Before you begin measuring your communication strategy, it's essential to first define the objectives you want to achieve with your stakeholders. This could be anything from elevating employee engagement and productivity to reaching your target audience.
After defining your goals, you may begin aligning them with measurable KPIs and metrics that will allow you to effectively track your progress. From there, you can iterate on your communication strategies based on the results and make gradual improvements to work toward your objectives.
Quantitative Metrics and Qualitative Feedback
In gauging the effectiveness of your communication strategy, it's crucial to not rely entirely on quantitative or qualitative feedback alone. Instead, you'll gain the most valuable insights when you employ a mix of both. More specifically, quantitative data can provide detailed and measurable information that may be easily tracked and visualized. However, when quantitative data is assessed in combination with qualitative data (such as that from interviews and focus groups), you may gather more nuanced feedback that further informs your communication strategy.
Frequently Used Communication Metrics
With a firmer grasp of why communication metrics matter, it's time to focus on the metrics and KPIs that companies most often evaluate to iterate and enhance their communication strategies. Keep in mind: It's unlikely you'll want to measure every single one of these. Ultimately, choosing the right metrics to track will depend on your organizational goals and objectives.
Engagement Metrics for Communication
A common goal for many organizations is to ensure not just that their messages are reaching a target audience but also that they are resonating. Fortunately, multiple engagement metrics and KPIs can help measure engagement.
Email Open Rates
Email open rate refers to the percentage of recipients who open an email that a company sends out. A higher email open rate could indicate a more successful messaging campaign, whereas a lower rate may mean that subject lines or email delivery timing should be adjusted.
Email Click-Through Rates
An email click-through rate (CTR) is calculated from the percentage of an email's recipients who actually clicked on a link inside the message of an email after opening it. Higher CTRs could be a sign of more compelling content and clearer calls to action.
Page Visits and Logins
Page visits and logins track the number of times a user visits or logs into an account on your website. Tracking this metric can gauge a website's overall effectiveness in driving traffic.
Mobile Usage Rates
Some companies choose to measure mobile usage rates, too, which comprises the percentage of their audience accessing the website on a mobile device (like a smartphone). If the business offers a mobile app, this metric may also help track the percentage of its users who are utilizing the app.
Time Spent/Read Time
Whereas page visit KPIs assess the number of times someone visits a website, time spent or read time more closely examines how much time the average user is spending on the site (or a specific page). This can help communication teams determine the effectiveness of a website (and its messaging) at retaining users.
Social Shares and Likes
Another KPI to consider tracking is social shares and/or likes, which looks specifically at the number of shares or likes a company’s posts receive on the social media platforms its audience is using. This, in turn, can give you a picture of whether the current social media messaging is garnering attention.
Comments and Replies
On social media, get a sense of the number of interactions that posts generate. Higher rates of comments and replies may be indicative of more engaging social media content that's capturing an audience's attention.
Communication Reach Metrics
In addition, communication reach can be measured via metrics such as website traffic, social media traffic, brand mentions, and more.
Website and Social Media Traffic
Many organizations will track the amount of traffic their websites and/or social media pages receive, which can be an effective way to gauge the success of marketing/messaging campaigns and inform future strategy.
Brand Mentions and News
You can get a better feel for communication reach by tracking the number of mentions of your brand receives across social media and in news articles. More mentions may signal that your messaging is effective and that people are talking about your brand.
Adoption Rates for New Apps
For companies that have released a mobile app, tracking adoption/download rates of these apps is a great way to measure the success of any marketing and messaging around them.
Employee Engagement Rates
Meanwhile, employee engagement metrics — such as net promoter score (NPS) and employee satisfaction survey participation data — can pinpoint areas of a brand's communication strategy that may warrant improvement.
Employee Advocacy and Profiles
Employee advocacy metrics (e.g., employee participation rate and training completion) may also give teams insight into how well internal communication strategies are aligning with long-term goals and objectives.
Impact Metrics for Communication
For those wanting to look beyond reach and engagement, impact metrics can be used to gauge the overall positive (or negative) effects of a company's everyday actions on stakeholders, employees, and customers alike.
Employee Feedback
The results from employee surveys and satisfaction scores can be telling when it comes to evaluating the impact of an organizational communication strategy — especially when combined with qualitative feedback from focus groups and/or direct interviews with employees.
Employee Turnover Rates
High employee turnover rates may indicate internal communication issues or other underlying problems to be addressed.
Sales and Customer Satisfaction
From a consumer standpoint, sales and customer satisfaction metrics can also reveal the impact of marketing and communication strategies.
Organizational Productivity
Finally, productivity metrics allow companies to quantify the effectiveness of communication strategies by looking at relevant KPIs like:
- Revenue per employee
- Human capital ROI (return on investment)
- Task completion rates
Learn More in a Strategic Communication Program
Given the wide range of metrics to track, knowing how to measure communication success isn't learned overnight. In a Professional Master of Arts (MA) in Strategic Communication at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, you'll have the opportunity to expand your strategic skill set by building valuable planning and analytical competencies that empower your career.
Learn about our Professional MA in Strategic Communication curriculum and more by getting in touch today. If you're ready to take the next step, you can also start your online application.
