Reviewing Data Is the Only Way to Know If Internal Comms Is Succeeding…Or Failing
Part six of a six-part series
- Part one of this series: Six Steps to Develop an Editorial Strategy for Internal Communications
- Part two: Editorial Strategies Must Incorporate Business and Team Goals
- Part three: How Do You Categorize Your Employees? Try Psychographics.
- Part four: Use Content Series to Optimize Your Internal Communications Strategy
- Part five: Publish to a Platform, Not Just to a Channel
Tracking and measuring your efforts directly relates to how you are supporting business outcomes and how you are optimizing your team.
- An editorial strategy is a plan for how your team manages, uses, and measures content, contributors, channels, analytics, and feedback to support the company’s goals.
You can’t just track anything willy nilly or because it’s right at your fingertips. You must ask:
- Which metrics are valuable for your stakeholders?
- Which metrics matter for senior executives?
- What does your team need to measure for its own benchmarking?
- Are some metrics more valuable than others?
Want to go deeper? Ask yourself which metrics you wish you had and see how you can work toward getting them.
You shouldn’t be on the hook for business goals like increasing sales of a widget by 20%, so don’t worry about measuring the company’s business goals. Rather, you are responsible for creating content that connects the business goal to the salesforce and nudges them in the right direction. For this kind of effort, you may want to track behavioral metrics.
Behavioral metrics are observable actions that lead to business outcomes. For example, salespeople attending seminars, downloading tip sheets, and reaching out to other sales teams to combine efforts.
As far as optimizing your team goes, you must measure volumetrics — things like open rates, comments, and retweets. Doing so creates a very basic understanding of whether your content is performing.
Measure your team’s success
Optimization is that which makes your team more efficient and high-functioning. For example, creating an editorial series can be an efficiency play. If you get a series up and running — especially one managed by contributors from outside your team — you have gained a level of optimization. Your team has freed up time to pursue something else.
Quantitative and qualitative measures need to be used to gauge your team’s success. And, of course, you should have benchmarks against which to mark progress (unless this is your first year doing X activity — then you’re establishing a baseline).
Quantitative measuring is straightforward. For example, you can use hard numbers to determine whether your newsletter’s open rates increase or decrease. If you can count it, it’s quantitative.
Qualitative measuring is tricky. For example, how do you know whether the content (e.g., videos, town halls, pantry posters, intranet articles) is relevant? One way is to conduct surveys, where you can get a mix of quantitative (yes/no answers) and qualitative (open-ended questions) feedback from employees. Another way is to host focus groups, which provide qualitative input.
Measuring the effectiveness of your work is critical, so you know whether what you’re pushing out into the world is having the desired effects. This is the only way to know whether what you’re doing is working or if you’re shouting in the wind.
If you want help with creating an editorial strategy for your team, reach out. I’d be happy to provide some advice and consultation. Email me at editorshaun@gmail.com.
