In the communications and PR world, you often hear from peers and those in the industry that it’s tough to measure the ‘hard’ impact of what we do on a business. We have generally struggled to articulate our worth tied back to actual revenue generation.
As long as we stay in our comfort zone of media clippings and measuring message impact, then we won’t sell what we do to the business properly. It’s probably why we’re labelled as ‘cost-effective’ compared to the other marketing disciplines – because no-one really knows our impact and the risk in terms of spend is relatively low.
Our main issue is that communications is too far removed from the business reality. Of course there are exceptions, but if we’re all about creating great content, then why don’t we make sure that our great content is driven and supported through the entire business?
Great content isn’t just a media relations campaign that sits within the domain of marketing. If we want to show our true worth, our content has to start, be created, thought through and driven across every job function.
It’s similar in respects to the customer experience. It’s not simply the domain of marketing to ensure the customer is happy and loyal. It’s the responsibility of everyone in the entire business to own the experience. The very best businesses with the highest NPS scores have known this for years. Those businesses that think customer service is a ‘department’ suffer in the minus numbers as far as NPS is concerned.
The same goes for how communications needs to operate. To drive real leads and business revenue, we don’t simply need great content. We need great content to be developed with every job function that matters in mind.
It needs to be a conversation starter for sales.
It needs to be a CEO presentation at the next roundtable.
It needs to be an eDM for the marketing director.
Finally, it needs to have its own CRM code so that it can be measured properly and recorded against. This is critical. It articulates our worth in a language boards understand.
You see, measuring what we do isn’t hard at all. If we develop something so great that the entire business buys into it, lives and breathes it, then tracking the lifecycle of its performance should be simple enough if everyone is bought into it.
Suddenly, rather than talking about ‘message pull-through’ in an analysis of a dozen clippings based upon a news event, communications can have genuine board level conversations about revenue generated.
Great content is just half the story, bringing the entire business with you and educating them will provide the fairytale ending.