Establishing metrics for marketing communications efforts is a topic that marketing and communications professionals at healthcare systems, medical practices and business settings often spend a lot of time discussing or debating.
With so many choices and options available to reach your audience, it helps to not only have reliable analysis of strategies and tactical approaches going in, but to also track and measure the effectiveness of those efforts along the way and post-campaign.
So where do you start? Is there some magic formula that marketing communications professionals employ to measure the effectiveness of campaigns or programs?
The answer is no. There is no "one size fits all" formula for measuring the effectiveness of marketing and communications. Some organizations treat marketing communications as one integrated effort. Others have separate marketing and communications teams. Businesses usually have separate sales or business development departments. Regardless of how you chose to divide responsibilities internally, most company leaders want to know that they are investing their budget dollars wisely both within each of the marketing disciplines and overall.
While I cannot honestly offer a simple, or generic way to measure your efforts, doing so doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, if you try to overcomplicate this process, you may miss the real point all together. Here are a number of points you may want to consider:
- Marketing communications isn’t an exact science. Marketing communications is not rocket science. The numbers should, however, line up and provide decision-makers with evidence that demonstrates proof of performance and enables them to make sound decisions.
- What’s your definition of success? In order to measure your campaign, program, or even tactical initiative, establishing a benchmark of success is critical. This exercise can also be a great educational opportunity, reminding staff that metrics for marketing communications might be a bit different than metrics for say, hospital performance or outcomes.
- Start with your marketing communications plan. Or last year’s plan. What worked? How do you know? How was that measured? Pick out the things that seemed to have produced results and see if you can apply metrics to individual strategies. Build in response mechanisms to all outreach initiatives. Think, website addresses, tracking visits and offers that can be tracked through office visits. Look at what might be added to round out the plan, replacing ineffective strategies or tactics with ones that show promise.
- Integrate all disciplines and activities into your metrics. Time and track advertising and public relations with sales and activities that impact the bottom line. Track sales and individual sales activities in conjunction with your communications outreach. Look for the cause and effect. Measure against last year’s efforts. All outreach activities need to be synergistic and working towards clear concise goals.
- Quantitative vs. Qualitative. Measuring marketing and communications requires looking at data and also using some good common sense to draw analysis. Surveys, open rates, and sales reports can be excellent tools to use for quantitative analysis. Timing is critical to analyzing cause and effect. Focus groups and one on one interviews are great ways to test perceptions and get information that can help you tweak your product, service, or image.
- Track and correct as you go. One of the big benefits of consistently and constantly measuring your efforts is that you can make changes and correct as you go. This isn’t to say that you should be changing course every five minutes. Many things can go wrong along the way and if you track everything, you’ll have more opportunity to make corrections from year to year, but also along the way.
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ROI. Once you have the information and data, how do you determine if your efforts were effective, or worth it? It’s pretty simple. How much did you spend on each effort? How much budget? How many man hours? What other investments went in to say, getting the ad campaign developed? Then, of course, what were the actual results? Go back to your metrics and look at sales, how many new customers were acquired and so forth.