Evaluating the effectiveness of any communications program is essential – but too often agencies say it’s intangible – citing awareness and thought-leadership. In reality, if you know what success looks like before you start and create a campaign designed to achieve it, it’s easy to measure whether something is working.

Here are a few tips:

• Set small, and tangible outcomes, as well as long-term goals. It enables you to understand what needs to happen to get to the destination and evaluate whether your strategy and tactics are moving you towards the ultimate outcome.
• Break activity in to four parts: audience, message, timing and delivery mechanism. It makes it easier to evaluate what’s working and what’s not – and make changes to improve the effectiveness of campaigns.
• Monitor progress – regularly. It enables you to make changes if you’re not getting the desired outcomes.
• Don’t be afraid to make changes. Monitor activity every 30 days and ask yourself which activities you need to continue, which you need to stop [because they’re not adding value] and come up with new ideas that will help improve the effectiveness of the effort.

If you have a question about this, or have a question of your own you’d like answering then please get in touch at lyndon@comms.bar –  we’ll be happy to do what we can to help.

AUTHOR DETAILS

Lyndon Johnson is the founder and general manager of COMMS.BAR™.

COMMS.BAR provides early-stage companies with right size, right time communications strategy advice to help them figure out what they need to do, when they need to do it and remove any unknowns from their strategy. The company is based in Toronto, Ontario.