measurement — Get In Front Communications

Not good with numbers? PR pros need to figure it out!

This is a guest post written by Gini Dietrich.

I was in a meeting a few weeks ago when a junior member of the client’s marketing team was asked to tell us the company’s goals, as they relate to the things we’re trying to accomplish.

Her response?

I have to look at my notes. I’m not good with numbers.

This is something I hear a lot: I went into PR/marketing/communications because I don’t like numbers.

And it’s no wonder. We’ve always gotten away with “measuring” our results in terms of media impressions, reach, and advertising equivalencies. After all, it’s hard to quantify brand awareness and credibility and reputation and thought leadership. You know whether or not you have it, but you can’t really put it in terms of numbers.

And those great big impression numbers? They feel good to a CEO who is looking for some way to show a return on your efforts.

But when the Web disrupted our industry we slowly began to see new and interesting ways to measure our efforts. Early on we looked at using unique URLs in our news releases and different 800 numbers at our events, but that wasn’t enough.

Running away from numbers

The Web has provided us a huge opportunity to measure our results directly to business goals, yet most of us still shy away.

Why? Because we don’t like numbers.

We’d like you to think about it differently. Call it data or information or goodies or, heck, call it chocolate. Just don’t call it numbers.

It’s fun to see results from your efforts…and now you have the opportunity to see them every day.

Start small. One of the things we discuss in Marketing in the Round is using a benchmark of zero as your first step. Find something — one campaign, one event, one project — and create the benchmarks, the dashboard, and the data points you’ll measure. Think beyond traffic and pageviews and bounce rate. Really think about what the goals are of the business and how you can affect change in those areas.

Three things to look for

For instance, in a for-profit business, you’ll want to look for ways to increase revenues, shorten the sales cycle, or improve margins. If you don’t know what all three of those things mean, go make friends with someone in the accounting department and learn it. Quickly.

Let’s use Pinterest as an example. It’s really easy to set up some boards and direct people back to your website or blog that way. Arment Dietrich has a client - Frank and Eileen - that makes high-end men’s and women’s shirts. The team created a Pinterest board for them, just to test and see what kinds of results could be achieved by pinning images of some of their shirts.

After only one month, Pinterest is the number eight referral source of traffic to the Frank and Eileen site. But remember we said to worry less about traffic and more on business results. So dig further. Pinterest sent three percent new visitors in April. Of that three percent, 83 percent bought a shirt. That represents $2,670 in new revenue for the business.

Other than the 83 percent who bought the shirt, all of the data for that particular test came from Google analytics (which are free!). The client also provides access to the e-commerce site, which shares the information needed to find out how many of the visitors from Pinterest bought a shirt.

This is a very simple way to look at measurement, but it gives you a starting point. Once you get this down, you can begin to advance and become more sophisticated in your measurement.

Companies that fully understand how they are being talked about and what levers work online can use this data to make informed future marketing decisions. Also, strategic intelligence gleaned from measurement can help uncover new opportunities for products and services.

Your clients or executive team will be ecstatic to finally have a real ROI on your efforts.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication ﬁrm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro, blogger at Spin Sucks, and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

How communicators overcome their fear of social media measurement

“I’m a writer; not a numbers person.”

“I was never strong in math.”

This ‘non-numbers mentality’ doesn’t serve PR and social media pros like us well. Especially when it means our seats at the proverbial C-suite table are empty.

Randall Bolten views numbers and measurement in a different light.

Bolten is the author of Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You. I recently interviewed him want to share his insights with you. By the way, Bolten is CEO of Lucidity, a consultancy that specializes in financial management and information presentation. He has spent 30 years working in Silicon Valley.

Ready? It’s time to get past your fear of social media metrics.

SY: PR practitioners have always been pressured to show tangible results and return on investment. Clients and employers are looking for the impact PR —and now social media —has on the bottom line. They don’t particularly care about the number of media impressions or page opens. They want specific numbers and proof of how business is impacted. When communicators fail to provide this information, they aren’t included in high level meetings.

RB: Presenting numbers is a communication skill. It is not a math skill; it’s not an aptitude that is accessible only by the ‘numbers guys.’ It’s simply a communication skill.

It’s very similar to best practices in grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, paragraph organization and all those other skills that you spend years learning in an effort to become a good writer or speaker. Strunk and White didn’t tell you how to articulate a political position more effectively; they tell you how to articulate anything more effectively.

SY: Why are so many communicators intimidated by numbers?

RB: The ability to understand mathematics is not the same as the ability to communicate information that has numbers. The good news about the skill of presenting numbers is that it’s no harder or no easier than the ability to stand up and be articulate with words and speaking or to write a clear effective business memo or position paper.

SY: You say that the C-suite and clients don’t expect us to be mathematicians. That removes a lot of pressure.

RB: You really can present numbers. Is anyone asking you to calculate the square root of revenues or take the first derivative of the expense trend or something like that? No. All they want you to do is to look at a bunch of numbers as if they were a bunch of words and ask yourself: Are they more or less than I suspected, or are they more or less than last year, how does it compare to the completion, etc. There’s relatively little real mathematics involved.

SY: As social media continues to enthrall many (and confuse some), communicators often have to answer executive naysayers wanting to know why seven employees spent 40 hours dealing with an online complaint. When you struggle to explain soft communication skills in hard numbers, the gap (and respect) between communicators and senior execs widens. How can PR and digital staffers address this?

RB: This is not a new problem, Susan. Numbers and financial information are the language of business communication. When radio and TV were new, you had to explain how many people were listening to the commercials. Then you had to provide back-up information on how many people who heard the ads actually went into the store. Then research was conducted to determine who bought the product and where they heard about it in the first place. Eventually the message got across that radio and TV advertising worked.

The success has always lied in demonstrating that the marketing department understands the underlying business problem. This is not easy, but the only way to get across that threshold is to find a metric that your audience can relate to. The comparisons may not be exact, but we’re still talking about getting people’s attention. Whatever metrics get widely used to validate other marketing programs, like traditional advertising or trade shows, can be used for social metrics. At least you’ll be using language the C-level executives already understand and base decisions on.

SY: Final thoughts?

RB: One of the challenges that you face when marketing social media is to figure out what is the quantifiable result you can point to where the C-level executives actually understand that that result does lead to more business or more profitable business.

SY: Thank you, Randall. It’s been a pleasure.