Offer strategy to leaders, not measurement datapoints

Dissatisfied with your ability to measure effectiveness and return on investment?

You’re not alone.

Forty-four percent of respondents are dissatisfied with their ability to measure communications’ effectiveness, Ragan’s State of Communications 2020 survey of nearly 800 professionals.

Larger organizations showed a higher degree of dissatisfaction (48%) than smaller ones (41%), but nobody’s popping the champagne. Smaller organizations are more likely to pay attention to social media engagement (71%) than their bigger brethren (50%).

So how to change that dissatisfaction? Become a strategic adviser, not a numbers nerd.

A good analytics team isn’t just circulating Excel spreadsheets your dashboard data, says Scott Monty, principal of Scott Monty Strategies.

“Their job is to discern from the data what the actions ought to be, what the insights are that will drive business decisions or content decisions moving forward,” he says.

One key for measuring ROI is alignment between the social media team and executives, sales, marketing, innovation and the rest of the business, says Communications Strategist Cheryl Dixon, who has worked across a broad range of industries, including luxury, beauty, retail and pharmaceuticals.