Planning - AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework

WHAT HAS PLANNING GOT TO DO WITH IT?

A few years ago, at a meeting at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) with some senior in-house PR practitioners speaking under the Chatham House Rule, a comment was made that really resonated with me. A head of a globally renowned organisation threw her hands in the air and exclaimed frustratedly: “Let’s face it, PRs biggest secret is that we don’t plan properly. We get caught up conducting activity for activity’s sake and don’t link this through to how it supports clearly defined organisational outcomes.”

A little while later, talking to Alex Aiken, UK head of Government Communications, Alex described what he saw as one of the greatest challenges in the world of PR and communications. “Too much SOS” he said. “SOS?” I asked. “Sending out Stuff” he replied. What did Alex mean by this? Well, that it’s too easy to join a busy PR and comms department and to get caught up in the ‘hustle and bustle’ of the department. It’s too easy to get involved in activity and ‘just doing stuff’ without taking the time to step back and ask, why am I doing this? Why does it matter? What is the purpose? What am I trying to achieve? How will this support my organisation and will it turn the dials for the organisation that actually matter?

It struck me that without a proper PR plan, defined up front, with clear objectives and organisational outcomes in mind, measurement will always seem abstract to PR professionals. Something that happens at the end of a campaign, something that can be left to vendors and software platforms offering all those different charts, dashboards and portals that count things – it must be measurement. Mustn’t it?

The truth is though that this approach can leave PR professionals horribly exposed. Most of the numbers that are easy to count only tell one part of the story. They count what we call the output metrics, those activity-based numbers like volumes, impressions, shares, likes, tweets etc. These are the ‘counts and amounts’ in media monitoring that are often referred to as vanity metrics because they generate massive numbers that rarely demonstrate effectiveness or value to an organisation. It’s a rare organisation that asks for its PR and comms team to deliver X articles or Y number of tweets, or worse, some other more spurious metric unique to PR like ‘Return on Engagement’ etc. These numbers, without context and in isolation, are irrelevant and meaningless. And alien to the C Suite.

The need to measure the impact, effectiveness and value of PR is critical and is, of course, the reason AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework exists – showing the way for all organisations of any size to measure in a meaningful manner from outputs to out-takes to outcomes. Measurement to be meaningful needs to demonstrate outcomes and the organizational impact achieved. The desired outcomes then need to be clearly understood and defined upfront in a PR plan, the plan needs to feature SMART objectives, current resources and benchmarks, realistic targets, appropriate KPIs and desired outcomes.

It’s for this reason that planning is such a critical component of PR, and has a symbiotic relationship with measurement and evaluation. AMEC hopes that the support and resources added to the Integrated Evaluation Framework will help you with your communications planning and enable you to take your measurement and evaluation in turn to the next level.

Finally, on behalf of everyone at AMEC, can I please take this opportunity to thank the amazing team of professionals who have given their time so generously to put together the planning resources section of the Integrated Evaluation Framework, under the working group leadership of H+K Strategies’ Allison Spray. I enjoyed working in this group enormously and learned a lot from their combined knowledge. In alphabetical order, the team are:

Deb Camden, Founder of The Communication Dividend

Alex Judd, Head of Impact and Planning at Clarity PR

Nicole Moreo, SVP, Analytics at Ketchum

Gemma Moroney, Co-founder of SHOOK

Claire Pimm, Director National Resilience Communications, UK Cabinet Office.

Aseem Sood, CEO, Impact Research and Measurement

Jason Woodward, Director, Strategic & Analytics Planning, Ketchum

Richard Bagnall, Co-Founder, CommsClarity Consulting, Board Director AMEC, Integrated Evaluation Framework team lead.

PLANNING WITH THE AMEC INTEGRATED EVALUATION FRAMEWORK

AMEC is passionate about planning, because work that is planned is easier to measure and most importantly, garners better results!

But what is planning, really?

Planning is ultimately a creative endeavour. It’s one that is grounded by research and fuelled by insight – both spaces AMEC members are very familiar with. And it’s crucial to creating more successful work because done correctly, it defines the bullseye for great work.

But how do you make that leap – from what you know from research to what you need to do?

In this piece, we’re going to outline how the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework – our flagship measurement strategy tool – can help you to plan your campaigns, plans and programmes too.

Starting at the end: Defining the ‘why’

You need to start by answering two questions:

What is the business impact you’re trying to achieve, and how can communications realistically contribute towards it ?
What is the human problem you’re trying to solve?

Let’s start with understanding business impact. It’s common to get a brief asking you to increase share of voice (SOV) by a particular percentage, or (more generically) to raise awareness. But to create a meaningful plan you need to understand the business imperative – for example, perhaps a service is actually looking to increase their subscribers.

The Integrated Evaluation Framework can help you to do this, by starting at the end and using Out-takes, Outcomes and Impact boxes to prompt your thinking. For example, some questions you might ask:

Out-takes

What do you want people to think differently as a result of what are planning to do?
What will your audiences do with and take out of your communications?

Outcomes

What do you want people to feel differently as a result of what you are planning to do?
What effects will your communications have on your target audiences?

Impact:

What do you want people to do differently as a result of what you are planning to do?
What results will be caused, in full or in part, by your communications?

It’s tempting to stop here, and base a response solely on the brand or organisation’s objective. And the objective is important, because it will tie back to how you think about measuring your success in latter boxes of the framework.

But for planning, you also need to understand the human problem you’re trying to solve.

To get there, you’ll need to do research. Look at how people search, what they talk about on social, how the subject area is covered in the media. Then go a step deeper: what do academics have to say on the matter? (Google Scholar is a great free resource for accessing papers across the social sciences.) Summarise the problem you’re trying to solve in a sentence or two. This is the beginning of your plan.

So you need to start at the END of the Integrated Evaluation Framework and ask yourself: What is the human problem we’re trying to solve? Or phrased another way, why is this communication plan needed?

Research, audience targeting and planning

Defining your audience

In addition to understanding the human problem, you need to understand better the people you’re looking to impact. The more specific you can be, the more impactful your plan and creative execution (or behavioural intervention) will be.

Think about who your plan needs to target to achieve the “why” – a solution to your human problem – that you’ve now identified.

So push beyond simple descriptions like “women in the UK” or “Gen Z.” Beyond demographics, think about their pain and passion points, and about what you know of their behaviours. This will help you in activation as well as in planning.

Finding the creative insights that will spark your idea

Insights are at the heart of all planning exercises. And there are lots of models for planning that break insights out into different categories. Most critically, however, there are two tasks for you to address here:

first, understanding the insight(s) which are likely to unlock the ‘why’ for your audience, and
second, understanding the unique position the brand or organisation plays.

Let’s start with the target audience insights. There is an old adage that an insight is like a fridge: the moment you look into it, a light comes on.

Much like defining your problem, the insight is going to be a product of research and is ultimately a creative act. Often it comes from the juxtaposition of two things which come from that research which seem at odds.

Or perhaps you’ll discover a simple, unspoken human truth. But it should be something you can phrase clearly, in one or two sentences, and which feels inherently true and revelatory. Once you’ve got that, you know you have your insight.

You also, of course, need to understand the role the brand or organisation is going to play in all of this. And to do that you need to ask: what is your unique selling point? What’s the one thing you offer to the world that no one else does? How can you help the customer/stakeholder overcome the human problem you’ve laid out?

Writing your strategy

Now you’re nearly there!

It’s time to summarise the strategy. How will you use the information and insights you’ve gathered thus far to solve the problem in the first step? There are a few common ways to phase these statements, but perhaps the most common is GET/WHO/TO/BY.

Get [target audience] / Who [consumer problem] / To [desired response] / By [one message/action]

You already know the first pieces. The final two need to articulate how you are going to solve the human problem by something the brand will do or provide. The “By” should solve the “Who”. Note that the “By” shouldn’t be an articulation of what you’ll do from a comms or media perspective – eg. don’t use this as a space to outline that you’ll get mentions in media or run advertising. These are activities, not strategies, and you’ll come to them in the next step.

If you’re looking for examples of what this looks like, we recommend a handful of strategists in our “Resources – Further Reading” section. Below you can see one example written by Julian Cole in his piece, “How to use the creative brief GET/WHO/TO/BY”:

GET: Gen Xers music lovers

WHO: think Spotify is a music streaming platform designed for the youth

TO: Reconsider Spotify as a song library for all music listeners, including them

BY: Showing that Spotify allows them to reconnect with good times no matter how much the world may have changed

Aligning objectives + activities

Think about WHAT measurable objectives will guide your success. Often a brand or organisation will have gone in with objectives already defined; in that case, your task here is to double-check that the strategy you’ve developed and the activities you’ll outline next will help to achieve that objective.

If you haven’t been given an objective – or more likely, the objective you have isn’t quite sharp enough – use the Integrated Evaluation Framework as an opportunity to refine your objective and make sure it is SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely or even SMARTER (Evaluated/Ethical and Reviewed/Recognised). One helpful tool to do so, the Smart Objective Builder for communication and PR professionals, is available here.

Then it’s time to bring your idea to life. Across paid, earned, shared and owned – how will your strategy take shape on these channels? Be as detailed as you can. Think about HOW you can achieve your objectives with the right activities. Then, think about WHAT measures you will need to make sure these activities are effective.

In summary

We hope this short guide helps you to improve your planning process, through the Integrated Evaluation Framework.

Begin by starting at the end of the framework – understanding the human problem you’re trying to solve – and working your way through your target audiences, your insights, your strategy and lastly, your activation . And of course, we would be remiss if throughout this process you shouldn’t also be developing a plan using the framework for what you are going to measure and how you are going to measure it! Take the time to do research and be as specific as possible as you fill in the sections of the Integrated Evaluation Framework planning tool.

Follow this process and we look forward to seeing even more award-winning entries by next year’s AMEC Summit!

GETTING STARTED WITH PLANNING

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Few would disagree with these words attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Having and following a plan tends to be good advice no matter the endeavor. To reach a goal, it helps to first identify a clear end destination, map out a specific route to get there, and pinpoint what you want to happen along the way.

Yet in the field of marketing communications, the strategic planning process is all too frequently skimmed over, cut short, or skipped altogether: objectives are often vague, KPIs become afterthoughts, and ongoing measurement protocols are absent. Without some degree of front-end planning, our focus often narrows to the actions we will be taking — rather than the outcomes we should be causing.

There are many reasons planning can fall by the wayside: we believe it takes too much time or uses up too much money, we’re worried it might get in the way of the creative process, we think we’re doing it when we’re not, or amidst the craziness of our industry, sometimes we just forget.

Done well, planning improves the quality of our work. It eliminates ambiguity, adds structure to complicated problems, sheds light on root causes, and makes the path forward clear. It ensures we are making the most of our time, maximising resources, pricing success correctly, and optimising based on learnings.

Thankfully, AMEC has been working to make this easier. The Integrated Evaluation Framework (IEF) is not just a measurement framework. It is also a tool that can help us with planning. So how do we get started? Here are a few tips:

Recognise what planning isn’t. Planning is not agreeing on the number of media releases, influencers, pitches, events, or other pieces of content. These are important, but as identified in the IEF, they are Activities. Without the other steps in the process—namely the Objectives and the Input, or the “so what”—activity may not always equal productivity. While this can be the hardest part, don’t worry! The next few tips will help.
Budget for it. Make room for planning time in your budget, and get the approvals and buy-in you need to do so. If all of a project’s funds get assigned to other things, planning is often treated as admin time that ends up getting squeezed out. Remember, this does not need to be a massive investment. Feel free to scale up or down depending on the specific needs of your situation. But make sure to bake in some time for pre-project strategizing, intra-project brainstorming, and post-project analysis. We know this is not always easy. We recommend discussing with your boss/ manager/ client early. Help them understand how critical it is to your success.
Schedule it. When you build your timeline, schedule in time for planning and protect it on you/your team’s calendars.
Involve the right people. Ensure that the most important voices are in the room at the very beginning, and that everyone knows what the overarching business objectives are. If you are an agency, that may be at the RFP (Request for Proposal) /SOW (Scope of Work) table read. If you are in-house, that may be at the very first briefing. Either way, collaboration is key. By having all the important players attend (could be someone from research, strategy, and creative; senior leadership, your brand team, your client), you are more likely to look at the challenge from multiple viewpoints, ask the right questions, and come up with a plan with fewer blind spots.
Step back. Planning is about taking time to stop and ask the right questions. No set of meetings, even with all the right people in the room, will set you up for success if it lacks this crucial element. As natural problem-solvers, we are often in a rush to start ideating. We want to deliver the solution or great idea, or to come up with the brilliant creative campaign. But we can’t craft the right key without fully understanding the lock we have to open. Allow yourself the space and time to think about the problem as much as necessary before diving into solutions. It is critical to take a step back and ask the right questions. The Planning Considerations column in the IEF provides a great list of questions to get started.
Align. As much as possible, make sure everyone is on the same page about what change you want to happen as a result of your campaign, what is keeping that situation from happening already, and how you will nudge your target audience to overcome them. When using the framework, this will include aligning on things like business and communication objectives, target audiences, the core problem to be solved—the first two boxes in the IEF . The best ideas come from the intersection of audience, landscape and a brand solution. Without that alignment, you are simply executing a task. Use the IEF to create a brief or document that the entire team can align on and refer back to as needed.

Time, budget, confusion and even excitement can all be planning enemies if we let them. But they do not need to be. To set yourself up for success, be clear about the value you want planning to add to your process, create time and budget for it, and align with the right people to get the right questions answered. We promise that even adding one of these steps to your process will help.

SEGMENTING AUDIENCES: STARTING WITH THE WHO, NOT THE GOAL

Why are audiences so critical when it comes to planning?

As you can see in our guide, Planning with the Integrated Evaluation Framework, the “who” behind your campaign exists across multiple steps. You need to understand your target audience well not only to consider the correct channels and tactics which will resonate with them, but also to develop the human insight that will drive your campaign or programme.

The audience is also a frequent stumbling block when it comes to planning, particularly in communications where broader approaches were historically used. In today’s data-driven world we can be much more thoughtful about how we segment and target. So our approach to defining our audiences needs to be updated as such.

Your audience is not defined solely by their demographic. By using labels of age and gender alone, you risk relying on stereotypes and assumptions: the avocado loving millennial, the wealthy boomer, the sports loving, beer drinking man.

That’s not to say demographics do not have their value. Your audience may need to be working in a particular field, have a certain level of disposable income, or be a parent to a young child to qualify as a genuine customer; but these things alone do not define them.

In most cases, once you’ve gotten past the demographic data, the most effective starting point to building better audiences is identifying psychographics: attitudes, opinions and behaviours. These can be particularly powerful as they help to hone your audience based on the things they care about, and the way they think about the world. Your millennial audience may love avocados, but what else do you know they care about? Are they more uncomfortable leaving the house without their phone than their wallet? Is a brand’s impact on the environment an important factor when purchasing?

Once you have this detailed audience definition, you’ll be targeting a smaller group ‒ but one that is much more likely to actually find your brand and content relevant to them. You can use this defined audience for your activation as well, to best understand the channels they’re likely to consume and the types of content most likely to resonate.

It’s also a jumping off point for the next step in your planning. Think deeper: why does that person need your product or service? What problem of theirs does it solve? What are their motivations and how can you match them?

By following this route, you’ll find that your target audience is not one big group of people. They’ll divide into a number of segments, each defined by these attitudinal and behavioural aspects.

It’s up to you, as a planner, to identify where you’ll have the most impact: where does the brand’s positioning resonate the most? Identify that segment (two segments, at most) and obsess over them for the next 12 months. And because you have a deep knowledge of them, you’ll be saving time, money and creating more impact with your work.

So the next time you see an audience defined only by their demographic, ask why, ask why again, and again. That’s where the gold is.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SMART(ER) OBJECTIVES

They’re key to everything we do In measurement and evaluation, yet even the most seasoned M&E practitioner or communications and PR professional can struggle to write objectives that are SMART let alone SMARTER.

To be clear, SMART objectives have been around for 40 years since George Doran, Arthur Miller and James Cunningham in their 1981 article “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management goals and objectives”. Yet even now, SMART objectives remain a source of confusion, fear or avoidance for many comms and PR professionals.

In four decades, their meaning has remained largely the same while their importance as anchors for effective strategy has grown. The SMART basics are:

Specific: targeting a specific area for improvement.

Measurable: quantifying, or at least suggesting, an indicator of progress.

Attainable: specifying who will do it.

Realistic: stating what results can realistically be achieved given available resources.

Timely: specifying when the result can be achieved.

Other common definitions are:

S – simple, sensible, significant
M– meaningful, motivating
A – agreed
R – reasonable, resourced, result-based
T – time-based, time-limited, time/cost-limited, time-sensitive.

To be even SMARTER, two additional criteria have been added:

Evaluated: assessing the extent to which your objective has been achieved. “E” also represents “ethical” objectives that are aligned with your personal or organisational values and ethics, as well as valid methods of data gathering and analysis.

Reviewed: reflecting and adjusting your approach or behaviour to reach your objective. “R” also can be adapted to mean “recorded”, “rewarded” or “recognised”.

Meaningful, reasonable and quantifiable objectives lie at the heart of PR’s value, according to The Institute for Public Relations. Their “why” for setting measurable PR objectives is compelling and includes:

linking the PR objective to the business objective
creating successful programs
driving performance and efficiency
creating a structure for prioritisation
making it easier to exceed expectations
reducing disputes.

When it comes to effectively evaluating a communication campaign, strategy or programme, SMARTER communication objectives are the ideal place to start and AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework endorses that approach.

And, when it comes to planning, the framework works equally well to help design your communication objectives by starting at the end and thinking about the underlying reason for your plan or strategy.

A clever technique for understanding the problem you need to solve or opportunity you want to address is “5 whys” analysis. By repeating the question “why?” after the initial problem or opportunity statement, each answer forms the basis of the next question, leading to a deeper understanding of the root cause.

With these insights and clarity on your purpose and audiences, next think about what you’re going to measure. There are four forms of PR measurement. To recap:

Outputs: are what you put out that is received by target audiences. The results are often in the form of media coverage, special events, collateral material, website and other channels.
Out–takes: are what audiences do with and take out of your communication. They are shorter-term and focus on your audiences’ initial responses in terms of attention, awareness, understanding, learning, interest, engagement and consideration. Out-takes are achieved as a result of outputs.
Outcomes: are the effects that your communication has on audiences. They are longer-term and are recognised widely in the form of attitude change, satisfaction, trust, preference, intention and advocacy. Outcomes are achieved as a result of out-takes.
Impacts: are the results that are caused, in full or in part, by your communication. They are recognised as effects that make a direct contribution toward the organisation’s goals and objectives. They relate to what happens as a result of outputs, out-takes and outcomes.

Not surprisingly, communication objectives come in lots of different shapes and forms which explains why they can be a challenge to write. Yet, the steps are really quite simple by answering the following questions:

What: determine a desired output, outcome or impact
Who: specify one or several target audiences
How much: explain how much the metric should change
When: decide a timeframe in which the objective is to be achieved.

There are multiple approaches and ways to explain how to write SMARTER objectives. Here are some other sentence structures for objectives:

[Who] will do [what] resulting in [measure] by [when].
By [when], [who] will do [what] resulting in [measure].
By [when], [measure – includes who and what].
[Measure – includes who and what] by [when].

EXAMPLES

Output

To develop an instructive worksheet to enable use of the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework as a planning tool by members and communication professionals to coincide with the AMEC Virtual Summit in May 2021.

Out-take

To create awareness among all AMEC members of the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework as a planning tool by December 31, 2021.

Outcome

To build confidence among all AMEC members in their ability to use the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework as a planning tool by December 31, 2022.

Impact

To enhance AMEC’s reputation as the global leader in communication measurement and evaluation (as evaluated by members of AMEC) by December 31, 2022.

Clearly defined communication objectives are every communicator’s most effective tool for proving our value – providing focus, motivation and driving performance and accountability.

To embrace a SMARTER approach to designing your next communications campaign, plan or strategy, learn more by reading “Planning with the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework” and try out the SMART objective builder for communicators.

MISGUIDED COMMUNICATION OBJECTIVES

If you can’t measure it, it’s not an objective. Here are some common, misguided objectives and how to turn them into something meaningful:

1. A thought leader in “innovation”

How do you measure the nebulous concept of becoming a “thought leader”? In the short-term, you need to have hit either a certain number of your target audience, or more than last year, with the right messages, eg.

Reach XX% target audience with at least two innovation-led key messages over the next three months.

If you’re conducting social media activity too, you can also measure the positive engagement around the relevant posts, eg.

XX% increase in positive engagement on innovation-related social posts over the next three months.

And search too, how many people are searching for your brand in relation to innovation?

XX% increase in innovation-led branded search volume.

But, most importantly, you need to be measuring the long-term perception change. Ask a representative sample of your audience directly, what do they think of your brand? Look for the answers that are relevant to “innovation”, get your benchmark, then decide on an achievable increase in that figure when you repeat the survey, eg.

XX% increase in “innovation” inclusions within brand perception survey over the next six months.

2. Enhance reputation

Another ambiguous concept, a company’s reputation: how do you measure that? There are plenty of ways, but three core areas of reputation are:

Trust: Does your audience trust your brand?
Perception: What traits and attributes do they associate with your brand?
Advocacy: How likely are they to recommend you? (Typically covered by a Net Promoter Score)

Maybe , just one of these is the key factor, maybe all of them are, there may even be other aspects to reputation that need covering, but the point is “reputation” has to be broken down into distinct, measurable concepts. Concepts that, really, can only be measured by asking a representative sample of your target audience.

3. Drive sales

Unless your campaign includes performance marketing, PR should not be tied to the number of short-term sales. Yes, it’s important context to know that’s the end goal to feature in the organisational objectives, but how that translates to your communication objectives is quite different.

It’s PRs’ job to build mental availability (or brand salience). In other words, to make sure the target audience thinks of your brand first at the time of purchase. But that’s not just the job of PR, it’s a marketing objective too, so you need to ladder your objectives to prove that you’re reaching the right people with the right messages first:

Reach the target audience XX times with, on average, two key messages.

And then prove those messages are having an impact, by surveying a representative sample of your audience on:

Unaided and aided brand awareness: Does your audience recall your brand without being prompted? And when they’re prompted?
Mental availability: Does your brand come to mind at the time of purchase? And across what contexts? (e a snack that’s healthy, a snack that’s convenient, a snack that’s tasty)

4. Create buzz

What is buzz? Something you can feel? An atmosphere of excitement?

Well, yes, but how do you measure that?

Buzz suggests you’re launching a big campaign. So, in this case, you’ll want to be conducting pre and post surveys on some of the concepts we’ve discussed above. Unaided and aided brand awareness, brand consideration, preference and mental availability, they’ll be the most important (and longer term) effects of “creating buzz”.

Less important than these concepts, but interesting for benchmarking “buzz”, is to include questions that measure word-of-mouth around your brand before and after the campaign too.

Additionally, in the shorter-term, you could also benchmark and measure:

Positive share of voice among target media
Branded social media conversation (posts, sentiment, engagement)
Positive social media share of voice (against a competitor set, or across a topic)
Branded searches
Website traffic.

Significant increases in these would qualify as “buzz”.

But, remember, the things that really count are those survey results from your audience, particularly mental availability, or if you’ve seen that significant uplift in sales. Otherwise, you may have created “buzz”, but its effects have not lasted into anything meaningful.

5. Increase ROI

Approach with extreme caution. The common usage of ROI (return on investment) is to compare the amount spent on the campaign with the amount of money that’s returned as a result, typically measuring that return shortly after the campaign end.

And therein lies the problem. Communication is in the long-term business, changing reputations, behaviour and – when sales focussed – ensuring the target audience thinks of your brand first at the moment of purchase (otherwise known as “brand salience” or “mental availability”). Therefore, it’s just plain wrong to measure a communication campaign with such a blunt instrument like ROI.

To quote Jim Macnamara:

“Being seen as a good corporate citizen and as environmentally responsible are now recognised as vital elements in a company gaining and maintaining ‘permission to operate’ in modern pluralist societies.”

Which makes reputation a very important thing to manage.

Similarly, mental availability has been proven to have a direct link to a brand’s increased profitability by marketing effectiveness experts like Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

Then, taking it a step further, our friends at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) have found a negative correlation between short-term, ROI (or “return on marketing investment [ROMI] as used below) focussed campaigns and the actual profit growth of a brand:

So does ROI even have a place?

If you’re running performance marketing tactics alongside your communications (eg. paid search or conversion focussed social media advertisements) then they should have their own ROI targets. Equally, on a marketing level, you can measure the price sensitivity over time: how much is your audience willing to pay for your product/service?

But, the irony is, if you want a good return on investment for communication (or your marketing as a whole) you do not use ROI.

ROI is a financial metric, such a blunt instrument does not illustrate the value of communications; instead think of brand perception, reputation, mental availability. They’re all proven to drive greater profitability, than pure ROI, so you’ll be doing both your team and your company a service by changing those internal attitudes.

In conclusion…

When measuring anything, your objectives need to be SMART (which is an acronym, and not me shouting the word “smart”). It’s a simple process to follow, and you may have heard of the acronym before, but it’s so often ignored. Let’s change that. You can read all about how to get SMART or even SMART(ER) in the next section…

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