Analytics are an essential element of effective marketing and public relations. Analytics provide organizations data and insights needed to improve tactics, plan strategies, measure performance, and link data to key business outcomes like sales and revenue.
Unfortunately, many PR and marketing departments don’t obtain the full benefits of analytics that can improve PR and marketing outcomes. Only 15 percent of marketers say they can quantify the value of their social media campaigns, according to a CMO survey.
As the year quickly winds to a close, the time for preparing New Year resolutions approaches. Along with the common resolution to exercise more, a resolution to properly implement PR and marketing analytics can lead to a happier and more profitable 2017. As you get ready to clink champagne glasses, contemplate adopting these data analytics resolutions to energize PR and marketing next year.
Review your goals and KPIs. Gather your stakeholders and ask if the metrics you’re using and the reports you’re delivering are what they prefer? Do they help your stakeholders make the key decisions you need to make? Candid feedback is essential to identify missing KPIs and ones to be ejected, says Nick Iyengar, associate director of Digital Intelligence at Cardinal Path, in a Marketing Land article. Re-examination of metrics may prompt a need to update your dashboards, adjust your reporting templates and complete other changes.
Replace manual reporting with automated dashboards. Pulling data from your disparate sources, compiling and organizing numbers in Excel, and building charts and PowerPoint decks is extremely time-consuming. Automated and fully integrated dashboards allow you to dispense with such labor-intensive chores. Communications dashboards, such as the new one from Glean.info, can be customized to particular organizations, departments, brands, countries and even particular PR or marketing managers. State-of-the-art dashboards can integrate data from a plethora of sources to provide a single, over-arching viewpoint.
Time-saving benefits of advanced dashboards enable you to engage in deeper analysis that ponders why trends occur. “If done well, your always-on dashboards will free up a lot of time for analysis and also generate demand for that deeper analysis from your stakeholders. That’s a virtuous circle!” Iyengar says.
Build trust in data. Organizations can increase trust in data by increasing transparency about the use and impact of their data, connecting them to real-world goals and opening the data “black box.” Improve data accuracy by scrubbing data and discounting or questioning substantial, unexplained swings in trends. “We need to take [data & analytics] out of the ‘black box’ to encourage greater understanding about its use and purpose to help organizations trust the new insights it can bring,” states Brad Fisher, US data and analytics leader and a partner with KPMG in the U.S. in the KPMG report Building Trust in Analytics.
Think like an anthropologist. Concentrating less on data and more on context will help obtain the full benefit from social media analytics. In other words, business managers must “think more like an anthropologist,” argue a trio of experts in the Harvard Business Journal. Rather than seeking data that confirm predetermined views, pursue unexpected insights that change perspectives, as anthropologists do. Trained human analysts, either hired in-house or through outside vendors, can understand the context and interpret the meaning of social media monitoring reports far better than automated algorithms.
Train your staff. PR pros typically disdain or even fear numbers and data. That avoidance of measurement may hobble PR’s ability to demonstrate success and cause C-suite executives to view PR suspiciously. Reserve time to learn how to better use media monitoring and measurement tools. Online courses in statistics and data analytics, now deemed must-have PR skills, can boost PR professionals’ confidence in handling data – and help their careers.
Include analytics in your budget. Analytics has become so important that it deserves a separate line item in the annual PR and marketing budgets. The actual budgeted amount depends on your methods of implementing an analytics program – and the cost of your outsourced measurement services. Many experts recommend that ideally 10 to 15 percent of the total budgets for marketing and PR should be reserved for data collection and analytics.
Bottom Line: Data analytics promises a goldmine of insights, but many PR and marketing teams have not yet found that treasure-trove. Following these New Year resolutions will help you and your organization obtain the full benefits of data analytics.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
