Welcome to the 2022 summer hacks series Part Two! These are really short ‘food for thought’, bite-sized episodes, so you can dive in when you have a moment.
I decided to focus on planning tips over the summer. Why? Because when people think about comms planning, they often focus on what they are going to say – you have a great product or service and you want to tell people about it. Focusing on the message seems the logical first step, but before you start typing, let alone promoting your offer, there are some vital actions you need to take.
The summer hacks is an overview of the 7 steps to effective comms planning. I use this process with all my clients, whether it’s a brand new product or we’re marketing a built environment project.
Part two is about implementation, review, and evaluation. This is the second episode of Part Two and is all about tracking and reviewing how well you’re doing.
One of the top three things people ask me is how you measure the effectiveness of your communication activity. My answer is that, without knowing what your current marketing and communications activities are and how they are performing, it’s impossible to know where to focus your energy and resources.
Let’s dive in
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Full Transcript (unedited)
Welcome to the 2022 summer hacks series Part Two! These are really short ‘food for thought’, bite-sized episodes, so you can dive in when you have a moment.
I decided to focus on planning tips over the summer. Why? Because when people think about comms planning, they often focus on what they are going to say. You have a great product or service and you want to tell people about it, focusing on the message seems the logical first step. But before you start typing, let alone promoting your offer, there are some vital actions you need to take.
The summer hacks is an overview of the 7 steps to effective comms planning. I use this process with all my clients, whether it’s a brand new product or we’re marketing a built environment project.
Part two is about implementation, review, and evaluation. This is the second episode of Part Two and is all about tracking and reviewing how well you’re doing.
One of the top three things people ask me is how you measure the effectiveness of your communication activity. My answer is that, without knowing what your current marketing and communications activities are, and how they are performing, it’s impossible to know where to focus your energy and resources.
Let’s dive in
Step 6: Is it working?
It’s time to pause and do a review. You need to take stock and follow up with people. Sense check if it’s working and if it isn’t working, you need to be able to tweak your plan.
There’s nothing more disheartening than not seeing results from your communications. You put the effort in, you publish, and… well either nothing happens or it’s not obvious whether it has.
You want to be reaping the rewards of your communications so you can do more of what works and drop the things that don’t.
You’re putting a lot of effort into creating all this amazing work. But are you tracking it or are you throwing it out there and then saying, ‘Oh, that’s that. We’re done, we’ve sent it out’?
Once you’ve done the blog post, you’ve sent or scheduled your emails and you’ve ‘done the social’ and it’s scheduled, you’ve put a date in for your event and sent the invites, you need to be tracking if it’s working. You need to be following up with people and sense checking if it’s getting the results you want. If it isn’t working then you need to be able to tweak your plan.
Here are some tips on how to start;
Make sure your goals are measurable in the first place.
Remember in episode 1 of this hacks series? we looked at purpose and goals. Did you set measurable goals? Hopefully, the answer is yes, so now we create a tracker with these in and monitor how it’s going.
We are looking for things like has the input needed created a valuable enough comms output. We also need to be looking at outcomes as well, so does this link back to our overall purpose as a business?
You’ll need to come up with a scoring method – I’ve one I teach but you’ll need to join my Masterclass to access that.
Make sure you set a timeframe to review your success. Monitoring is as important as reviewing at the end. Set a review date but also one or two check-ins at realistic timeframes – don’t check for engagement every day!
Make sure you check my show notes for a link to my activity tracker today.