A Simple Guide to Measuring a Communications Campaign's ROI

With an advertising campaign, return on investment (ROI) is simple– just calculate your spend vs revenue! However, measuring ROI in communications isn’t about quick revenue—it’s about proving that your work drives awareness, reputation, and long-term growth. This guide will walk you through the steps to make sure the money you spend on strategic communications and public relations is providing worthwhile business outcomes. 

Defining Clear Goals

You can’t manage what you don’t measure but you can’t measure what you don’t define. The first step in measuring your communications campaign’s ROI is knowing what you want to measure and why. 406 Strategic Communications can assist you in defining the communication goals your business hopes to achieve, however, here are a few common ones to consider:

• Expanding awareness: More people knowing about your business and recognizing your brand. In this case, ROI may look like a spike in website visits. 

• Improving reputation: Becoming the trusted “household name” in your area for your product or service. ROI might show up as an increase in word of mouth referrals. 

• Increasing engagement: Receive more reviews, clicks on your newsletter, website, or social media. ROI could be an increase in positive customer reviews. 

Understanding the Process

Tracking your strategic communications campaign’s ROI can be broken down into three main parts: the inputs, the outputs, and the outcomes. Understanding each of these can help you to better create a budget, know what you’ll be able to create within that budget, and anticipate how those deliverables will help you meet the goal you specified above. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself when planning out your strategic communications campaign:

• Inputs: How much are you willing to invest in your strategic communications campaign? Are there tools or programs you’ll need to invest in? 406 Strategic Communications offers free quotes to help you get a better idea of your communication campaign’s cost. 

• Outputs: What deliverables are you expecting? For example, how many newsletters a month? Social media posts? Blog posts? Press releases?

• Outcomes: This is your goal that you decided upon above. However, at this point, you may feel comfortable making this goal more concrete with specific numbers such as how many website clicks you expect to receive in a day after a certain number of months. 

Choosing the Right Metrics 

When it comes to tracking your outcomes, how do you know which metrics to follow? 406 Strategic Communications can assist you in deciding upon the best metrics to track based on your specific goals. For example, we often track website analytics, social media statistics, and revenue related information. These are all quantitative metrics, however, 406 Strategic Communications also tracks qualitative metrics for our clients. For example, we may do “customer spotlight” blog posts where we interview your clients. This not only provide your website with valuable content but also gauge sentiment about what customers like about your services and what areas may need improvement. 

Calculating ROI 

Once 406 Strategic Communications is collecting data and metrics on your communications campaign, we can start calculating the ROI. Keep in mind these calculations are highly dependent on the specific business. 

As an example, if a press release resulted in a story being covered by two local news stations, we may compare what an ad of that length would have cost to air on that network. Then, we can take that cost, minus the amount you spent on the campaign, to get an idea of your ROI. 

However, if we can track how many customers bought your product/service after seeing the news piece, that would be an even better metric to calculate ROI! That could be done by asking clients how they heard about your product/service so the sale can be properly attributed to the campaign that it relates to.  The numbers might look something like this: you spent $5,000 on a campaign and received $15,000 in new sales, that is a 3:1 ROI. 

Turning Data Into Action

Measuring ROI in PR and communications doesn’t have to be complicated. Contact 406 Strategic Communications to start building a measurement system that proves the value of your communications.