An important factor in any business’s success is a strategic communications plan. It is important to understand how your communication investment affects your bottom line. Two of the most common mistakes made when developing a communication strategy is to focus on one approach to communicating with your target audience and not measuring how your communication strategies effects your sales, services, and website traffic. When you are communicating properly across social media, PR, and marketing, you can achieve better results. Here are some tips to monitor the success of your communication efforts.

Social Media is all about authentic two-way conversation so be sure to measure how engaged your fans and followers are online. Take a content inventory, record what type of content gets the most likes retweets, comments, or shares. Find out how your audience responds to pictures, infographics, helpful tips, or video. Measuring the response you get from online audience can help you develop responsive content and draw in new fans and followers.

Public Relations shapes how the public views your business and brand through what is said or written about you in print, television, radio, or the internet. To measure your public relations success, check your website to see if there is a boost in traffic or if there is a boost in sales during or shortly after you receive good press in the media. This may take time, but a steady increase in favorable media should result in a steady increase of new interest in your company.

Marketing/Branding is the experience you create for those connected with your business. Once the general public begins to know who you are and you develop positive interactions with them, you can create brand loyalist through marketing. It is important to share content relevant to the consumer and that expresses your unique brand. To measure your email marketing strategy, you can compare your open rate to that of other companies in your industry. The open rate is the number of people who opened your email. This data can be found on sites like ConstantContact or MailChimp and will you an idea of where you measure up with similar consumers. Next you want check your Click Through Rate, your email should have a call to action link or form that drives people to your website. The click through rate gives you an idea of how many people actually followed through and visited the given links.