Lisa Arledge Powell, President, MediaSource

Within any effective communications strategy are objectives—often referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs)—which shine a light on just how well your approach is moving the needle for your brand and achieving your goals. Whether your goal is driving your audience to click through to a web page, leading to sign-ups for a newsletter, or viewing a piece of content your brand produced, every communications strategy is built around some actionable end result. 

Another important acronym in measuring the value of your work is the CTA. CTA stands for call-to-action, and is a strategy that prompts a desired response from your audience and leads to achievement of your KPIs. It’s an engaging tweet that makes a reader want to click-through to your website. It’s a gripping email campaign that leaves you wanting to learn more about a product or story. Whatever your CTA may be, the more clearly-defined it is, the more attainable your KPIs become. But how do we know how effective our calls to action are? By measuring them.From the initial conception stage of a project, communicators need to determine how they will incorporate measurable CTAs into their brand strategy. After all, it’s only when a prospective reader or consumer clicks your Download Now or Subscribe button that they’re taking actions that’ll move the needle for your project and achieve its KPIs. Here are a few tips to begin effectively measuring your brand’s calls to action: 

• Step one: Determine the overarching objectives of your work. What does your brand want as a result of this communications strategy? Sign-ups? A sale? 
• Step two: How will you measure that goal? Is there already a system in place, or do you have to develop one? Consider the utility of vanity URLs through Bitly, which will collect information about your audiences like their location or referral channels.
• Step three: Build the data points you plan to measure into your strategic plan. This may be directing people to a landing page in a press release, or hosting materials on a site for your brand. The goal is to send people to an owned media property that you can measure using tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot.

Collecting this data on your audience helps you learn valuable information about the overall effectiveness of your communications strategy.Now, it’s up to you to report on what you learn!