Thanks to the Brad Pitt film, most people today are familiar with the story of Moneyball. Based on the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, it's the story of how the Oakland A's used statistics in order to rebuild their team on a limited budget. While in the past, managers and scouts had relied on a scout's gut feel or the popularity of a player to build their team, this new method, called sabermetrics, used a numbers-based approach in order to identify the most consistent and most promising players.
The idea to use the wealth of data available to achieve better results was a simple but powerful one, and something that communications professionals today can learn a lot from. Rather than rely on our impression of an event—It felt like we generated a lot of buzz—there are metrics from which to draw real, actionable conclusions. Companies spend a lot of time, money, and energy planning and executing their internal and external communications, but rarely put the same effort into effectively measuring the ROI of that outreach.
While the specific metrics might change depending on the type of webcast—what's important to an Internal Communications Director may differ from a Marketing Manager—the focus on attendance and engagement remains the same. And the tools available to companies today make it easier than ever before to take a Moneyball-approach to evaluating the impact of your online communications.
Let's look at some specific event types and the kinds of webcast metrics that can help you uncover ROI.
Product Launch
Most marketing events come with a large amount of promotion, usually at a hefty price. While leads generated and sales is often the focus for marketing webinars, one metric often overlooked is the effectiveness of your pre-event outreach to generate viewers in the first place.
To keep a pulse on this, monitor your event registration over time to ensure your email promotion, for example, is generating the amount of registrants you'll need to hit your targets post-event. In the lead-up to your event, you should see predictable spikes in registration following each promotional outreach. And if you don't, you know there is some tweaking to do.
Another thing to consider is Smartcode URL checking. For marketing events which have multiple promotional channels (e.g., email campaign, social media promotion, sales team outreach, online ad campaign) be sure to ask your webcast partner for Smartcodes, which give you multiple unique URLs for the event. Assign each channel a Smartcode, so that post-event you'll be able to tell exactly how many registrations and viewers each channel delivered. This will help uncover the effectiveness of each referral source.
Press Conference
When it’s your PR team’s turn to measure their ROI, there are a couple of different metrics beyond viewership that are relevant for press events.
The first is social media engagement which is particularly important if your company has a large social presence or if you’re looking to grow it. Rather than chase down stats on individual social networks, you can use your webcast reporting to monitor how often the event link was shared across multiple networks. This will give you a consistent view in terms of how engaging and shareable your press conference was.
The second metric that is relevant for PR events is the number of journalists or media influencers in the audience. Look for a provider who has integrated reporting between their media contacts database and their webcast analytics to save you from manually looking up each of your attendees to see who is a journalist or media influencer.
Sales Training
Learning and Development teams around the world have embraced webcasting as a great way to create consistent, scalable training programs that can easily be measured and reported on to senior management. And while program completion and test scores are usually the key metrics being analyzed, to prove the ROI of your online training program you need to look no further than your cost per participant.
While there’s no question that some types of training rely heavily on face to face interaction, many can be accomplished just as effectively online. To create a comparison, consider all of the costs that go into each option. For in person training, you will have travel and expenses for participants, the trainer’s fees if they apply, and sometimes even venue costs. Further, you are limited in the number of learners who can participate, which drives your cost per participant even higher. Contrast that with webcasting, where you can eliminate T&E costs and deliver an interactive presentation to a very large audience at a fraction of the cost, reducing your cost per participant dramatically.
CEO Town Hall
The internal town hall is one of the most popular types of webcasts delivered around the world today. Companies big and small have realized the economy of scale you can gain by moving the CEO’s quarterly all-hands call online. And while there’s an easy measurement to make in terms of time and money saved as you park your CEO in a boardroom to deliver their message once rather than sending them via plane to offices around the world, most internal communications professionals are looking for meaningful audience metrics to better articulate their ROI.
Employee engagement is the most powerful metric in terms of measuring the return on your investment in online town halls, which can be measured in a couple different ways. One common method is an annual or periodic employee survey to measure overall engagement. But if you are interested in a more granular view, the analytics from your town hall webcast can help you separate those who actually engaged with the event (e.g., polls, surveys, submitted questions) from those who simply logged in and multi-tasked their way through the presentation.
It is critical to set targets in advance of the presentation: How many audience-submitted questions are you looking for? How many downloads of the supporting materials? How many comments or poll responses do you expect? How much of an improvement are you looking to see versus the last town hall?
By creating a picture of what success looks like from an engagement perspective before the event, you will be able to use your webcast analytics to accurately measure just how engaged employees were with the presentation.
For any of the event types above, the real value of tracking these kinds of metrics comes when you start to look not just at a single event, but when you compare the same metrics across events over time. Decide on a framework and use it consistently across multiple events to get insight into how the impact of your webcasts are improving over time, and help you tell a more complete story about the ROI of your communications.
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