T H E VA LU E O F D ATA I N D I G I TA L CO R P O R AT E CO M M U N I C AT I O N S S E R V I C E
B R O C H U R E
CONTENTS The communications challenge for corporates
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The author
James Brock // Executive Director, Addison Group
The role of corporate communications
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James has over 25 years client side and agency experience,
The role of data
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and corporate marketing. He provides strategic advice on communications
The problem with data
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How can data add greater value to communicators?
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The barriers to better data for corporate communicators
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Five tips for making data more valuable
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covering corporate communications, branding, product to a number of clients and also has overall responsibility for Addison Group’s
Executive summary
capabilities and offer in research, consultancy and business development.
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This Service Brochure is part of a series published by the Asia-Pacific Association of Communication Directors (APACD). They are intended as constructive manuals that give advice on practical challenges and topics in communications.
The APACD is cross-national network for in-house communication directors, managers and spokespersons in the Asia-Pacific region. It aims to establish common quality standards and advance professional qualifications within the field by organising events such as debates, seminars and
workshops. In addition, the non-partisan Association lobbies for the profession, offers practical advice, provides useful services and information for its members, and publishes Communication Director, a quarterly magazine devoted to corporate communications and public relations.
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T H E VA LU E O F D ATA I N D I G I TA L CO R P O R AT E CO M M U N I C AT I O N S The communications challenge for corporates Companies now operate in a dynamic environment, fraught with both challenges and opportunities. At the root of this is the shifting relationship between the corporate and public worlds, as societal expectations towards companies change rapidly, and a heightened scrutiny of the social value of companies coincides with the commercial and financial challenges faced in a world slowly emerging from recession. Society’s proxies, in the form of policy makers and regulators, are increasingly alert to this dynamic, with developments in the regulations and guidance for certain types of communication now focused far more on value creation than financial performance. Underpinning this change is technology. Digital communication has greatly increased companies’ ability to get their message across to far more diverse audiences and with a wider geographic scope than ever before, but it has also opened up those organisations to the outside world. Corporate communicators can no longer focus on those audiences who traditionally have been most influential, but now have to contend with a broader range of groups, who often focus on opposition to, or scrutiny of, a single aspect of strategy, operations or behaviours. However, despite this changing external environment, companies still need to pursue the objectives and strategies
they determine will deliver sustained success. The ultimate objective of all businesses remains to both create and preserve value in the long term through delivering sustainable, profitable growth. How can corporate communications support this core objective at a time of such significant change? The role of corporate communications Simply put, the role of corporate communications is to assist and promote the business in the creation and preservation of value by positively influencing the attitudes and actions of that company’s key audiences. In order to do so, communication has to present and explain those aspects of the business most relevant to long term financial and reputational value creation in the eyes of its key stakeholders. These aspects are: • The development, performance and current position of the business • What the business wants to achieve and how it intends to achieve those objectives • How the business is structured and managed in order to compete successfully • How the business is governed and controlled • How the business acts and behaves
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In turn, corporate communicators also have a responsibility to monitor and assess how stakeholders respond to these messages, both to ensure that they are being properly understood and to react if they need to change. Effective corporate communication therefore needs to be: • Strategic – focused on communicating the key drivers of value creation • Integrated – consistent but still adapted to the specific interests and concerns of stakeholder groups • Responsive – shown to be able to understand and respond to stakeholder concerns For any business therefore, the objective of corporate communications is to support and promote the organisation’s long term value creation strategy through positively influencing both traditional and emerging audiences. Communicators need to deliver a sense of strategic direction through the clarity and accessibility of messages, a sense of reliability and trustworthiness through integrated and credible communications, and a sense of responsiveness through an ability to listen and react to feedback. The role of data Given the importance of this task, it is perhaps surprising that so few concerted efforts have been made to use data to measure the progress and effectiveness of corporate communications. Like most forms of communication, corporate communication has become increasingly focused on digital - and will continue to be so. Among the advantages
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of digital communication is the ability to use the data supplied by audience interaction with your communication to understand the nature of those interactions and respond quickly and effectively. The lack of traction for data in the field of corporate communications is all the more surprising when considering the extent to which data has transformed marketing and branding communications. In marketing and branding, digital communications has created new levels of reach and presence for brands and products, generated extraordinary levels of sophistication and accuracy in customer profiling and targeting, built consumer enthusiasm and awareness through promoting interactions with and around brands and, in the rapidly growing field of behavioural analytics, allowed marketers to understand and respond to unseen or poorly understood patterns of consumer behaviour in new and innovative ways. The obvious response to the less developed uptake of data among corporate communicators is the lack of a direct sense of return on investment. Corporate audiences are not ‘consumers’ and corporates are not competing for their business. If challenged though, most communicators would agree that this is only true in scale, not in fact. Reputation management through effective corporate communications might be a harder thing to justify substantial investment in, but in certain key regards, reputation is what the organisation is selling, and sustainable benefit is what it hopes to achieve in return. There is a significant opportunity, now, to use innovative and insightful tools and techniques to tap the potential that relevant, high quality data has to improve corporate communications.
The problem with data The problem is not the potential of data to help improve corporate communications, more that the quality and relevance of the data currently provided to communicators has as yet failed to address those needs. Although there are issues with both the quality and relevance of data available to corporate communicators, that is not the only reason. In a number of companies, there is still a disconnect between their overall communications strategy (sometimes because that strategy is poorly defined or understood) and the strategy adopted for the company’s website. The corporate website is the hub of an organisation’s online corporate communications efforts and the only place where all stakeholders and audiences converge – analysts and investors, NGOs and regulators, journalists and opinion formers, customers, communities, employees and job-seekers. As such, it is the key online asset for communicating a company’s corporate narrative and building and maintaining its reputation. Successful corporate websites combine content, architecture and functionality to deliver a clear overall sense of a company’s aspirations and strategies, as well as relevant content to specific audiences. They also provide a good user experience: a website is a proxy for a company’s reputation and creating an authentic, relevant and compelling experience is a key measure of success. This is where the challenge and the opportunity for data exists. There is a pressing need to show that decisions, actions and investments made around the website are helping deliver the right content to the right audience in the right
way so as to support the company’s overall objectives. Data can help, but currently it doesn’t. Why? Almost all websites are set up so that usage patterns can be tracked. However, because analytics services are almost always driven by e-commerce goals, the needs of corporate communicators are ignored. E-commerce-driven measurement typically means a website’s performance is measured in completed transactional journeys and these ignore user behaviours such as engagement, loyalty, brand familiarity and so on. Conversely, other usage patterns are of interest to corporates but of no interest to e-commerce, such as video usage, social media tracking, event monitoring, traffic management, and content performance comparisons. Funnel and path analyses are often misused. Typical e-commerce pathways are linear, measuring the progress from entering the site through product views, to adding to basket and checking out. The aim is to see how quickly someone can buy a product. However, with corporate websites there are many different pathways and successful outcomes to a visit which means that attempting to deploy this type of analysis will lead to confusing results. How can data add greater value to communicators? How can web analytics data form a valuable resource for corporate communicators? By making the right data available, in the right way, to provide actionable insight. This enables the setting of website priorities and investment that support the company’s overall corporate communications strategy. There are three key components to the provision of meaningful, actionable data to corporate communicators:
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