A crisis, whether it is external or internal cannot be predicted most of the time. Like the current pandemic situation that has affected businesses everywhere and almost no one saw it coming. That is why every organization should be prepared to overcome these times with a foolproof crisis communication plan. They need to update their crisis management plan regularly to prevent any long-term damage. During the times of great crisis as such, companies realize all the weaknesses they had within but failed to recognize before. The survival of your company depends on your previously build reputation and powerful crisis communication.
That is why you need to understand how to measure your crisis messaging to stay afloat in the market. It will help you monitor the upcoming risks and provide a clear image of the situation to your investors. You need to know whether your messaging efforts are making an impact on the market. You can do so by measuring your communication campaigns. You must have a systematic approach in order to measure your crisis communication properly. You have to make a measuring plan beforehand to achieve your crisis management goals. Let’s learn how to build a proper crisis messaging measurement program for your organization.
1. Monitor the media
The media plays an important role in measuring your communication at the time of crisis. It can become your best measurement tool if you use it properly. It is not only a clever but extremely essential form of crisis messaging tool in the world. Here are some tips for media monitoring:
- Track the reporters covering the particular news so you can reach them whenever you need them in the future.
- Analyze the mood and sentiment of the story.
- Observe all the mentions throughout the media so that you can measure the key terms later.
- The biggest media houses make a greater impact and reach the most audience.
So, going through the media reports on the situation will give you a clear view of how your crisis messaging is doing at the moment. You can make improvements where it is needed after you have completed your analysis.
2. Analyze social media
Social media plays a very important part in our lives today. It was invented for people to socialize with each other. Now it represents our society as a whole. Be sure that it will have an opinion about your communication in a crisis. That is why it is necessary to go through what your target audience, investors, and the market have to say about it in social media. You might be tempted to respond to some of the reactions on these mediums. But it is clever to analyze the outcome before you do so.
- Go through the posts about the situation and your messaging, thoroughly.
- See what your existing engagement has to say on the matter.
- Observe how your potential consumers are reacting to it.
- Know what the influencers are saying about the matter as they have a lot of power at converting people’s thinking according to theirs.
- Use social analytic tools to be more precise.
3. Website measurement
You can easily know how your communication efforts are faring at the time of a crisis by analyzing your website. The traffic on your website at the time can tell you a lot of things.
- Find out how many people visited the home page and how many of them went to the newsroom. That way you will how many people read your crisis messaging.
- Go through the feedbacks and reviews to see if any of them talked about or mentioned your communication practice.
- Make sure to analyze if there is a difference in your sales pattern after you have deployed the crisis messaging. If you see any improvement then you have succeeded. If it is the other way, it has clearly failed.
Most businesses measure the visitor volume while measuring their crisis measuring outcome. But that is not effective because all of them are not always visiting with a positive opinion. These kinds of traffic do not impact crisis communication positively.
4. Business measurement
Your business is the most essential part of measuring your response in an emergency situation. You need to focus on the image of your brand at the moment to know where your stand with your communication endeavors. The best way to do so is to focus on the response of your consumers.
- Find out what they are saying about your brand after you have released your crisis response.
- The feedback sent through emails and calls to your sales team is the most important. They provide the most detailed impact of your crisis communication.
- Go through their questions to understand what kind of impression your response is making in the market.
- Their engagement towards your brand and their decision whether to purchase or not is an effective way of measuring.
- Do real-time sales tracking to see how much your communication at the time of the crisis has impacted.
The measuring can vary from company to company. It depends on the type of your business.
5. Audience research
Your crisis messaging is ultimately directed to your target audience. You issue it to make a good impression or repair your brand image in front of them. Researching their opinion is the best way to measure how your crisis response is influencing the market. You may avoid it like most of the companies thinking audience survey takes a lot of time to come to a conclusion. Some even think that doing so only makes the consumers more aware of the crisis situation. But it is the most precise way to know about the performance of your crisis response. There are certain tools available in the market right now that can make your online surveys way simpler and cost-effective. You can craft the survey in a way that does not aggravate the situation further.
