How content analysis can improve your corporate communications
What is content analysis?
Content analysis is a systematic approach to building an objective interpretation of almost any kind of content. The process aims to bring scientific credibility to the more subjective text analysis you might have practiced in your college literature classes and research papers. For more on content analysis, visit our recent blog post on the subject.
While content analysis was initially a very manual, very slow process, advances in data science and natural language processing have enabled us to apply content analysis to unlimited quantities of text. We can now rapidly and objectively measure the effectiveness of all kinds of content, and compare it to similar samples from competitors, peers, and best-in-class communications.
What can content analysis do for my organization?
Though content analysis is perhaps best known for its use in scholarly research, its potential to enhance corporate communications is huge, especially now that technology has made it possible to conduct these analyses on a large scale.
While traditional methods of measuring a communication’s effectiveness are certainly worthwhile, they have their limitations. Human biases can affect even the most skilled expert’s evaluation, and the manpower required to evaluate every single outgoing communication is simply outside the realm of possibility for most organizations’ tightening budgets.
Data-driven content analysis, on the other hand, allows organizations to measure hundreds—even thousands—of communications at lightning speed and with complete objectivity. With the results of these analyses, communications teams can be confident in the quality of their output, and in the steps they’re taking to improve their messaging.
What kind of communications can I evaluate this way?
Organizations can apply content analysis to all of their communications. Here are just a few possibilities:
- Financial communications: Conduct a content analysis of your company’s recent earnings calls to determine how clearly and confidently your executives are communicating to investors. Then find out how your financial communications stack up against competitors and industry leaders.
- Executive speaking engagements: Whether your CEO is addressing employees or customers, it’s critical that each engagement strikes just the right tone. Communications teams can use content analysis to ensure the message will be just as effective as best-in-class executive communications, building the CEO’s credibility and the overall reputation of the brand.
- Corporate communications: With the growing demand for engagement with consumers, consistent communication across the ever-increasing number of media channels is more crucial than ever. And more difficult. Communications teams can use content analysis to ensure they’re emphasizing the same values and themes across all their diverse messaging.
To learn more about how Quantified Communications can use content analysis to help you improve your organization’s communication strategy, contact us at info@quantifiedcommunications.com.
More on content analysis from Quantified Communications.