A marketing communications audit is incredibly important, requires a great deal of time and is probably one of the most overlooked jobs in the world today.
What is a marketing communications audit?
There are two kinds of audits – corporate and competitive.
A corporate audit looks at everything your company has put into the market in order to communicate with your target audiences. This would include customers, potential customers, former customers, suppliers, investors, media as well as your own employees.
A competitive audit looks at everything you can find that your competition put into the market in order to communicate with their target audiences.
For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on the corporate audit. (I’ll write about a competitive audit at a future date.)
What should be your goals for the audit?
First, you want to review everything you’ve put into market and make sure that there is a consistency of design as well as messaging.
Second, you want to get some specific details from your audiences. Sure, you already got the response rates and conversion rates – but know you want to hear about their reaction to the appearance, the content, the messaging and offers.
How should this work be performed?
For the internal review, I like to get my hands on a large conference room and start putting things up on the wall. Each column is an audience, each row represents the stage of the relationship. This visual inspection of everything can be amazingly powerful and should help you identify some opportunities for improvements.
For the external review, there are several options that range from focus groups to in-depth interviews of your audience/segments. Basically, you want to take those messages targeting a specific segment of your audience and let that segment comment on those communications. This will help you understand their perception of your presentation (channel, design, messaging, offer) from the early stage of the relationship to the later part of the relationship.
Remember that looking back is good – but look to the future as well.
You want to learn how improve results through your communications so understanding what your audiences are interested in moving forward is critical. For example, last year a message about “reducing expenses during a recession” might have been perfect – but if the economy seems to be changing, you might need to update your message to reflect that optimism.
Then what?
Take all that information and spend a few days analyzing the comments. What were the strengths and weaknesses of your communications? What opportunities for improvement exist? And what threats exist if nothing is done.
With the analysis done, turn that data into actionable information with some practical recommendations for next steps. Remember, you are going to be testing any changes against your control packages so it’s not like you’re going to change from “last year’s look” to “this year’s look”. You’ll continue to use what has worked and test what could work until the tests prove it’s time to roll out that new look.
