Taking a marketing audit is often step one for my clients. It is important to know what you are saying, whom to, how and where you are saying it and if you are spending money on that messaging. This may sound obvious, and taking time to sit down and list out all the messaging actions you are currently taking, may illuminate some messaging you weren’t even aware you were spending energy on.
Questions to ask to begin your marketing audit
What messages are you disseminating?
Where are you disseminating these messages?
How (with consideration for medium, tone of voice, storyline, etc.)?
What amount of energy, time, money and otherwise are you spending on these messages?
What messages?
What is your brand saying to the world? Each interaction with a customer carries cues about your brand that the customer picks up on.
Does your shipping receipt include an easy-to-contact link to someone with whom the customer can talk to immediately about their order? That tells the customer not only do you care enough to hire people to care for the customer but you care so much that you make sure that customer can contact those people for assistance at any time they need if something arises.
Does your shipping packaging include sustainability messaging on the packaging? If done correctly, you are telling the customer your business values and your commitment to go above and beyond to carry out a commitment, even if it requires paying a little more to stand strong. This will carry over into assumptions made by the customer about other commitments your business makes.
What is important in this part of the audit is taking stock of each and every message you are sending out into the world and trying to become fully aware of both intentional and unintentional messaging customers are receiving from your brand.
Where?
Where are you speaking to you customers? What channels are you currently sending your messages through? Are you active in your physical community and enjoy a strong local footprint, do you have a strong online presence with an easy-to-use and delightful website accompanied by a valuable social media presence that enhances the value of your customer’s daily lives?
Looking at where your messages are being received and where your audience prefers to receive messages is another crucial limb of a marketing audit. When you take stock of where you’re talking and also stock of where your desired customers are listening, you may open up a whole new opportunity you didn’t even know existed.
How?
How are you speaking to myriad stakeholders in communication with your brand? From employee communications to print collateral, how are you speaking to people? What is your tone of voice? Are you taking time to respect the conversation and convey the message in a way deemed necessary by the conversation itself? If not people may question your sincerity.
Are you sending a mailer when you could send an email with just as much reception and much smaller costs. Are you buying print media when a social media ad could be just as effective and more targeted?
When we dive into how you are speaking to people we find opportunities to change how we are saying things. Maybe we craft different messages for different audiences, and the ability to send those messages through different mediums and channels allows for that customizability getting more bang for your return on ad spend buck.
How much are you spending?
It’s all about getting the best bang for your buck and sometimes we are spending way more time and energy on doing something an old way that a small shift in process can greatly alleviate. When we take stock of what exactly you are spending your time and energy on, we then can identify where we can consolidate and trim and where we can grow and improve. This kind of efficiency allows us to make sure when we do speak it is powerful and to the right people. The more we can create effiencenies here, the more we can see the value of the action and then the more time and space we can make for more growth of effective messaging activities.
Taking these steps will put you in the right place to begin to understand how you're spending your energy when it comes to your marketing messages and allow you to identify if there are places your effort would be better spent or if some effort you are taking is working well and you need to do more of it.
If all of this is just too much for you to undertake or it feels too big to tackle, hit me up! I will help you move through this first intregral step to move you toward effective and powerful marketing efforts.
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