I
f you follow Full Tilt, you have likely heard us champion the benefits of strategic communications audits. They are a highly targeted means to objectively understand the current state of your brand in the market and identify the most impactful and achievable ways to move forward.
Our marcomms audits look at resources, alignment, messaging, creative, channels, audiences and employee communications to help teams make more effective and efficient decisions, prioritize and optimize. For a deeper overview of our process, read our recent post “Assess and Optimize: Maximizing Your Marcomms Now When Budgets Are Uncertain.”
Having conducted hundreds of audits, from tactical reviews of a specific channel to wholesale assessments of entire communication functions for global organizations, we’ve seen it all. We’re sharing some of our most common findings so you can begin to look for them within your organization.
- Internal alignment challenges
Teams want to do their best work. They want to contribute to the organization’s vision. But they lack visibility into key processes, people or information that would help them get their jobs done more effectively or efficiently. Often opening up lines of clear communication, gaining alignment on roles and responsibilities, setting expectations and goals, and defining what success looks like in terms of collaboration, can help brands overcome a myriad of challenges. - Lack of data visibility
The second most common issue we see is that teams want to do smart, data-informed work, but are lacking critical insights to do so. Whether it’s data locked up in certain systems or tools not integrating with each other for a full picture or reports not going deep enough to provide actionable insights, data is foundational to getting comms right. - Messaging aligns with the company – not its target customers
Often, companies are so focused on nailing the messaging about what they do, their position in the market and their benefits, they lose sight of what their customers want to hear. Instead, messaging should be customer-centric and based on a deep understanding of audience needs and how they make decisions. - A one-size-fits-all approach
Communicators are time strapped, frequently budget strapped, and always trying to extend their reach as far as possible. That means we often see content repurposed for a variety of audiences and channels with limited or no adaptations. While we understand the appeal of this approach from an efficiency perspective, hyper-focusing on smaller audience segments or only your most effective channels, and adapting content accordingly, pays off over broad-based communications. - Things are working well!
You might be surprised to learn that our audits aren’t simply lists of what’s going wrong! Often, they validate all of the things that are going right and help to reinforce what to prioritize.
Want to find out how your brand compares or help to address these challenges within your organization? Let’s start an audit!
