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One of the most difficult things to do in life is to perform an honest self-evaluation. Whether you’re trying to figure out how many calories you consume in a day, how often you say “um” when you speak, or how much time you spend watching TV versus reading, it’s easy to throw on our rose-colored glasses and give an answer liberally sprinkled with personal bias.
The same is true for your PR and marketing program. Everyone wants to think they are doing a great job and that their programs are delivering powerful results. In fact, they often want it so much that many companies evaluate their own performance with confirmation bias — whether they are doing their PR and marketing in-house or working with an agency partner.
Just like a financial audit, bringing in an outside expert firm to conduct an audit of your PR and marketing program can help you find the gaps. That way, you can shore up the weak points and identify the strong points so you can amplify them.
Here are nine areas of your integrated marketing program that an in-depth audit can help you evaluate:
1. Current messaging: An evaluation can determine if your messaging accurately reflects your organization and if it helps differentiate you from competitors in an engaging and memorable way. The audit can also help you determine if your message is easy to understand quickly, which is critically important in our multimedia world where people’s attention spans are shorter than ever.
2. Share of voice/sentiment versus competitors: It may seem like competitors are getting all the attention, but are they really? The auditing agency can bring in media monitoring tools such as Meltwater to help evaluate what percentage of media coverage you’re attracting as well as whether the sentiment is positive, negative or neutral. The agency can also evaluate the quality of your placements versus competitors, which is more important than simply counting “hits.” More isn’t always better.
3. Media targets and their value: An audit will review your current media targets to see how aligned they are with your audience(s) and how valuable those audiences find them. For example, if you’re appearing regularly in healthcare provider publications but you’re trying to sell analytics tools that will be used by health payers, most of that media coverage probably has little value to your organization. You might as well be targeting People magazine.
4. Overall content strategy: We all know that content is king. But are you developing the right types of content for your audience(s)? An audit will compare best practices for a content strategy in your industry or market area with what you’re currently doing and identify gaps and opportunities. For example, if you know you have an audience that likes “snackable” content and you’re not producing infographics or one-minute videos, you’re probably missing an important communication channel.
5. Existing byline articles and case studies: There are a couple of things to look for here. One falls under “everything old is new again.” You may have forgotten about a story angle from a couple of years ago because it was played out at the time, but now it’s a hot topic again — if you put a new spin on it. You can get some quick wins by reviving these high-interest topics. Or perhaps there is an angle in your existing materials that you haven’t thought about yet. An audit can help you find those nuggets buried deep in your content folders so you can take advantage of them. An auditing agency can also suggest new ideas to explore.
6. Press releases: This is a two-pronged evaluation. The first part is the overall strategy — for example, whether you are producing too many press releases, not enough or just the right amount. You want to shoot for a “Goldilocks” level of “just right.” The second prong is the content of the press releases themselves. You don’t want to push out “empty calorie” releases just for the sake of putting them out. An audit will look at the frequency and quality of releases and make recommendations to help you hone the program.
7. Speaker and award targets: Everyone loves a winner (except the people they beat out). It’s great to secure speaker opportunities and awards, but they must be relevant to the organization. Speaking at a conference where there are no potential buyers, or winning awards no one cares about, doesn’t do much for your company’s reputation. An audit will help ensure all the time and effort being put into speaker and award opportunities has a strong potential payoff in the end.
8. Speaker and awards applications: Once you know the right places to go, there’s an art to preparing applications in a way that gets your organization selected. An audit will look at your approach and make suggestions for improvements that will help you win more often.
9. Social media strategies and posts: In most industries, an organization’s social media presence is incredibly valuable — and incredibly undervalued. An audit will help determine (or confirm) which channels you should be using, what you should be saying and how you are being perceived. Not to mention whether anyone even notices you’re there. If you are already active, it will look at how well you’re interacting with your followers and whether you’re taking full advantage of the opportunities to connect with customers and prospects.
These are just a few examples. Whatever you ultimately decide to measure in an audit, the ultimate report will give you a clear, unbiased look at how your program is performing, where you are doing well and where you can improve.
Armed with that information, you’ll be ready to refine your program and answer questions from the C-suite with confidence. That alone may be worth the cost, especially when budget time rolls around.
