Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Marketing audits are the dental checkups of the business world. Sure, you dread your regularly scheduled cleaning, but you know it’s good for you and your pearly whites. More importantly, it’s really the only thing standing between your dubious flossing regimen and a traumatizing root canal.

In similar vein, a marketing audit is designed to catch any major flaws in strategy, process and implementation before a costly mistake. If done right, they can save your company thousands of dollars, keep marketing aligned with revenue goals and serve as a safety net for preventing anything that could detrimental to the future of the company.

The best kind of audits usually begin at a holistic level, dive into deeper detail and end with a prioritized list of action steps. While not all marketing strategies are created equal, here are a few ways to go about auditing yours...

We tend to create the social media presence for our businesses in an organic fashion, which is the natural way to grow relationships right?

...The problem is; as you explore new tools and meet new people who invite you to join them on other networks, your messaging and your social media presence overall can easily get confused.
That’s why it’s a good idea to conduct a social media audit every so often to step back and get a 10K foot level. This allows you to see yourself as others might see you and judge if you are delivering the message you think you’re sending....

Whether marketers like it or not, consumers are now generating over 25% of content that appears in web searches for specific brand names, and consumers often trust those social media messages more than advertising or news articles about the brand. Research has shown that this “electronic word-of-mouth” is seen as reliable by consumers and significantly affects a firm’s perceived value.

But with such a panoply of channels out there, how can social media marketers keep track of what people are saying? And what strategies can be implemented to engage those consumers to influence the conversation? That’s where a careful social media audit can help. It’s a systematic examination of social data to help marketers discover, categorize, and evaluate all the social talk about a brand. This approach captures what consumers are saying about a brand, what competitors are doing on social media, and what the brand itself is doing.

I developed a social media audit template for the book Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution from the principle of the Five Ws that is taught to journalists: who, where, what, when, and why...

Examine what works and what doesn't with your social media marketing by performing a social media audit.

Social media audit checklist

OK, I promised this would be easier and more helpful than you think, right? Well, following the outline below could mean a social media audit in 15 minutes or less. All the basics are covered here, and you can dig as deep as you choose to improve your social media marketing. This is what the audit should cover....