Frequently Asked Questions

• To identify the intended brand/company message and its positioning

• To compare the intended message to the public’s perception of the brand/company message

• To identify the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s communication methodology

• To assess customer engagement, loyalty and retention

• To assess feedback from employees and other internal stakeholders

• To determine the effectiveness of the company’s marketing communication of its product/service positioning

A marketing communications audit will let you know what your company is doing right and what could use some improvement when it comes to communication. Before giving your public image a complete overhaul, its best to know what is already working so that you don’t waste time or money.

An audit will also give you insight on not only what your customers think about your company, but also on what your employees think. It is imperative that all employees know the correct message and care enough to communicate it accurately with others.

1. First, we need to determine a baseline for the information we collect. We will meet with you to determine what ideas and messages you think you’re communicating to employees and the public. We will go over your branding strategy and your internal and external communications strategies if you have those in place. We will collect any policies and procedures or other documents that you feel might aid us in the audit.
2. We want to make sure we give you thorough and accurate information. Therefore we will arrange to perform a series data collection methods, including employee and customer interviews. Where appropriate and feasible, we will also survey customers and employees anonymously. We will also review the company website and social media accounts and analytics to assess the impact of the company’s online presence.
3. Depending on the location of your business, we will plan a site visit where all of your marketing materials and advertising will be collected or reviewed and analyzed. Various experts in qualitative research and human factors and ergonomics (if applicable) will be utilized.
4. We will then take all of the data collected and run various analytic procedures to determine if your stated goals have been met and if your strategies are effective. Your results and our recommendations will be presented to you in a neat and concise report. We would be happy to review all results with you or  to create a presentation for you or any higher level executives.

The timing of your audit fully depends on the amount of materials we are given to review. For a thorough examination of your marketing materials and communication processes, we anticipate you receiving results in a minimum of two weeks. Of course, an audit for a company with only a website and a brochure will be completed sooner than the audit of a company with several marketing channels to examine. However, barring any unforeseen circumstances, we do not anticipate any audit lasting longer than three weeks.

Performing a thorough communications audit is time consuming. Not only do we want to gather the best information for you we would hope that you would want to be well informed to make your future marketing decisions. That being said, our audits are priced based on the time spent. We charge an hourly rate for the entire process and we commit to a minimum of 10 hours of work.

Of course we can. If you’ve read through everything we’ve said and feel like an audit is not the right thing for you or not right for you at this time, we can definitely design your site or any other marketing materials to your specifications. The better news is that all audit clients will receive a 20% discount on any other marketing services once your audit is completed.