Are your Marketing Communications Hitting the Sweet Spot?

March 11th 2019 | By Emma Grant

The task of crafting marketing messages isn’t exactly an easy one. It consumes valuable time and effort. So when you’ve settled on your approach, you will rightly expect it to start paying dividends. Your investment in time should after all be worth it. But there is a lot more to communications than simply creating those messages: it is vital to go one step beyond and make sure that the messages you think you are putting out are the ones that are actually being received. Let’s take a look at how to go about doing this.

There is more to communications than simply creating marketing messages: it is vital to make sure that the messages you think you are putting out are the ones that are actually being received.

Your communications audit

Taking a step back to check whether your marketing communications plan is actually working is an essential exercise. Are you sending consistent messages? Are your communications actually in line with what your brand promises? The only way to verify all of this is to run a communications audit. Not sure where to start? Here are some tips.

1.     Assess your campaigns

Bring together your past three months’ worth of campaigns and assess how they stand up against your objectives. Is everything consistent? Have your campaigns actually worked to develop good relationships with your audience? Have they resulted in new business, converted leads? If there are inconsistencies between goals and results then you’ll need to work out where things have gone wrong.

2.     Review marketing coverage

Look at your paid advertisements and your media coverage both online and offline. Scrutinise as much data as you possibly can. Look at things like the reach of your ads and coverage, and the frequency of the coverage. Then delve deeper to see whether your key marketing messages were coming to the fore within that coverage. You may well see missed opportunities where you could have better communicated your brand values. You may even find that your key messages were misinterpreted.

3.     Ask questions

The best way to discover whether your messages are being received in the right way is to ask the very people who are receiving them. Customer surveys are the best way to do this, or you may wish to be more direct and try direct interviews. If you’re using customer surveys, you’ll need to invest some time into crafting questions that draw out the information that is going to be valuable to you. Your core aim is to ascertain whether your marketing messages are being received in the right way. So for example, if one of your key messages is that you offer a bespoke design service, you may wish to include a question such as:

Which of the following statements do you associate with us?

1. Offer a range of off-the-shelf products for immediate despatch
2. Offer customisation of off-the-shelf products
3. Offer a full bespoke design service for a completely tailored experience

So now you have your communications audit off-pat, you can start to really delve into the data you extract.

Delve into your data

Gathering data is one thing, but actually analysing it and then acting on what you find is the key to really making sure your marketing communications are hitting the sweet spot.

Look to really understand the differentiators that make your company stand out and then use these to shape your customer relationship management programme, and make sure these differentiators form your key messages.

Use your analysis to help you make adjustments to your communications campaign, from the main strategy right through to individual elements. This way you’ll be able to eliminate what is not working, enhance what is working and set targets for future success.

If you could use some help running a communications audit, or would benefit from a managed SEO campaign or you need some expertise in designing customer satisfaction surveys, talk to Figment!