Planning to launch a new product or service, expand your offerings or reboot your brand? If so, you're likely queuing up a host of new marketing materials to trumpet your latest venture. From brochures, to mailers, to trade show graphics, to maybe even a website redesign, you're hoping to engage, inform and influence your audience with clear, consistent and effective messaging.

Before you move forward with these materials, sometimes it's helpful to take a step back. Now may be a great time for a communications audit, which is this month's topic. As always, you can "listen" to our monthly e-newsletter topic in audio form on your computer, or sign up for our podcast through iTunes. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on and experiences on this topic, so send them to me at sharon@bendingdesign.com.

What is a communications audit?
While it's certainly not as painful as a tax audit, it's still a rigorous identification and evaluation of an organization's — and their competitors' — existing marketing support materials. The endgame is to ensure that your current materials are still accomplishing what they were originally designed to do, both individually and holistically, in terms of messaging, branding and imagery. By taking a good long look at your competition, you'll also gain perspective on how your existing pieces measure up, where gaps may be, and how you can gain an edge.

How does a communications audit work?
It begins by identifying, gathering then reviewing any existing and relevant marketing pieces, including any customer-facing website that represents your brand. This may be trickier than it sounds. Depending on how broad and deep and your organization runs, you may have multiple departments creating materials that find its way into the public arena. While this is perfectly normal, it's not unreasonable to think that consistent brand messaging, integrity and/or quality may have gotten diluted along the way.

In some cases, the messaging may not accurately reflect your brand's current value proposition or may simply overlook some new services or products you've more recently introduced. In other cases, the messaging may still be relevant and compelling but the imagery may evoke a simpler era that pre-dates the advent of, say, the personal computer. It happens.

What are the benefits of a communications audit?
A comprehensive communications audit can provide you with:

• A solid baseline - At bare minimum, an audit will tell you where you've been and reveal your current state. From there, you can make informed decisions on the effectiveness of various pieces, particularly what needs to be updated and what needs to be scrapped.
  
  
• A competitive edge - Find out everything you can about your key competitors. A great place to start is by reviewing their marketing materials. You may be surprised what they reveal. Besides, chances are good they've got their eyes on you.
  
  
• Help with planning - It's easier to plan where you're going when you know where you've been.
  
  
• Savings opportunities - Scrapping or retooling ineffective pieces are just a start. There may be other opportunities to save money by formatting pieces differently, streamlining print runs, etc.
  
  
• An opportunity to preserve your brand integrity - A thorough checkup of your marketing materials will likely reveal some discrepancies here and there around logo usage, messaging, graphic design, outdated offerings, and so on. With so many pieces in circulation potentially affecting your brand, now's a great time to determine what still works - and what doesn't.

Communications audits are one of the many services we offer, and can provide you with an inexpensive and noncommittal way to determine which pieces pass the effectiveness test, and which you should probably make plans to improve.

Contact me to set up a time to explain the methodology involved and show you a sample of the report we produce. Whether or not you're planning your next big sales promotion or rebranding, now may be the ideal time to take that big step back.