The One Audit That Will Make You More Money

Make Next Year Better

If you’re like me, your email inbox is filling up with ways to prepare for the new year to ensure a great start to the year.  Whether it’s your finances, health, spiritual growth, or business growth, there are many steps you can take to prepare for a great new year.  However, all these emails are missing one important piece for us business owners.  If we don’t do it, we will struggle to hit our goals next year.

Align Your Marketing Message

Whether you are a multi-million dollar company or a one-man/woman show, your company/brand puts out communication every single day.  From your website, social media posts, business cards, email campaigns, to employee engagements with customers, your brand is speaking.  What will happen if your brand message isn’t uniform?  Will your message be well received, memorized, and call people to action if it is confusing or unclear?

Don’t make the mistake of confusing your customers.  Confused people do not buy.  It is when a person feels understood that they engage with a brand.  Recently, I worked with a company who’s website was very pretty to look at.  However, the words on their site were all about them.  Their story, their goals, their company culture.  While none of this is bad on its own, it is when the company didn’t engage the customer by talking about the customer and what problem their customer was experiencing that they will not convert website visitors to customers.  To make problems worse, the social media campaign was all about the employee’s hobbies! Again, not bad if the brand is established and the message is consistent on what problem the company is solving for the customer.  After a marketing message overhaul, we were able to get the company’s message in line with what a customer needed to hear to do business with them and reflect that in their social media campaigns.  It made a world of a difference.

So, how can you use this story to get ready for a better year?  Conduct a messaging audit.  In one area gather all the ways you communicate to the public and spread it out so you can see it all.  I prefer paper and tape on a large wall.

• Print out your website pages, your email campaigns, social media posts, and any other ways you communicate.
• In front of you, have your brand message printed out. Highlight the keywords.
• Now, audit each piece of communication and identify where your message is consistent and where you may have gone off track.

“Marketing is an exercise in memorization.” – Don Miller

Effective marketing is easy to understand and repeatable, thus making it easy to memorize.  By creating a consistent message, potential customers will remember you, not your competition.  Ensuring that your marketing is consistent in all outlets will give your company a springboard into the first quarter and beyond. Carve out some time in your calendar and conduct a marketing audit.  You may be pleasantly surprised, or find that some work needs to be done.  Either way, you will be better prepared for the new year and ready to grow your business.