Boards should guide their companies toward a thorough audit of their marketing capabilities and take up training to improve their own acumen.
To achieve any type of significant change, you sometimes need to step back before embarking on a forward-looking plan. Whether it be personal, professional or a change related to the business operations of your company, taking stock of where you are, were or want to be allows you to put constructive change into practice. Fear of letting go of past programs, processes, perceptions and even people in this type of self-assessment or audit has no place.
The concept of an audit is not foreign to a private company board. A board’s audit committee oversees both the financial reporting process and the external, independent audit, year after year. But beyond the financial audits needed for compliance, taxes or investors, what about audits of other substantive committees or working parts of the company? Marketing, as the driver of brand and reputation, strategy and programs, and customer interface, is too important an area to ignore.
Just as a financial audit assesses whether a company’s records are fair and accurate, a marketing audit for efficiency, impact and effectiveness is equally important.
If the time you are spending on marketing is not making an impact, if the money you are spending is not realizing a return on your investment and if your structure is inhibiting your ability to try new things, it is time to make a change.
With few boards having marketers among their ranks, and even fewer board members having expertise related to the current nuances of marketing disciplines, boards embarking on this form of audit from within will have difficulty providing effective governance of the function. An annual presentation to the board of visual marketing campaigns and ads is not enough. To do it right, the eyes of an independent outside expert should be retained and might be just what both the board and the company need.
Engage an Independent Expert to Conduct Your Marketing Audit
Outside evaluations provide a clear, independent voice that is data-driven. They blend qualitative insights with quantitative data to help identify and push the right things forward. Your independent marketing audit team will have the skill sets to provide budgets, processes and people to help drive change. Insiders often lack that clarity – or simply do not have the skill sets to even see it.
In challenging times, it is important to honestly assess who you are and what you are doing. This is the exact time to look for positioning gaps and seize upon opportunities that directly relate to your company or brand in the marketplace versus the competition. Some of the questions asked within your marketing audit will include:
- Do you have a strong brand and is it reinforced by values, mission, purpose and authenticity that resonates with your audience? Do you have a carefully defined audience?
- Has an analysis of your competitive environment been done? Is your brand reinforced with a positioning that sets it apart from the others?
- Is your brand-messaging strategy implemented consistently throughout the organization? Are your employees, including the leadership team, articulating what your firm is about in a consistent way?
- Do you have a strategic plan? Has it been distributed for use as a working tool across all of your functional departments? Are the programs in place within each of these functional areas in sync with one another? Do each of their programs support long-term strategy or have they simply been carried over year after year?
- Are you actively speaking to your clients or customers? Is lead generation, customer retention and client-based marketing understood and instituted? Is return on investment for each program being tracked in some way?
- Is your spend consistent with market need and/or competition, and is your spend positioning you for growth?
Provide Marketing Training to Your Board
Marketing is not haphazard. It is a science. It takes the right people executing on the right tasks at the right time to do it well. A board education plan is needed, particularly for those boards charged with the development of forward-looking strategy. The board will need training to understand what will be presented to them as part of your marketing audit.
Your outside marketing audit consultant will also review the dashboards currently utilized by the board to assess the health of the company. Simply put, the marketing-related dashboards they might be getting, typically developed by those outside of the marketing function, might not be focused on a changing competitive landscape or the current nuances of marketing. For the board to properly assess the strategy, brand, reputation and traditional and digital spend, it behooves them to have an outsider develop the right indicators and train the board on their use.
Continuous Learning Leads to Continuous Growth
Once your audit is done, and your board training complete, a forward-looking plan can be developed and implemented by management teams. But it doesn’t end there. Including independent marketing consultants as part of your board or board committee structure will ensure that this audit is done every year as part of an annual board self-assessment.
Marketing plays a critical role in the success of any business. But it’s not just the marketing department that drives that success. The board of directors also plays an important role in ensuring that a company’s marketing efforts are on track, and that they’re aligned with the company’s overall strategy.
Effective marketing relies on organized, focused, foundational growth strategies. Real change comes when your self-awareness enables you to open yourself to the infinite possibilities ahead. After all, you’ll never become who you want to be if you’re too attached to who you’ve been.
Paula Zirinsky is cofounder and chief strategist of Structura Strategy Group LLC.