Let's start with the basics. Define Objectives, Audiences, Customer Behaviors, and Competitor Spaces:

• Clarify the goals and objectives of the audit. What are you trying to achieve? Are you looking to improve customer experience, increase sales, or optimize marketing spend?
• Determine who your ideal clients are. Consider demographics, interests, behaviors, and preferences. This will help you understand where your potential clients spend their time online.
• Map out the customer journey to understand how customers interact with your brand across different channels. Identify touchpoints and potential pain points.
• Study your competitors or businesses like yours. Identify which social media platforms they are using successfully to acquire clients.

Understand where the business is now:

• Evaluate the nature of your business and your products or services. Are they visual, informational, or experiential? Different social media platforms cater to various content types.
• Create a comprehensive inventory of all the marketing channels you are using, including websites, social media platforms, email, mobile apps, and offline channels like stores or call centers.
• Create a comprehensive list of all the media and public relations channels you are using, including email lists, pitches and proposals, media advisories, public share platforms, and offline channels like stores or call centers.
• Gather data from each channel, such as website analytics, social media metrics, email campaign results, and sales data. Ensure you have access to historical data for analysis.
• Evaluate the consistency of messaging, branding, and user experience across all channels. Are your brand elements cohesive? Is your audience familiar with your key selling points and what you’re trying to get them to do?
• Examine your cross-channel integration, meaning how well your channels work together. Are there opportunities to improve integration and data sharing between channels?
• Analyze the collected data to identify patterns, trends, and areas of strength and weakness in your marketing efforts. Look for gaps in performance.
• Are you confident that your marketing management can effectively use social media analytics tools to measure the performance of your chosen platforms. Do they appropriately pay attention to metrics like engagement, reach, and conversion rates for their own purposes while focusing on the response to the call to action (CTA) that you’ve aligned to?
• For any paid advertising, do you have a comprehensive strategy around this and are you certain that you are focusing your time and budget on the correct marketing channels, and testing in small areas where appropriate for continued growth? Most businesses must employ paid advertising options across numerous platforms to reach a wider and more targeted audience to see true marketing ROI that is specific to a singular goal.
• Evaluate the technology and tools you use to manage and measure your marketing efforts. Are they helping or hindering your omnichannel strategy?
• Study your competitors' omnichannel strategies to gain insights and benchmark your performance.
• Based on your analysis, pinpoint opportunities for improvement. These might include refining messaging, optimizing channel mix, or investing in new technologies.

Once you have a clear view of where you are and where you’re seeking to BE, creating the right content, delivering it at the right time, on the proper platforms, and iterating and retargeting as appropriate become the next phase of strategy building: 

• Make sure the goals are clear. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive website traffic, or provide customer support?
• Create a detailed action plan with specific steps, responsibilities, and timelines to address the identified opportunities and challenges.
• Deeply familiarize yourself with the features of various social media platforms. Each platform has unique strengths and caters to specific content formats.
• Research the demographic information for each platform. Different platforms have varying user demographics, which may align better with your target audience.
• Consider the type of content you can create. For instance, Instagram and Pinterest are visual-centric, while LinkedIn is more business-oriented and text-heavy.
• Research the cadence that might suit your business goals most appropriately. Sometimes this can be the most painful trial and error if you’ve not had a depth of experience in this work, so if you have a mentor as expert this would be ideal, as it truly can make or break your hard work.

Do you have the bandwidth and/or team to execute and iterate with excellence both now and into the future noting that marketing and PR are never static and these audits and programs will need to continue for the lifetime of your business:

• Is your team able to execute the action plan with excellence, making necessary changes to your strategy, processes, and technology stack in a way that makes sense for your future business?
• Are you able to monitor the impact of any iterative changes and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure you are making progress?
• Are you confident in what to do with the vast data and information that can be gleaned from current digital tools that you might subscribe to?
• Omnichannel marketing is an ongoing process. Do you have the strategic knowledge and resources to regularly review and update your strategy to adapt to changing customer behaviors and emerging products and categories? Are you a part of this innovation?
• Assess the time and resources you can allocate to social media marketing. Is your current solution the best use of time and resources, in that it is effective and is holding human resources to their highest potential?

If you think marketing and PR hasn't worked for your business, it is likely because you don’t have the time or experience on your team to create a best-in-class strategy, and execute with excellence ongoing. Content and cadence are extremely important to become and maintain relevant, so that when growth marketing and PR tactics are employed, they can have the best possible reach and impact. 

"If we have a deep understanding of the potential impact of marketing and PR tactics, they can consistently enhance our business position."

"It never hurts to consult an expert."