Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

The communications organization should monitor itself to ensure its activities align with other marketing efforts. Key to maintaining this alignment is conducting a periodic reputation audit, at least on an annual basis. A reputation audit can tell us how effective we are in driving engagement and achieving results with our external audience (such as customers, prospects, analysts, media and other stakeholders) as well as with our employees and partners. It is an evaluation of where the organization is currently regarding its communications efforts and a diagnosis of where the organization needs to focus additional time and resources. At the end of the audit, we should know what’s working, what’s not, and what might work better if optimized.

The first step in a reputation audit is to define the activities you must analyze. Think of these from the perspective of higher-level functional categories within your communications organizations, such as advertising/branding, PR, AR, corporate communications (including your Website), community management/social media strategy, creative, internal communications, and public affairs. From these categories, determine the activities that are typically performed; then, you can rate your current level of effectiveness for each function based on the results they deliver. For every functional activity you should be able to identify the target audience, what you are trying to accomplish, and if these goals are being reached. Using the ratings you’ve identified for each functional activity you can begin to identify the areas that need improvement (based on their lack of alignment) and begin to develop a strategy for improving these goals.