Blog

Assessment Item 2: Audience and Content Audit

Task Description:

Students will choose either a small business (fewer than 50 employees), a not-for profit organisation, a community organisation, or a client from the public sector to individually conduct an audience analysis and content audit of their use of one existing communication channel. The analysis must identify and assess their audience (or desired audience) as well as their current online communication strategy.

Specifications:

Word Length:                       500 words audience analysis + 500 words content analysis (excluding references)

Due Date:                              Friday 1^st May 2020 11:59pm Week 6

Submission Format:           Turnitin.

Subject Objectives:              a, b, c and d.

CILOS:                                   1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 6.1

Brief:

Client Selection

In this task students will select a client for assessment 2 and assessment 3. The client can be a small business (fewer than 50 employees), a not-for profit organization (NFP), a community organisation or a client from the public sector of your choice.

You can either select a lesser-known client and build general brand awareness or focus on strategy for a current or future campaign they may pursue. The bigger the client the more important it is to have a specific campaign rather than just building general awareness. For example: raising brand awareness may be sufficient for a brand new startup, for a local café, or a small business, but not for a Govt department like Transport for NSW.

For example, a Transport for NSW campaign communicating what new cleaning procedures are being used, or demonstrating how to employ social distancing techniques on Sydney transport. It could also be a campaign ‘informing the public about the changes to menu and opening hours’ for a café franchise. The campaign does not have to be real but it does have to be realistic. Make sure your tutor agrees that your campaign is realistic. Many organizations will already have begun communications campaigns related to the current COVID-19 crisis and the dissemination of changes to normal business practice which may help give your analysis focus, however there is no use picking an organization that is already undertaking an effective campaign, as you will need to be able to eventually offer improvements and other suggestions in A3.

Examples of appropriate clients include:

• The Department of Transport (with a particular campaign to focus on)
• Your local café
• Greenpeace Australia (with a campaign around a local environmental issue)
• Reverse Garbage in Marrickville
• A small accounting firm looking for new clients
• Your local library
• A local artist (a little known band, ceramic artist, painter, etc.)

Clients who you shouldn’t use:

• Nike
• Coca-Cola
• Coachella
• Kayla Itsines
• Any company with more than 50 employees (unless you have a very focussed and specific campaign, as in the examples above)

The end goal is to be able to offer an improvement to a client’s social media strategy so there is no point picking a client with an existing worldwide (or even nationwide) following and an excellent social strategy already in place. Make sure that your client actually needs a social strategy, and that it might actually benefit from one. If you are having difficulty selecting a client, please speak to your tutor for some suggestions.

Conducting an Audience Audit

The first step in developing a social media strategy is to assess where your client is already at. Before you can make recommendations, you need to know what they are already doing on social media (if anything) and get a good understanding of their target audience. This involves collecting lots of data about the company, their business, their audience, their content, and making a critical assessment about the effectiveness of the existing communication strategy. As Meghan Casey (2015, p. 65) explains in The Content Strategy Toolkit, “[t]o make strategic recommendations about content, you need to understand the business. If you don’t, you’re more likely to recommend solutions that don’t help the company achieve its business goals”.

Conducting an audience audit on its own is mostly meaningless without also looking closely at the business itself – this is sometimes called a business audit and involves conducting research and finding information about the business, what they do or sell, and who they think their audience(s) are. This is an important task that involves collecting real data about your client and presenting an analysis of it supported by evidence.

Here are some questions that should drive this section of the assessment. Do not answer these in a dot point form but use them to inform your written response:

• Who are the current customers or users?
• Are there any prospective customers?
• What is the customer or user’s existing communicative ecology like?
• How does the organization interact with their current customers?
• What products or services does the company offer?
• How long has it been in business?
• What need in the marketplace does it fill?
• What are their revenue streams and how are the goods and services accessed?

(adapted from Casey, 2015).

Content Audit

In this part of the task, you will be conducting an analysis of one existing channel the client uses to communicate their online content to their audience (e.g. a Facebook page, an Instagram account, or a website).

Doing a content audit involves assessing how the business currently communicates in this channel and involves collecting real data about your client (such as a list of their posts, content types, etc.) and offering an analysis of it supported by evidence. Here are some questions that should drive this section of the assessment. Do not answer these in a dot point form but use them to inform your written response:

• What content is already available?
• Is it connected to other content or other platforms?
• Can search engines find the content?
• What is the content for? Who is it for?
• What is its purpose?
• Is it clear, usable and readable?
• Does it contain a compelling call to action or next step?
• Is it up to date and accurate?
• Is it accessible? Is it clear? Is it credible? Is it valuable?
• What is the ratio of self-promotion to information useful to customers?

Here are some examples of professional content audits to get you started:

The Iconic – https://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/the-iconic/

Kayla Itsines – https://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/kayla-itsines/

Aldi – https://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/aldi/

Note that these audits also address other digital marketing strategies like SEO and Email Marketing and make use of advanced software like eye-tracking. For this assessment, we are only interested in social media marketing, in one channel of communication, and are not expecting heat maps, eye tracking, etc.

You have 1,000 words total for the audience/business audit and the content audit. We recommend dedicating around 500 words to the audience/business audit and 500 words to the content audit. We encourage you to use images to support your analysis.

It is important to note that this is a significant research task. In addition to drawing your own findings from the data, you need to find evidence from digital marketing professionals (i.e. professional industry blogs and analyses like the examples above), research reports, and scholarly literature to support your conclusions. Conclusions that are not supported by evidence will not achieve the level of analysis required.

The emphasis in terms of this assessment and the criteria is on your research skills, the depth and quality of your analysis and your ability to examine the existing communication strategy of a potential client.

What if my client is not active on social media or my campaign doesn’t exist yet?

In addition to discussing the lack of content available on social media, conduct a content audit of a competitor who has a clear social media strategy to gain a baseline and set expectations. For specific campaigns, conduct a content audit of a similar sized campaign from another organisation, or a different campaign run by the same organisation as a guide. The goal is to gather enough information to be able to take forward into A3 and inform what is desirable and achievable in the multiplatform social strategy.

Rubric: