Students will choose either a small business

54060 DIGITAL COMMUNITIES

Assessment Item 2: Audience and Content Audit (30%)

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 analysis 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. The client may be targeting the same digital community from assignment 1 or a completely different one.

Specifications

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

Submission Format: Turnitin.

Subject Objectives: a, b, c and d.

CILOS: 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 6.1

Criteria

Criteria	Weighting
Relevance of sources	25%
Depth of analysis and reasoning	25%
Comprehensiveness and relevance of audit	25%
Clarity of expression	25%

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 little-known client and build brand awareness or select a well-known NFP or government department and work on an existing campaign with room for improvement, or a campaign they may be interested in pursuing in the future. The client must be real. The bigger the client the more important it is to have a very specific campaign. For example, raising brand awareness may be sufficient for a new startup or a small café but not for a Govt department like Transport for NSW. A campaign might be something like ‘reducing fare evasion on Sydney busses’ or ‘informing the public about a new menu item’ for a well-known chain restaurant. 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.

Example clients include:

• The Department of Transport (with a campaign around fare evasion in Sydney)
• Your local café
• Greenpeace Australia (with a campaign around a local environmental issue)
• Reverse Garbage in Marrickville
• A small accounting firm
• Your local library
• A local artist (i.e. music, ceramics, art)

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)

We want you to be able to offer an improvement to a client’s social media strategy so there is no point picking a client with a worldwide (or nationwide) following who already has an excellent social strategy. Also make sure that your client actually needs a social strategy (i.e. will it actually benefit them?). If you are having difficulty selecting a client, please speak to your tutor for some suggestions and ideas.

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, the audience and their content and making a critical assessment about the effectiveness of the 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 is the target customer or user?
• Are there any prospective customers?
• What is the customer or user’s existing communicative ecology like?
• How does the organization interact with and provide information to their current and prospective 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).

The content audit involves assessing how the business currently communicates in this channel. This involves collecting real data about your client and presenting an analysis of it supported by evidence and observation. 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?

Here are some examples of professional content audits:

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. For this assessment, we are only interested in social media marketing in one channel of communication.

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 company in the same sector who has a clear social media strategy. For campaigns, conduct a content audit of a similar campaign (or a different campaign run by the same organisation) as a guide.

Rubric

Assessment Criteria	High Distinction standard	Distinction Standard	Credit standard	Pass standard	Fail
Relevance of sources	The selection of sources to support the research and analysis presented in the audit are of outstanding and precise relevance, and reflect the most appropriate choices in academic, industry and other material to inform the audit.	The selection of sources to support the research and analysis presented in the audit are highly relevant, and reflect appropriate choices in academic, industry and other material to inform the audit.	The selection of sources to support the research and analysis presented in the audit are relevant, and reflect largely appropriate choices in academic, industry and other material to inform the audit.	The selection of sources to support the research and analysis presented in the audit are minimally relevant, and reflect some appropriate choices in academic, industry and other material to inform the audit.	The selection of sources to support the research and analysis presented in the audit are irrelevant – or no sources are present in the audit.
Depth of analysis and reasoning	An outstanding degree of clear and logical thought is evident throughout the whole analysis and in the depth of the presented results of the audit, including strong evidence for the analysis drawn from reliable and relevant data, including research and observation.	A high degree of clear and logical thought is evident throughout the analysis and in the depth of the presented results of the audit, including good evidence for the analysis drawn from relevant data, including research and observation.	A good degree of clear and logical thought is evident throughout the analysis and in the depth of the presented results of the audit, including good evidence for the analysis drawn from reliable and relevant data, including research and observation.	Some degree of clear and logical thought is evident throughout the analysis and in the presented results of the audit, including some evidence for the analysis drawn from data, including some research and observation but more detail was possible.	No evidence of analysis is present, or the analysis is not relevant, with little or no reasoning present in the analysis and insufficient evidence.
Comprehensiveness and relevance of audit	The audit presents an outstandingly comprehensive selection in the content analysed, in the details and analysis of audiences, and in the integration of business considerations with great strategic significance to the organisation and its goals.	The audit presents a superior selection in the content analysed, in the details and analysis of audiences, and in the integration of business considerations with strategic significance to the organisation and its goals.	The audit presents a good selection in the content analysed, in the details and analysis of audiences, and in the integration of business considerations with some significance to the organisation.	The audit presents a sufficient selection of content analysed, in the details and analysis of audiences, and in the integration of business considerations of the organisation.	The audit presents an incomplete or irrelevant selection in the content analysed, very little detail and analysis of audiences, and minimal integration of business considerations with significance to the organisation.
Clarity of expression	The audit is laid out in a perfectly clear and outstandingly logical manner, with consistently professional tone and outstanding usage of UTS Harvard referencing.	The audit is laid out with a high degree of clarity and a highly logical manner, with a superior level of professional tone and a high standard of UTS Harvard referencing.	The audit is laid out in a reasonably clear and logical manner, with a good use of professional tone and mostly correct usage of UTS Harvard referencing.	The audit is laid out in a sufficiently clear manner, with suitable professional tone and the usage of UTS Harvard referencing. There may be errors with referencing remaining.	The audit is laid out in a disorganised or illogical manner, with inconsistent professional tone. There may be incorrect or incomplete usage of UTS Harvard referencing, or no references.

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