When managing a small business, it’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day operations and forget about your ultimate marketing plan. But it’s essential to always keep the wider picture in mind.
Conducting a thorough marketing audit can ensure that your everyday operations align with your business objectives.
So, in this blog, we will share the crucial steps that are part of a marketing audit checklist.
What is a Marketing Audit?
A marketing audit is an unbiased assessment of your present marketing initiatives, tactics, and outcomes. The objectives are to assess the success of your marketing initiatives and discover areas for development.
A marketing audit determines the main advantages and disadvantages of your existing approach. It draws attention to the strategies, procedures, and methods that best achieve objectives.
In short, it lays the groundwork for future decision-making by pointing out possibilities, gaps, and places for growth.
A marketing audit is one of the most important things any firm must do. It involves more than just the marketing audit checklist.
To be precise, it involves getting to know the business closely, determining successful marketing practices, and identifying the areas that need improvements.
The marketing audit checklist can help you through the process if you’re unsure where to begin or if there are any important things that need to be done beforehand.
3 Elements of a Marketing Audit
With B2C and B2B companies having a formal marketing plan, it becomes almost necessary for every business to proceed with marketing audits.
And that won’t be possible without understanding the elements of it.
Among the components of a marketing audit, you will find the following:
1. SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis examines the possibilities, threats, weaknesses, and strengths of marketing. It is critical to recognize your strengths and weaknesses as well as any gaps and chances that you may take advantage of to grow your clientele.
2. Market Research
A marketing audit should also involve market research to get feedback on the marketing effort. The business will be able to comprehend the reasons behind the activities of its consumers.
Fortunately, there are many top-notch market analysis tools to simplify the process.
3. Competitive Analysis
It is the process by which marketers research rivals in a certain market or industry to determine the tactics and resources they employ to draw clients.
Additionally, it reveals to marketers the things rivals are lacking that they can offer.
Learn More: 10 Steps Of A Great B2B Strategy Barely Anyone Will Tell You
Factors That Make a Marketing Audit Important
Even with the most successful marketing team, money can buy, and you may still gain from the insightful information and data that an outside marketing audit can offer.
Marketing audits should be carried out on a regular basis to offer useful information regarding the effectiveness of marketing initiatives such as email campaigns, advertising, social media marketing, organic growth, and more. A marketing audit will help you optimize the overall marketing performance.
A marketing audit can address key elements such as these:
- If your marketing plan is working as planned
- Successful aspects of your present marketing initiatives
- Present marketing initiatives that fail to generate desirable results
- If you are reaching your target audience through the appropriate channels
- If you are utilizing the marketing opportunities that your rivals are taking advantage of
- With a marketing audit, you can figure out all these important elements that help your business grow.
Why Do You Need a Marketing Audit Checklist?
Using a marketing audit checklist, you can assess how successfully your strategy has fulfilled the market’s demands.
Let’s say you are not achieving the desired results for your product in terms of quality, safety, performance criteria, or client demand.
If so, it becomes necessary to pull back the curtain on the possible areas for development in more detail.
Before determining whether to reformulate items or increase production in preparation for the introduction of new products, etc., you may determine how much labour is required by doing an inventory.
A marketing audit may seem a hassle at first, but in the long term, doing this saves money and time.
Everything hinges on your pre-marketing goals, which should include both brand recognition and actual order volume. For this reason, having a strategy and quantifiable targets is crucial.
Marketing Audit Checklist: 9 Steps
Here are the most important steps of a marketing audit:
1. Select the Type of Marketing Audit
Several kinds of marketing audits examine a company’s marketing initiatives from different angles.
Comprehensive and systematic audits are the two most popular types.
Making a precise selection about what you wish to audit is integral since it will influence the direction of your marketing evaluation.
Established companies frequently utilize a thorough marketing audit to look at important marketing data points like lead generation and ROI.
That provides a comprehensive picture of their marketing initiatives.
It would be ideal for businesses still developing to conduct a comprehensive marketing audit.
A systematic marketing audit includes evaluating a company’s marketing infrastructure, procedures, and strategy, as well as the data that is currently accessible.
It focuses on five aspects:
- Performance
- People
- Process
- Platforms
- Partners
The decision between a thorough and systematic audit relies on your unique requirements and marketing objectives.
2. Decide on Your Marketing Audit Objectives
The next step is to precisely outline the objectives of your marketing audit.
The marketing audit serves as a compass to determine whether the audit goals are being accomplished. And when you know the final destination, it becomes simpler to find a route.
Having specific metrics that you wish to compare against your rivals and industry best practices is one method to establish well-defined goals.
These are referred to as benchmarks, and they provide audit, track, and measure categories for marketing KPIs.
Whether it’s social media engagement or a marketing audit, the key performance indicators are your guiding light.
Benchmarks may be used to expedite the process of making better business decisions by providing a framework for defining audit targets.
More importantly, ensure that your objectives are precise, quantifiable, and feasible.
Clearly stated objectives guarantee that you have actionable marketing insights that are specific to your industry at the conclusion of the marketing audit.
3. Get Relevant & Accurate Data
After that, for a marketing audit, you need to acquire information after you have goals that are precise and quantifiable.
This can originate from several sources, including marketing expenditure, website traffic, social media metrics, and campaign metrics.
You must make sure the information is genuine and dependable.
After gathering the data, arrange it so that it may be easily analyzed and referred to at a later time. You can compile data into a single document and make charts and graphs.
4. Create Personas for Your Customers
Gaining more knowledge about your target market, current clients, and future consumers can help you avoid wasting time, money, and resources on ineffective marketing initiatives that target individuals who aren’t likely to be interested in what you have to offer in the first place.
These are other justifications for why creating client personas for your company and marketing strategy is crucial. Effective auditing actually requires well-crafted consumer personas. A character designed to reflect a company’s target market is called a customer persona.
Based on your target population, consumer personas typically revolve around the following characteristics:
- Age range
- Gender
- Income disparity
- Education
- Occupation
These are the handful of important attributes that comprise a consumer persona.
5. Evaluate Current Information and Initiatives
The assessment of your current marketing initiatives is the next phase in the audit process. Start by carefully analyzing every marketing channel while keeping your objectives in mind. Pay attention to key performance indicators such as acquisition, conversion, reach, engagement, and retention.
Reach & Acquisition
Evaluate the efficiency with which you are attracting new customers to your marketing funnel.
Tools such as Google Analytics and Social Media Analytics can provide insights into website traffic, page views, social media reach, new visitors, and followers. Therefore, they are essential for a digital marketing audit.
Engagement
Assess the degree to which your audience is connecting with your material. Metrics like likes, shares, comments, time on the page, bounce rate, and more are all available for usage.
Conversion Rate
This is an important indicator of the proportion of site visitors who complete a desired action. Keep an eye on your website downloads, email sign-ups, conversion rates, and cart abandonment rates, among other things.
Customer Retention
Determine how many consumers stick with your brand over time. Examine the rate of churn and repeat business.
Content Strategy Evaluation
Examine reach, engagement, and conversion to assess the effectiveness of your long—and short-form content across all your marketing platforms.
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ROI
It stands for return on investment, which calculates your marketing initiatives’ profitability.
Compare the time or money you put into the outcomes you achieved. Determining whether this specific pastime is worthwhile for your time and money is the aim here.
You can use metrics such as likes, shares, comments, bounce rate, time on the page, and more.
6. Verify the Documentation of Important Procedures
When we have goals and performance data, we must confirm the processes and procedures we expect to use to accomplish objectives and produce performance outcomes.
Keep in mind that not all procedures or processes need to be recorded; only those that are related and essential to meeting objectives and producing outcomes should.
However, whatever the process they may follow, marketers need to maintain documentation at all times.
7. Acquire Funding and Resources
The lack of resources in marketing strategies is a common reason why marketing objectives are not met. Hence, double-checking budgeting is a step in a marketing audit.
Therefore, it’s crucial to confirm that plans have allocated funds. However, that doesn’t mean you need to do the extra work of recording every penny spent on marketing.
The budget must be included in the larger organizational financial budget.
While there isn’t a single correct technique for establishing a marketing plan budget, there are a few guidelines and warning signs you should consider.
In other words, if you want to acquire more clients, you should be aware of the amount of money you are prepared to spend on a single new client.
8. Determine Your Rivals
You must be aware of your competitors to conduct a successful marketing audit.
This may assist you in setting standards for where you should be, the channels you should be examining, and the areas you should concentrate your marketing efforts on.
With such information, you can find the methods you use to differentiate yourself.
The following queries help while doing a marketing audit:
- What effective strategies does your rival employ?
- In what way are they presenting their products?
- Which platforms are they focusing their marketing efforts on the most?
- Are there any new rivals setting up their game?
9. Find Out & Suggest Ways to Improve
Finally, offer suggestions for enhancing your marketing plan, such as changing the messaging, channels, or budget.
This last step is actually the essence of a marketing audit.
For instance, from the marketing audit, you may get the signal to shift your advertising budget to another channel if the campaign isn’t generating enough leads.
Once you’ve made these changes, monitor the outcomes to gauge how beneficial they were.
FAQs
What elements go into making up a marketing audit?
A good marketing audit consists of several elements. These include following a methodical procedure, being thorough, doing the task independently, and finishing it on a given timeline.
Which kinds of audits are there for marketing?
Numerous marketing audits are available and may be used in various contexts. The marketing environment, marketing strategy, marketing organization, marketing systems, marketing productivity, and marketing functionality audits are among the several kinds of marketing audits.
What makes a marketing audit crucial?
A marketing audit is crucial for tracking problems and increasing the efficacy of marketing initiatives.
Summary
A marketing audit reveals the finer points that may be extracted from performance data and how your marketing initiatives result in increasing the ROI.
Not everyone has the skill to perform all the steps in a marketing audit checklist. So, if your previous audits have failed to have any positive effect, you contact a professional.
By hiring a reputable expert to do a marketing audit, you may optimize your marketing results.