Marion Barnham • December 27, 2024
As we all know, most companies conduct regular financial audits, but how many actually conduct a regular marketing audit?
It’s important for businesses of all sizes to consider undertaking a marketing audit in order to identify and review the current status of a company’s marketing activities and help reduce future costs. Particularly for small to medium sized businesses that are wanting to find out what activities are working and what activities are not working as well and measuring this against expenditure and then overall ROI, the marketing audit becomes a must-have part of the entire process.
A comprehensive review of a company’s marketing and communication really helps a business understand where it’s heading from a marketing perspective. By reviewing issues such as: customers and your target audience; your competitors; the market place in general and your internal situation; you will be more informed about the success of previous marketing activities.
A marketing audit analyses the business objectives and understands what it is the business is trying to achieve providing leaders with the opportunity to make more informed decisions on their future marketing direction.
The information is also invaluable in helping small to medium sized businesses build a successful marketing strategy and highlights what they will need to deliver the most cost effective marketing strategy in order to meet their business objectives.
How does a marketing audit help a business meet its goals?
A thorough marketing audit provides a benchmark for monitoring future marketing activity and highlights recommendations to improve the efficiency and performance of your company’s marketing activity.
A marketing audit is often used by a company reviewing its business strategy. A marketing audit can inform management with an invaluable customer and market insight, vital to help them set realistic business objectives.
Key elements that may be covered in a marketing audit should include:
The SWOT analysis
- Customer and prospect research
- Competitor landscape analysis
- Review of current internal marketing activities assessing their impact and results in the past and:-
- Overview of external market factors covering the PESTLE analysis
Conducting a SWOT Analysis
It’s critical for any business to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the business from a customer’s point of view. The key is to understand what the strengths are that are also important to customers, rather than what a business is just “good at”. Another important area is to understand the weaknesses and where the performance affects customer relationships and market opportunities.
The opportunities and threats available need to be considered to understand how you can maximise the opportunities and minimise the threats. The opportunities and threats to any business come from the external factors affecting them and this will be touched on throughout the PESTLE analysis.
Market research to understand your customer and prospects
As part of conducting a marketing audit, you should also research your customers and prospects to understand why they buy from your organisation and perhaps why people do not buy. It is really useful to understand what your customers like and do not like about your organisation so you can help develop and improve your products and services further. It also helps in the product development process, customer experience and branding campaigns that position the organisation to prospective buyers.
Competitor landscape analysis
To help you differentiate yourself from the competition, a key part of the marketing audit is also undertaking competitor analysis. This could include some so called ‘mystery shopping’ that helps you compare your organisation against your competitors in areas related to service, or it could involve an analysis of your online activity, website, Google ranking and why your competitors are featuring higher in Google searches, what key social selling or marketing activity are you doing through channels such as Facebook, even LinkedIn and Twitter – how many followers do you have and how are your followers engaging with you?
Review of you own internal marketing environment
Some companies really miss the point and skip this step altogether, even though it’s probably the most important of all. It’s time to put your own business and its marketing environment under the microscope. More importantly look at all the aspects of your business from a marketing perspective including the following key elements:
- What resources does your company have for marketing and sales? Does this include resources both internal and external?
- What type of marketing material, brochures and flyers do you use to promote your company to prospects? How do you use it? How often?
- What promotional vehicles do you utilise including website, collateral, direct marketing, interactive and online marketing?
- What about event vehicles such as trade shows, special events, seminars and webinars?
- What is the state of your technological and analytical vehicles used for marketing purposes – including database, market research and CRM systems? How could they be used more efficiently and integrated so they provide a 360-degree view of your customer?
- What is your website like and how is it being used? In addition, what do the statistics for website performance look like?
- What social media channels is your business using and how engaged are you currently with your followers across the various platforms?
- What do your customers and prospects think of your company? How do they engage with your organisation and at what level?
- What about the overall customer experience you provide– what is the customer experience at various touch points of your organisation eg. From your reception/ incoming calls, to your customer facing salesforce right through to senior leader engagement with customers and prospects?
Analysis of the external marketing environment
External factors are equally as important when undertaking a comprehensive marketing audit.. It is important to recognise that although we may have no control over external factors they are still hugely influential and therefore very important to consider when setting your business and marketing objectives.
One of the university text-book approaches used so often by businesses for analysing the external environment is the PESTLE analysis – it is useful for identifying the economic factors that affect the decisions of the business. It’s about taking the political, environmental, social, technological, environmental and legal factors all into consideration and identifying how they are impacting your overall marketing strategy and objective setting.
The marketing audit is really a ‘back to basics’ marketing approach that many businesses do away with only to find they suffer the consequences later down the track.
Has your business conducted a marketing audit lately? If not, would you consider conducting one and if so, what did it reveal?