Marketing Audits: A Useful Tool for Building Your Business

By Michael Monahan | President & CEO, Moxē Integrated Marketing

Like a ladder to a roofer or a pipe wrench to a plumber, a marketing audit is an important tool that can make your marketing investment more effective.

A marketing audit is an independent, unbiased, professional third-party review of your marketing efforts to get an opinion on what’s working, what isn’t working and recommendations on how to optimize your marketing mix and maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.

Are you spending the right percentage of your gross revenues on marketing to effectively grow your business? Do you have the right internal resources in place who can “own” the marketing function? Do you have an agency partner who knows your business and your industry? Do you have the right mix of paid, earned, owned and shared marketing strategies in place to grow your business and build your brand over time?

“We did a marketing audit on our business last year and it revealed our assumptions about our market were wrong. We were able to take that information and refine our strategies and tactics to something that is now working for us,” said Jason Scarborough, CEO of a local pool and spa leak detection company.

Nuts and Bolts of a Marketing Audit

To be effective, a marketing audit needs to be thorough, examining all aspects of your branding and marketing efforts, as well as your niche in the industry and your target audience. Objectivity is also important which is why marketing audits are best performed by a third-party marketing professional.

A marketing audit is typically comprised of five parts:

• Asset Inventory

Gather a list of all your marketing materials, print and digital. The inventory should include websites, social media platforms and all aspects of your company’s digital footprint. SEO optimizations should also be considered marketing assets for this inventory.

• Industry Research

You may know everything about your industry, but an objective industry analysis can turn up information you weren’t aware of and bring a fresh perspective. At its most basic, this step should take the form of a full SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.

• Competitive Study

A focus on three to five of your closest competitors should review and compare marketing tactics, pricing strategies, and range of products and services. This competitive study may show price points, products and services, or segments of your customer base that are underserved.

• Target Audience Analysis

Your existing customer data can be the basis for this analysis which should include compiling key demographics and sociographic information to identify customer segments you could better target with marketing messages. Creating a customer journey map will help you better understand the customer experience.

• Report Recommendations

The report you receive from your marketing audit could be the most important step. This is where you get recommendations from a marketing professional for how to use the information gathered in the audit to inform your marketing plan and improve your marketing efforts.

Once you have your recommendations, you’ll be at an important phase in the process. You’ll need to decide if you’re in a position to implement the recommendations on your own or if you need to engage an agency partner to help bring that vision to reality.

If you are going to own the recommendations, set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound) goals for your marketing program. How many articles would you like to see in Central Florida Builder, Engineering News-Record or The Orlando Business Journal featuring your business? How many e-mail campaigns do you want to send out a year and what is an acceptable open and click-through rate? How many qualified new business leads do you want from your digital advertising?

With those KPIs in hand, you can work backward to determine the scope of work necessary to generate the results you seek. Use the information in your marketing audit report to execute marketing efforts to reach your target audience where it is with messages that will resonate, improving your conversion rate.

When done professionally and implemented strategically, a marketing audit is an important step in getting the most out of your marketing investment.