And, sometimes, they weren’t so good to begin with.
This is where a marketing audit comes into the picture: a thorough examination to help you identify performance gaps, opportunities for improvement, and strategies that are not yielding the desired results.
Too many buzzwords? Here’s what you need to know about it, in simple terms.
What is a Marketing Audit?
A marketing audit is a detailed check-up of your marketing. It looks at everything from your strategy (what to do) to your tactics (how to do it). This check-up is necessary to understand what works in your marketing and what doesn’t.
What’s more, marketing audits help you keep up with new trends, understand what your customers want, and stay ahead of your competitors. A good marketing audit doesn’t just point out problems; it helps you improve over time and succeed in the long run.
Why do a Marketing Audit?
Think of a marketing audit as a health check for your business’s marketing. It’s not just looking at what you’re doing now but digging deeper to find out what’s working and what’s not.
A marketing audit makes sure what you’re doing in marketing matches what you want your business to achieve. It checks if each marketing move is helping you get closer to your goals.
What’s more, it informs you about what customers want, what your competitors are doing, and new chances to stand out. This keeps your marketing fresh and relevant.
Finally, a marketing audit also looks at how you’re managing your marketing budget and using your resources. Are you spending too much or too little? Are you using everything you’ve got effectively?
Doing these checks regularly means your marketing stays on track, useful, and ready to change when needed.
The 5 Components of Marketing Audit
A thorough marketing audit examines various facets of your marketing strategy to identify what’s working, what’s not, and where there’s room for improvement. Here’s a closer look at the essential components you should focus on, along with actionable tips for each:
1. Market Analysis
This is about understanding who your customers are, what they need, and what’s happening in the market you’re selling to.
Ultimately, understanding your market’s nuances allows you to tailor your products/ services and messaging to meet your customers’ evolving needs.
A market analysis starts by segmenting your market to understand different customer groups and their specific needs.
During market analysis, tools such as Google Analytics 4 will come in handy as they will reveal core data such as your customer demographics. Conducting surveys is also another way to understand your customers more and create your customer personas.
2. SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A SWOT analysis helps you look at what your business does well, where it can improve, what opportunities you could take advantage of, and what challenges you might face.
A SWOT analysis helps you capitalize on your strengths, address your weaknesses, seize opportunities, and mitigate threats.
To get started, list your company’s internal strengths and weaknesses. For opportunities and threats, look at industry trends, economic factors, and competitive landscape. As always, don’t shy away from using tools— in this case, SWOT Analysis tools, that will make your life easier.
3. 7Ps of Marketing
This is a checklist to make sure you’re considering everything important in your marketing, consisted of 7 points:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
- People
- Process
- Physical evidence
This comprehensive approach ensures every aspect of your marketing mix is optimized for your target audience, enhancing the overall customer experience and brand perception.
Review each ‘P’ individually. For ‘Product,’ assess your range and features. For ‘Price,’ evaluate your pricing strategy against competitors. Use customer feedback for ‘People’ and service assessment. Check online platforms for ‘Promotion’ effectiveness. Analyze ‘Place’ for distribution efficiency. For ‘Processes,’ audit your service delivery methods. Lastly, examine your ‘Physical Evidence,’ like packaging or online interface, to ensure it aligns with your brand.
4. Digital Presence
This is about making sure people can find and interact with your business through your website, and social media, and how you show up in search results.
An optimized digital presence increases your visibility online, engages your audience more effectively, and drives conversions.
Use SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to analyze your website’s search engine rankings and identify improvement areas. There are also AI-powered tools that help you optimize your content at sale.
What’s more, evaluate your social media engagement rates and content performance. Check your website’s user experience (UX) with tools like Hotjar or Google PageSpeed Insights.
5. Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis involves looking at other businesses that are similar to yours to see what they’re doing right or wrong, which can give you ideas on how to improve your own business.
Knowing what your competitors are doing well, and not so well, can help you identify market gaps and opportunities for differentiation, allowing you to position your brand more effectively.
By diving deep into these components with a hands-on approach, you not only get a clearer picture of your current marketing landscape but also actionable insights to drive your strategy forward.
Identify key competitors and analyze their marketing strategies, product offerings, pricing, and customer engagement tactics, utilizing competitor analysis tools. Use tools like Ahrefs to understand their SEO strategy and BuzzSumo to see their content’s performance.
Ahrefs, in particular, has a dedicated feature on its platform to conduct a competitive analysis.
From Insight to Action (With Actual Examples)
I probably know what you’re thinking. Gaining insight into your marketing is one thing. But how can you put this into practice?
Here’s a practical approach to transforming audit insights into actionable strategies.
1. Prioritize key insights
Start by categorizing the findings from your audit based on their potential impact on your marketing goals and the urgency of addressing them. This helps in focusing on changes that will deliver the most significant benefits.
Let’s say that after reviewing your audit, you find that your website’s loading speed is below industry standards. And also that your social media engagement rates are low. You decide to prioritize website optimization because faster loading times can directly impact sales and customer satisfaction.
2. Set specific, measurable goals
For each key insight, set clear and measurable goals. When insights are translated into specific goals, it becomes easier to understand what needs to be achieved and to stay on track.
For example, if your audit shows that your email open rate is at 15%, a specific and measurable goal could be to increase email open rates to 25% within the next six months.
3. Develop an action plan
Create a detailed action plan for each goal. This should include the specific steps needed to achieve the goal, who is responsible for each action, the resources required, and a timeline. Make sure the plan is realistic and achievable.
Different kinds of marketing audits require different action plans. Accordingly, an action plan for a social media audit to improve user engagement can look like this:
- Conduct a social media content analysis to identify top-performing posts and audience preferences.
- Task the Social Media Manager with developing a content calendar with engaging content ideas.
- Allocate resources for graphic design and content creation.
- Schedule weekly posts with a focus on audience engagement.
- Monitor engagement metrics and adjust the content strategy as needed.
- Timeline: Start immediately; evaluate progress weekly.
4. Start with the low-hanging fruits
Start with quick wins before you start tackling more complex initiatives. A low-input effort for a significant output always brings the best ROI.
For example, think about your content marketing. Content, no matter how successful, has its own lifecycle stage. Given enough time, it will happen what is known as content decay. In other words, the organic traffic in most of your blog posts will start declining at some point.
Now, a content marketing audit may reveal a keyword you may have. However, before start writing new content, you should first optimize your existing content, according to the audit. Not only does content optimization take significantly less time than creating new content, but it also has a higher impact. Why? Because you already know that the content you are optimizing already brings traffic, whereas new content means testing the waters with no guarantees.
5. Monitor and measure results
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and growth metrics for each action item to measure progress. Regularly review these metrics to assess whether the changes are driving the desired outcomes, and try to stay away from vanity metrics.
It’s also important to visualize your data, as this helps you make sense of it and also communicate any insights effectively. Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio is a great free reporting tool that can help you with monitoring and measuring results. What’s more, it offers great synergy with the rest of Google platforms, including Analytics and Sheets.
6. Pivoting is always an option
Sometimes, even if it looks like you are doing everything right, things don’t go as planned. Therefore, you need to be able to reassess and pivot your strategies based on your marketing audit.
For example, after optimizing your PPC campaigns based on audit findings, you may notice that certain ad groups are still underperforming. So maybe it’s time to reallocate your budget. You can either reallocate it to already successful campaigns or experiment with new ad creatives and targeting options.
But bigger changes may need to take place, not just in your campaigns. When it comes to products, there’s always the possibility that you may have to shift the strategic direction of the business. What is known as product pivoting. Product pivoting can take the form of anything from reassessing your product-market fit to rebranding.
Outsourcing Your Marketing Audit
A marketing audit is one of the most common outsourced marketing activities.
So when should you consider outsourcing your marketing audit?
It goes without saying that if your company doesn’t have prior experience with a marketing audit and/ or the specialized knowledge for it, then outsourcing to experts can fill this gap.
There are times, however, when you have the knowledge but you lack the time. When internal teams are stretched thin because core business activities are a priority, outsourcing can ensure the marketing audit doesn’t drain internal resources.
What’s more an audit happening externally can bring a fresh point of view. It can provide an unbiased perspective, identifying issues and opportunities that internal teams might overlook due to familiarity or bias.
Last but not least, sometimes, outsourcing your marketing audit it’s simply cheaper or cost-effective. If you account for all the tools and processes you must follow to complete an audit, it might be too costly or complex for them to implement an audit in-house.
What should you expect from an outsourced marketing audit?
Different audits have different deliverables. Accordingly, a website audit can be different from an SEO audit and a MarTech audit from a TechStack audit. Also, agencies and marketing consulting firms do things differently one from another.
That said, this is what our audit service deliverables here at GrowthRocks look like:
1. User research report: A summary of the findings from user research, including user personas and key insights about how users interact with the product.
2. User journey map: A visual representation of the user’s journey from awareness to purchase and beyond (aka the growth funnel), including all touchpoints with the product.
3. Onboarding and activation report: An evaluation of the onboarding process for new users, including suggestions for improving the activation rate of new users.
4. Metrics and analytics report: A review of the product’s metrics and analytics to identify patterns or trends in user behavior, including suggestions for improving upon these metrics and increasing user engagement.
5. Pricing and packaging report: An evaluation of the product’s pricing and price tiering to ensure that it aligns with the user’s needs and expectations, including suggestions for adjusting the pricing and improving conversion rates and customer retention.
Conclusion
Whether you do your marketing audit in-house or outsource it, it’s a very helpful process to understand what works in your marketing efforts and what doesn’t.
Are you looking to outsource your marketing audit or other parts of your marketing?
We’d love to hear from you so don’t hesitate to contact us!
I write for GrowthRocks, one of the top growth hacking agencies. For some mysterious reason, I write on the internet yet I’m not a vegan, I don’t do yoga and I don’t drink smoothies.
