Marketing audit is an evaluation of marketing strategies, tools, positioning against competitors, advertising channels, and overall promotion budget. We recommend conducting an audit once a year based on the following criteria: key products, pricing, competitors, and promotional channels.
Goals and Objectives of Marketing Audit
The main goal of the audit is to identify growth points to increase the efficiency and competitiveness of the company, ultimately leading to increased sales. To achieve this, it is important to analyze and evaluate:
- Product and Pricing in the competitive environment.
- Customer Journey and key touchpoints with your brand.
- Customer acquisition tools within the sales funnel.
When should you conduct an audit?
We recommend conducting a marketing audit regularly on an annual basis.
Ideally before launching new advertising campaigns and/or products and services.
The following signals may serve as precursors for an audit:
- Your competitors have become more noticeable in the information field.
- Unstable flow of leads, lack of sales, or low conversion rates.
- Lack of understanding of the market situation and the need to determine which channels or advertising bring maximum effect.
Steps to Conduct a Marketing Audit
A marketing audit is a comprehensive analysis, designed to uncover new opportunities and highlight areas for improvement. With a systematic approach, inbound traffic to the website, brand recognition, the number of quality leads the overall number of sales should steadily grow.
However, if key performance indicators decline, it’s important to understand where the team’s work is failing. This is where a marketing audit comes in.
To successfully complete a marketing audit, it’s essential to follow a systematic approach, which includes defining audit objectives, collecting and analyzing data, evaluating omnichannel marketing messaging, and recognizing potential opportunities and recommendations.
Once you’ve defined your audit objectives, the next step to perform marketing audits is to collect and analyze data from verify marketing systems. We usually analyze data from different angles:
Strategy: Does the company have a marketing strategy, and how is its implementation tracked within the marketing plan?
Segmentation: Are target segments identified, is the customer base analyzed in these segments, and how to reach each segment in the most fitting way?
Positioning: Is there a formulated positioning, how understandable is it to customers and employees, and how is it traced in marketing activities?
Product and Services: Is the product portfolio analyzed, how are new products introduced to the market, does product-market-fit work properly?
Pricing: How is the pricing policy and strategy structured, are competitor prices analyzed regularly?
Distribution and partners: How is work organized with distribution channels and partners, are there standards for interacting with them?
Competitors: product, price, sales, marketing tactics, traffic channels, market share.
Promotion: Is there a formulated promotion strategy, what do media plans look like and how are they conducted, how is work organized with the sales funnel, do promotion expenses correspond to company revenues?
Budgeting and KPIs: How is the marketing budget formed, what KPIs are implemented and tracked.
SWOT analyses: the summary of the main findings to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. We generally recommend matching strengths with opportunities, and address weaknesses and threats. A SWOT analysis will help you generate ideas and recommendations for improving your marketing.
The final element of marketing audit is a marketing action plan – a document that outlines the next steps, responsibilities, timelines, budgets, and resources required to implement your marketing objectives and strategies. A marketing action plan will help you execute your marketing in a systematic and organized way.
As marketers, we’re always looking for ways to improve our marketing activities. A marketing audit is a useful tool to review current processes, adjust strategy, promotion channels, and sometimes even organizational structure, to find new opportunities for rapid business growth in highly competitive markets.
