Unlocking the Benefits of a Marketing Audit: Your Guide to Conducting a Comprehensive Analysis

Sometimes you get that feeling your marketing is simply not working as expected.

You can’t put your finger on it but something is off.

The phones aren’t ringing as much as they used to, customers are not coming in to see you as frequently as they used to, and your website inquiries are down.

It might be time to mix things up and make some changes to your marketing strategy. But, where do you begin?

The best thing you can do right now is to perform a marketing audit so you have a clear understanding of how your current marketing strategy is performing and where you can make improvements.

In this blog, we are going to cover:

1. What a marketing audit is
2. The steps for how you can do one yourself

Once you’ve conducted your first marketing audit, you’ll be equipped with specific action items for tasks that will help improve the areas of your marketing strategy that will have a positive impact on your bottom line.

Let’s get started.

What Exactly is a Marketing Audit?

A marketing audit is an internal review of your current marketing strategy to identify what’s working and where you can make improvements.

Your marketing strategy can consume a lot of company resources, including both time and money, so it’s important you continually monitor and optimize your marketing strategy to generate the highest return.

It might take you a couple of hours to complete a marketing audit if it’s the first one you’ve performed in a while.

I promise you, the time invested will be well worth it.

Invite your website developer and any partners involved with implementing your marketing efforts to help you conduct the audit.

They can generate reports that will be useful when analyzing everything.

How to Perform Your Own Marketing Audit

Running your own marketing audit is not as daunting as it sounds.

Here are five steps to get you started that will help you gain clarity on what you’re doing right and where you can make improvements.

#1 Define Your Marketing Goals

It is best to start by creating a focal point. Establish specific marketing goals you want to achieve. These goals should follow the good ol’ SMART goals-setting format as follows:

• Specific – What will be accomplished? What actions will you take?
• Measurable – What data will measure the goal?
• Achievable – Is the goal doable? Do you have the necessary skills and resources?
• Relevant – How does the goal align with broader goals? Why is the result important?
• Time-Bound – What is the time frame for accomplishing the goal?

Go through a quick brainstorming exercise alone or with your team to identify as many different marketing goals as you can.

You might not be able to put all of these ideas on your radar at once, so prioritize them in order of importance.

Keep your top goals in mind as you conduct the remainder of your marketing audit.

#2 Review Your Target Audience

Everyone with a wallet is not your customer.

Your marketing strategy should focus on attracting customers that you want to do business with.

This is best realized by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer you want to do business with.

Even if you’ve created buyer personas in the past, it is best to revisit them during your marketing audits.

Changes in your industry, business, or the general way consumers make purchasing decisions continue to happen.

Make sure the ideal customer that you want to do business with is continuously updated.

If you need help creating a buyer persona, visit neongoldfish.com/resources and download our buyer persona workbook.

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#3 Examine Your Marketing Messaging

It does not matter if you have the best product in the world and the perfect customer right in front of you unless you can clearly show them how you can help them solve their problem.

Customers make purchasing decisions to avoid pain or seek pleasure. Which one does your product or service provide?

Make sure your marketing messaging is aligned with the problem your buyer persona is facing.

Review the content on your website. Do your website visitors clearly understand how you can help them the moment they get to your site?

The value you provide or What’s In It For Them should be front and center.

All those features and benefits of your product or business can be detailed as well but they have to understand the value.

Don’t forget about those CTAs. CTAs (calls-to-action) need to be easily found and simple to understand.

You worked hard to get that potential customer to look at your ad, visit your website, read that email, or watch your video.

Don’t HOPE they figure out what you want them to do. Tell them specifically what you want them to do.

#4 Analyze Your Numbers

Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start looking at your numbers.

Outline all the different elements of your marketing strategy including your website analytics, search engine optimization, paid search, social media profiles, email database, and content marketing.

Look at your website analytics to understand the visitors coming to your website. Compare these metrics against the same time period for the previous month, quarter, or year.

Which channels (direct, organic, paid, social, email, or referral) are driving the most traffic? Which pages of your website receive the most visits?

Review your organic rankings on the search engines.

How do you appear for target keyword searches your potential customers might be searching for on search engines like Google and Bing?

Evaluate the impressions, clicks, and conversions for your paid search campaigns. Identify which campaigns are producing results and which need some attention from you and your team to perform better.

Look at the health of your email database.

Take note of the number of marketing emails you’ve sent to your database. Pay attention to open rates, click rates, the number of new subscribers, and finally the number of unsubscribes.

Review the messages sent including the subject line, premise of the message, and specific call to action.

Review your social media profiles. Record metrics like audience size/growth, engagement, and the number of posts you published.

Which social channels perform the best? What type of content does your audience engage with most?

Finally, take a look at your sales process. How many leads did your marketing efforts produce?

Of those leads, how many did you propose or quote work?

How many of them turned into customers, and what is the average lifetime value of these customers?

It is important to understand the value of your leads and your ability to convert them into revenue for your company.

Don’t forget about traditional marketing channels like direct mail, radio, television, and billboards. These are a little more challenging to track but should be considered in your overall evaluation.

#5 Create an Action Plan

At this point, you have collected a lot of valuable information.

You have revisited or created your buyer persona.

You have reviewed the marketing messaging on your website, landing pages, ad copy, marketing emails, social posts, videos, and blog posts.

You know how many people are visiting your website, the most popular pages, how long they stay on your website, which content resonates best with them, how well you rank on search engines, ad campaign performance, social media channel performance, email performance, and your success level in turning leads into opportunities and opportunities into sales.

Where are you winning and where do you need to improve?

• Create specific action items to concentrate on the areas that need help.
• Set reasonable timelines that work with your capacity.
• Get other people on your team involved.
• Get help from others for things that are outside your comfort zone.
• There are a lot of great partners out there who can help you with many of these tasks.
• Establish KPIs that align with your marketing goals.

If your goal is increasing leads from your Google Ads campaign, you will want to monitor your daily ad spend, CPC, impressions, conversions, response time to inquiries, number of leads that are legitimate opportunities, and close rate on the opportunities you quote.

Put everything on a timeline and monitor your progress on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to ensure action items are being completed.

Full marketing audits do not need to be performed every week, but should be conducted on a quarterly basis.

Daily or even weekly monitoring of established KPIs can keep you on track. It will also prevent you from making changes too quickly before an element of your marketing strategy has time to produce results.

Marketing audits are not something most people perform on a regular basis so do not let this entire process overwhelm you.

The first time through will come with a bit of a learning curve, but it gets a lot easier each time you do one.

Of course, if you need help with your marketing audit, the Neon Goldfish team is here.

Give us a call or visit neongoldfish.com to schedule a call with a member of our team to chat about how we can help you complete a marketing audit and develop a plan to get your marketing strategy back on track.

 

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