As marketers, we’re always looking for ways to improve our game plan. But with so many tactics and channels available, knowing where to focus our efforts can be challenging.
Ultimately, no marketing strategy is perfect. A marketing audit gives you a holistic view of your marketing efforts, including what’s working, what could be improved, and where new opportunities are present.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at marketing audits, the best time to conduct one, and a few best practices to pull one off.
A marketing audit identifies the biggest strengths and weaknesses of your current strategy. It highlights what plans, processes, and practices are most effective at meeting goals. Just as importantly, it builds a foundation for future decision-making by identifying opportunities, gaps, and areas for improvement.
To get the best results, your marketing audit should be objective, systematic, and recurring:
Objective to ensure your it’s free of bias Systematic to ensure your audit is structured, organized, and measurable Recurring so you can discover and address problems early on Keep in mind that a marketing audit can encompass your entire operation or a subset of it — such as a specific campaign, process, or focus (e.g., social media marketing).
Elements of a Marketing Audit A comprehensive marketing audit may include one or more of the following elements:
1. SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis outlines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your marketing. Using this framework, you can take inventory of your marketing assets and roadblocks.
2. Competitive analysis. As the name suggests, a competitive analysis takes stock of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. It puts a magnifying glass on their products, prices, marketing strategies, campaigns, and target audience.
3. Market research. Even if you think you know your customers through and through, market research can reveal even deeper insight into their needs, preferences, motivations, and behaviors. On top of that, you can tap into emerging trends and new opportunities in the marketplace, helping you stay ahead of the curve.
Read the full article about conducting a marketing audit at HubSpot:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-audit
By: Erin Rodrigue
Publication Date: 2023-05-26