Benefits of a Marketing Audit

A marketing audit involves a thorough review of your business plan. These include your goals and your current marketing activities, your existing results and competitive analysis. It's extremely important to look closely at the aspects of your business so that your marketing team can identify your business strengths, weaknesses, and strategies for resolving what is not working. A thorough marketing audit is a reference point for monitoring future business activities and provides recommendations for improving the efficiency and performance of your company's marketing activities.

A marketing audit is often used by a company that overhauls its business strategy. A marketing audit would let you know your valuable customers and market perspective, which is essential for determining realistic business goals.

The function of a marketing audit is to identify two key data analysis which is strengths and weaknesses. Weakness gives every entrepreneur the information needed to identify areas needed for improvement. While strength shows what is currently working and how it can lead to successful marketing and growth of the business. Knowing both your Weaknesses and Strengths are crucial for a successful marketing strategy.

Listed below are the benefits of conducting a marketing audit:

A Marketing audit helps to identify underperforming efforts and how it can be adjusted or eliminated.

With marketing audits, you get to determine which aspects of your business do not meet expectations. Are you spending money and time on projects that do not generate a positive return in terms of returns and revenue?

With marketing audits, you are able to identify mediocre products and services and look for clues as to why they are not working well. With this, you would be able to know if these products or service continue to fit within your overall vision if they have now become insufficient for your branding and your target market; which ultimately means they should be removed from your plan.

A Marketing audit helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competition.

When conducting marketing audits, the first task is looking at your brand performance against that of your competitors. It should take into consideration the customers likes and dislikes of the competing brand and their current marketing mix strategy. A full competitive review would give you a clear idea of how you’re marketing and messaging efforts works and how it stacks up with your main competitors.

Marketing audits, therefore, helps highlight your strengths and weaknesses over your competitors, helping you in positioning and refining your competitive approach. This broad market focus can also highlight areas that are not of interest to your industry.

Marketing audits help to evaluate your business’s marketing content.

A marketing content audit takes a slightly different approach but is an effective way to identify gaps in reaching all the key issues, such as your customer personalities, and the steps of the sales funnel. Many businesses have a variety of content at the "awareness level" as well as tightly focused documents that are used directly by the sales, but they lack stimulating content to consistently guide those interested in the "reflection phase" or through to purchase. A well-conducted content check will determine if your company has a similar content defect, and content types can be recommended to address this vulnerability.

Marketing audits help to identify the best performing programmes to be used

Whether you are reviewing digital marketing programs or the presence of your public relations team in the media, an audit will show you which programmes work well, so you can continue to prioritize to generate leads and revenue.

A media audit will identify the outlets and contributors your brand can rely on to provide the necessary protection. A successful marketing audit identifies programmes such as blogs, email marketing, or certain social media platforms that consistently generate high conversion rates.

Marketing audits Save your business money

Many companies have a tight budget and you do not want to spend money that is of no use. Because a marketing audit identifies underperforming areas you can rank them and then take an executive decision to cut or review for another period. Take the time to thoroughly review your marketing plans and make sure your budget is always well positioned.

Once all the audit and assessment activities have taken place, the findings are assembled into a report complete with a prioritized action plan. Leading national and international brands understand the value in evaluating their current situation to better plan for the future. You can do the same.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

The Stammering Communicator

Debbie-Ann Jollie is a Marketing Strategist with more than 10 years experience creating marketing strategies and promotional campaigns for a diverse group of corporate clients and first-time entrepreneurs. In her not so spare time she likes writing blogs for her boutique while sipping on Jack Daniel's honey ('cause vodka gives her a headache) and taking naps on Sundays.