A marketing audit is a complete evaluation and interpretation of your business’s marketing environment and efforts. The audit is comprehensive and systemic in the analysis of your marketing methods and results. These audits are done by a third-party to provide an outside perspective.

Marketing audits will also evaluate your marketing goals, objectives, strategies, and principles to identify your problem areas and opportunities to improve. The end goal is to create an easy-to-follow marketing plan of action that will enhance your marketing activities, and therefore your businesses’ marketing performance.

Simply put, it studies your marketing plan and highlights the strengths while eliminating the weaknesses.

Parts of a Marketing Audit

Marketing audits work similarly to website audits; they consist of six elements that are designed to optimize your marketing strategy and create a reasonable end-game goal.

The different pieces typically included in a marketing audit are:

• Initial consultation: The starting point where you discuss what you know is working or not working in your marketing strategy and create a plan of attack to correct or improve the situation.
• Marketing gap analysis: You will attempt to identify why your content is not converting an identify an achievable goal for your marketing plan. You will also get clarity on what your target audience wants vs. needs.
• Marketing UX review: A UX or user experience review determines how your current and future clients use your website and how to target your marketing towards their needs.
• Marketing funnel review: Discovering the client’s journey from when they first learn about your business to when they’re ready to buy your service.
• Avatar motivation: Understanding the motivation behind why your client behaves how they do and what in your marketing strategy triggers them to purchase your service.
• Marketing project plan: A guide that takes everything you’ve learned into consideration that creates and plans out a marketing strategy that attracts your target audience.

Why Do You Need a Marketing Audit?

Your current marketing strategy might be working well, or it might not be. Either way, having an outside source look at your plans can examine the situation and reveal issues you may not have noticed or may have skipped over. An audit can also uncover new opportunities that you might not have identified. Marketing should influence all of the decisions regarding your website and business; if you did not have marketing, you would not have clients.

That’s why the value of a marketing audit always outweighs the cost. The number of clients that can be reached will make up for the investment needed to begin. A marketing audit should be completed annually before the creation of the yearly marketing plan. This timing will allow you to expand into new opportunities or course correct on the things that are not working well in your current marketing strategy.

A marketing audit should be viewed as an annual activity and expense that helps guide your marketing activities. Through this exercise your business can stay on the cutting edge of practices that will continue to bring clients to your business over the year.