Does Your Company Need a Marketing Audit?

Is this situation happening to you and your company?

Your company invests some money at a new marketing campaign hoping for good results; increased sales and new customers. Then over the next few months, everyday business keeps chugging along while slowly, creeping up the back of your neck, you suspect (and then finally realize) your not seeing any results from the campaign, and thus have WASTED valuable time and money.

Now it’s one thing to know that something is wrong, but it’s much more important to know what went wrong?

At MEMO this is how we meet some of our clients. They sense something isn’t quite right with their marketing efforts; maybe it’s their website, their emails, their direct mailings or their blog. Their materials are out of date. Whatever it is, it’s just not working.

That’s why we encourage our clients to conduct a marketing audit. Just like the three month/3,000 mile oil change for your car, it’s a chance to periodically examine everything under your marketing hood and evaluate what needs a little attention and what needs a major overhaul.

A marketing audit eh? What will that tell me?

It may sound like a very formal process, but in reality, it’s not.  In a nutshell a marketing audit is a high-level review of your marketing plan, tools and activities that will:

Help to discover what is performing well – no need to change things that are working like they’re suppose to.

Identify areas for improvement – sometimes certain marketing activities only need a little nudge in the right direction to make magic happen.

Uncover gaps in your strategies – often it’s just a case of the right hand not talking to the left hand. A marketing audit can easily identify that.

Kick bad habits that aren’t working – we can get in a rut, doing the same things and forget to look up and see if they are working.

Indicate if you should conduct a competitive audit – you need to consistently be evaluating your competition.

As you can see, this is as easy as getting the leadership team in a room and discussing these topics.

So How does a marketing audit work?

The goal of a marketing audit is to see what’s working in your campaign and more importantly what’s not working, what went wrong or what’s missing.

If you do a Google search you will find plenty of articles to advise you. Each gives you multiple and different steps to conduct a DIY marketing audit. Here are some of the examples we found when we looked:

Analyze Goals…Define your Buyer…Assess the Effectiveness of your Blog…Run the Website through Performance Measuring Tools…Prepare Information in a Report…Craft a Plan and Measure Success

Or

Gathering the Right Data…Interpret the Data…Interpret Your Website Traffic…Interpret Your Conversion Leads…Create a Plan to Improve Your Results

Essentially an audit will closely examine all facets of your marketing efforts; from reviewing your goals and understanding your prospects (personas) to gathering data from all your marketing efforts. Once examined and gathered, you interpret what you find, identifying what’s missing or what didn’t work in your marketing campaign.

OK, I’m sold. Where Should I Start?

Doing it yourself is one place to start. These steps will work and you can bet it will take some time to complete. Then, and only then, can you begin to institute the changes your marketing plan needs

Enlisting the help of a marketing expert might be a better choice. It offers a 3rd party, expert view and honestly, sometimes it’s easy to get too close to the trees to see the forest.

When we work with our clients at MEMO, we offer comprehensive analysis using our Strategic Marketing Model to examine where your marketing efforts may have fallen short.

strategic-marketing-model

We examine each of the six pieces of the model so that you understand what’s missing from your current marketing campaign. Here are some of the questions we help to uncover answers to:

  • How is your research and planning? Do you know your ideal customers? Do you have goals written down and steps to get there?
  • What about your marketing tools? Are they working well and in harmony with each other? Are your marketing tools out of date and not telling your story well anymore?
  • Perhaps your not tracking your marketing activities well and therefore missing important deadlines?
  • Are you creating critical marketing reports so you have means to measure your success and monitor progress? (Hint: A marketing audit is one of these critical reports!)

Any one of these steps, if not there, will leave a gap in your marketing efforts.

Another very important piece to successful strategic marketing is the 4 Pillars of Marketing. Your Marketing Audit may even show that one of these pillars is incomplete or missing in your marketing.

 

To help you we have created this simple workbook. It asks you all the questions you need to answer so you can fill in the gaps found in your marketing audit.

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