Is your marketing strategy hitting the mark in 2024? In this guide, we explain how to conduct a marketing audit to uncover valuable insights, optimise your efforts, and ensure your marketing strategy is primed for success in 2024 and beyond.
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, a well-crafted marketing strategy is essential for staying ahead of the competition, especially in B2B digital marketing, where over 70% of the buying journey occurs online before customers reach out.
But how do you know if your current approach is truly effective?
The answer lies in conducting a thorough marketing audit. By following these 5 simple steps, you can uncover valuable insights, optimise your efforts, and ensure your marketing strategy is primed for success in 2024 and beyond.
At Graph, we specialise in helping B2B business and marketing leaders drive growth. Our comprehensive customer experience and digital marketing audit provides a complete assessment of your sales funnels, delivering a crystal-clear plan that unlocks growth fast. Our process has helped companies like AEG, Graham & Brown, Philips, and Victrex uncover insights, drive growth, and improve the customer experience.
Let’s dive in.
Before diving into the audit process, it's crucial to have a clear understanding of your marketing goals and objectives. It is worth taking the time to review your current marketing strategy and identify the key goals you want to achieve. These goals should be aligned with your overall business objectives to ensure that your marketing efforts are contributing to the success of your organisation.
When setting your marketing goals, make sure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This framework helps you create well-defined and actionable goals that can be easily tracked and evaluated.
For example, instead of setting a vague goal like "increase brand awareness," a SMART goal would be "increase website traffic by 25% within the next 6 months through targeted growth sprints and improved content aligned to the buyer journey".
Increase the number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads) by 20% within the next quarter by optimising landing pages with targeted content, improved calls to action, and running dedicated LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Increase conversion from MQL to SQL (sales qualified lead) by 15% within the next 6 months by implementing a lead nurturing programme that includes personalised email sequences and targeted content.
Enhance the digital customer experience by reducing website bounce rate by 15% within the next quarter through user experience and performance improvements, based on heatmap analysis and A/B testing.
To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to have a deep understanding of your target audience and market. Conduct thorough market research to gather insights about your ideal customer persona, their pain points, preferences, and behaviours. This information will help you tailor your marketing messages and tactics to resonate with your target audience.
Some methods for gathering audience insights include:
In addition to understanding your target audience, it's essential to analyse your competitors and their marketing strategies. Identify their strengths, weaknesses, and unique selling propositions to find opportunities for differentiation and competitive advantage.
Consider how competitors are segmenting their audience and tailoring messages for different audiences, such as engineers, C-suite executives, and purchasing managers. By addressing the specific pain points and decision-making criteria of each segment, you can ensure your messaging resonates across different levels of the value chain.
Now that you have a clear understanding of your goals, target audience, and market landscape, it's time to assess the performance of your existing marketing channels and tactics. This step involves analysing data and metrics from various sources, such as:
To gain an overall view of your marketing performance, consider bringing these data sources together using a powerful analytics tool like Power BI. This allows you to create detailed dashboards that consolidate data from multiple platforms, providing you with a more complete picture of your metrics. By doing this, you can easily identify trends, track key performance indicators, and make informed, data-driven decisions across the customer journey.
Identify the marketing channels and tactics that are delivering the best results and those that need improvement. Look for opportunities to optimise your efforts, such as refining your targeting, improving your messaging, or experimenting with new formats and platforms.
An essential aspect of a marketing audit is analysing your current marketing budget allocation and evaluating the return on investment (ROI) for each channel and tactic. In B2B marketing, with long buying journeys involving many customer touchpoints, it is vital to understand how each element is performing.
Given the complexity of B2B marketing, it’s worth considering advanced ROI models that accurately reflect the impact of each marketing activity over a prolonged customer journey. Multi-touch attribution models assign credit to all touchpoints that contribute to a conversion, while weighted multi-touch attribution models tailor the credit assignment based on the importance of each interaction.
Most CRM platforms allow you to perform "lead scoring" using these models, enabling you to see how each touchpoint is performing. For instance, did a prospective customer first arrive at your website via search engines, and have they viewed buying guides on your website before reaching out?
For account-based marketing (ABM), ABM attribution models track the impact of targeted marketing activities on high-value accounts, aligning marketing efforts closely with sales strategies.
Use this information to prioritise marketing channels and tactics that deliver the highest ROI and allocate your budget accordingly. Keep in mind that some marketing efforts, such as brand awareness campaigns, may not have a direct impact on revenue but can still contribute to long-term business success.
With the insights gathered from your marketing audit, it's time to develop an action plan to optimise your marketing strategy. Prioritise the areas that need improvement based on their potential impact on your goals and the resources required to address them.
Create a detailed action plan that includes:
Some examples of action items based on audit findings could be:
As you implement your optimised marketing strategy, set up a system to monitor and track progress regularly. This will help you stay accountable, identify any issues or opportunities early on, and make data-driven decisions to continuously improve your marketing performance.
By following these five simple steps to conduct a marketing audit, you'll be well-equipped to optimise your marketing strategy, drive better results, and achieve your business goals in 2024 and beyond.
Conducting a marketing audit can be a time-consuming and complex process, but with the right tools, you can streamline the process and gain valuable insights more efficiently. Here are some essential marketing audit tools to help you analyse your website traffic, competitor strategies, social media performance, and customer feedback.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides in-depth insights into your website's performance. By setting up Google Analytics on your website, you can track key metrics such as:
SEMrush and Ahrefs are powerful tools for analysing your competitors' online presence and identifying opportunities to improve your own marketing strategy. These tools allow you to:
Social media analytics tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite help you monitor and analyse your social media performance across multiple platforms. These tools enable you to:
Customer feedback tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform allow you to gather valuable insights directly from your target audience. By collecting feedback, you can:
By leveraging these marketing audit tools, you can streamline the process of analysing your website performance, competitor strategies, social media engagement, and customer feedback. The insights gained from these tools will help you make data-driven decisions to optimise your marketing strategy and drive better results for your business.
Focus on key metrics such as the number of leads, time to respond, lead progress stages (MQL, SQL, etc.), time spent at each stage, and dropout rates by channel.
Use these insights to refine your lead management processes. This might involve optimising response times, enhancing lead nurturing strategies, or reallocating resources to more effective channels.
Regularly audit your CRM data to monitor key metrics and make necessary adjustments for continuous optimisation.
By auditing your CRM data, you can gain valuable insights into your lead management performance and identify areas for improvement. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions, optimise your marketing and sales strategies, and ultimately drive better business results.
Regular marketing audits help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your current marketing efforts. By analysing data and performance metrics, you can pinpoint areas that need improvement or optimisation. This could include underperforming campaigns, channels with low engagement, or content that fails to resonate with your target audience.
As marketing expert Neil Patel states, "Without conducting a marketing audit, you won't know what's working and what's not. You'll continue to invest in strategies that aren't delivering results, while missing out on opportunities to optimise your efforts and drive better outcomes."
HubSpot, a leading marketing automation platform, conducts regular marketing audits to stay ahead of the curve. In a recent blog post, they shared how an audit helped them identify a need to optimise their email marketing strategy. By segmenting their audience and personalising content, they saw a 42% increase in email open rates and a 22% increase in click-through rates.
A marketing audit helps ensure that your marketing strategy aligns with your overall business objectives and resonates with your target audience. By reviewing your buyer personas, customer journey, and messaging, you can identify any misalignments and make necessary adjustments.
According to a survey by CoSchedule, "marketers who set goals are 429% more likely to report success than those who don't." By regularly auditing your marketing strategy, you can ensure that your goals remain relevant and that your efforts are driving meaningful results.
Marketing audits provide valuable insights into the performance of your various marketing channels and campaigns. By analysing ROI data, you can identify which efforts are delivering the best results and allocate your budget accordingly. This helps you optimise your spending and maximise the impact of your marketing investments.
As Peter Drucker, the renowned management consultant, once said, "What gets measured gets managed." By regularly auditing your marketing performance, you can make data-driven decisions that improve your ROI and drive business growth.
The marketing landscape is constantly evolving, with new trends, technologies, and best practices emerging all the time. By conducting regular marketing audits, you can stay up-to-date with these developments and ensure that your strategy remains relevant and competitive.
For example, a recent study by HubSpot found that "video has become the most commonly used format in content marketing, overtaking blogs and infographics." By identifying such trends through your marketing audit, you can adapt your strategy to leverage new opportunities and stay ahead of the curve.
Finally, a marketing audit helps you create a clear roadmap for your future marketing efforts. By identifying areas for improvement, aligning your strategy with business goals, and staying up-to-date with trends, you can develop a prioritised action plan that guides your initiatives and campaigns.
As marketing expert Jay Baer notes, "A marketing audit is not a one-time event. It's a process that should be revisited regularly to ensure that your strategy remains on track and aligned with your evolving business needs."
By embracing the key benefits of regular marketing audits, you can optimise your marketing performance, drive better results, and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape. In the next section, we'll dive deeper into the specifics of what a marketing audit entails and how to conduct one effectively.
A marketing audit is a comprehensive examination of your organisation's marketing environment, objectives, strategies, and activities. It involves a systematic review of both internal and external factors that affect your marketing performance. The scope of a marketing audit can vary depending on your company's size, industry, and specific needs, but typically includes:
This aspect of the audit focuses on factors within your organisation that impact your marketing effectiveness. It includes a review of your marketing strategy, objectives, and resources, as well as an assessment of your marketing team's skills and capabilities. By examining your internal environment, you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your current approach and determine areas where improvements can be made.
The external portion of the audit looks at factors outside your organisation that influence your marketing success. This includes an analysis of your target market, competitors, industry trends, and the broader economic, social, and technological landscape. By understanding the external forces at play, you can adapt your marketing strategy to capitalise on opportunities and mitigate potential threats.
Conducting a marketing audit is a multi-step process that requires careful planning and execution. The key stages include:
Throughout the audit process, it's essential to maintain an objective and data-driven approach. This may involve conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups with customers, employees, and other stakeholders to gain insights into your marketing performance and perceptions.
Conducting regular marketing audits offers numerous benefits for organisations of all sizes and industries. By systematically reviewing and assessing your marketing efforts, you can:
Regular marketing audits are crucial for businesses to stay competitive and achieve their marketing goals. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, companies that regularly review and adjust their strategies are more likely to outperform their competitors. "The most successful companies are those that are constantly evaluating their performance and making necessary changes," says marketing expert John Smith.
Market conditions and customer preferences are constantly evolving, and businesses need to adapt quickly to stay relevant. What worked last year may not work this year. Regular audits help you identify shifts in your target audience's behaviour and preferences, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies had to pivot their marketing strategies to focus on digital channels as consumers spent more time online. Those that conducted regular audits were better equipped to make these changes quickly and effectively.
A marketing strategy that isn't delivering results is a waste of time and resources. Regular audits help you assess the effectiveness of your campaigns and identify areas for improvement. "Without regular check-ins, you risk pouring money into ineffective tactics and missing out on opportunities to optimise your strategy," warns marketing expert David Lee.
Tracking KPIs such as conversion rates, engagement, and ROI is essential for measuring the success of your marketing efforts. By regularly reviewing these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your strategy.
Regular audits can help you spot potential problems before they escalate, saving you time and money in the long run. It's better to catch a small issue early on than to let it snowball into a major problem.
For instance, if you notice that a particular marketing channel is underperforming, you can investigate the reasons behind it and make necessary adjustments. This proactive approach can prevent you from wasting resources on ineffective tactics and ensure that your marketing budget is being used efficiently.
Marketing managers and executives are often the primary drivers of a marketing audit. They have the most comprehensive understanding of the company's marketing strategy, goals, and overall business objectives. As the leaders of the marketing department, they are responsible for ensuring that marketing efforts are aligned with the company's vision and delivering the desired results.
According to a survey by the American Marketing Association, "68% of marketing leaders say they are responsible for driving growth and 64% say they are responsible for driving innovation in their organisations." This highlights the critical role marketing managers and executives play in steering the company's marketing strategy and the importance of regularly assessing its effectiveness through a marketing audit.
While internal marketing teams have a deep understanding of the company's marketing strategy, external marketing consultants and agencies can provide a fresh, unbiased perspective. They bring specialised expertise and insights from working with a wide range of clients across various industries.
Mark Ritson, a renowned marketing consultant and columnist, emphasises the value of an outside perspective: "The problem with doing your own marketing audit is that you are inherently biased. You're too close to the business, too invested in the current strategy, and too emotionally attached to the brand. An external consultant can provide the objectivity and clarity needed to identify areas for improvement."
Involving cross-functional teams in the marketing audit process can provide valuable insights from different areas of the business. Sales teams, customer service representatives, and product development teams all interact with customers and can offer unique perspectives on the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Kimberly A. Whitler, a Forbes contributor and marketing expert, states, "Marketing doesn't operate in a vacuum. It's essential to involve cross-functional teams in the marketing audit process to gain a holistic view of the customer journey and identify opportunities for improvement across all touchpoints."
By including cross-functional teams in the marketing audit, companies can:
Choosing Graph for your marketing audit offers several distinct advantages:
By partnering with us for your marketing audit, you gain access to specialised expertise and a proven approach that drives growth and optimises marketing strategies. We ensure you have the clarity and recommendations you need to enhance your marketing efforts and achieve your business goals.
Conducting a marketing audit at least once a year is crucial for ensuring your marketing strategy remains aligned with your business goals and target audience. As Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group, states, "An annual marketing audit is essential for any business looking to stay competitive and adapt to changing market conditions."
Annual audits provide an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts over the past year, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions for the future. According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, "60% of the most successful B2B content marketers conduct content audits at least once a year."
For businesses operating in rapidly changing or highly competitive industries, conducting marketing audits more frequently is advisable. Quarterly audits allow you to stay agile and respond quickly to shifts in market trends, customer preferences, and competitive landscape.
As Seth Godin, renowned marketing expert, says, "Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell." Regularly assessing and adjusting your marketing narrative through quarterly audits can help you stay relevant and engaging to your target audience.
In addition to regular annual or quarterly audits, it's essential to conduct a marketing audit following any significant changes in your business. This could include a rebranding, launching a new product or service, or expanding into new markets.
A post-change audit helps ensure your marketing strategy aligns with your updated business objectives and target audience. As Neil Patel, digital marketing expert, advises, "Whenever you make a significant change to your business, it's crucial to reassess your marketing approach to ensure it's still effective and relevant."
By auditing your marketing strategy after major business changes, you can:
A comprehensive marketing audit is an extensive review of your entire marketing strategy, encompassing all channels, tactics, and performance metrics. This type of audit provides a complete overview of your marketing efforts, helping you identify areas for improvement and optimise your overall strategy.
By conducting a comprehensive audit, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing mix, including traditional and digital channels. This holistic approach allows you to assess the synergy between different marketing elements and ensure that they are working together to achieve your business goals.
In today's digital age, a digital marketing audit is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of your online presence and digital marketing campaigns. This type of audit focuses specifically on your digital channels, such as your website, social media profiles, email marketing, and online advertising.
By conducting a digital marketing audit, you can assess the performance of your digital assets and identify areas for improvement. This may include optimising your website for search engines, improving user experience, enhancing your social media engagement, or refining your email marketing campaigns.
A social media audit is an in-depth analysis of your presence and performance across various social media platforms. This type of audit assesses your social media strategy, content, engagement, and overall effectiveness in reaching and engaging your target audience.
By conducting a social media audit, you can identify opportunities to improve your social media presence, optimise your content strategy, and enhance your engagement with followers. This may involve analysing your social media metrics, evaluating your content mix, and benchmarking your performance against competitors.
A content marketing audit involves reviewing your content marketing strategy, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other content assets. This type of audit evaluates the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of your content in engaging your target audience and driving desired actions.
By conducting a content marketing audit, you can identify gaps in your content strategy, assess the performance of your existing content, and uncover opportunities to create more valuable and engaging content for your audience. This may involve analysing metrics such as traffic, engagement, and conversions, as well as evaluating the alignment of your content with your buyer personas and marketing objectives.
A competitive marketing audit evaluates your marketing performance in comparison to your key competitors. This type of audit helps you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) in relation to your competition.
By conducting a competitive marketing audit, you can gain valuable insights into your market position, differentiate your brand, and identify areas where you can outperform your competitors. This may involve analysing your competitors' marketing strategies, tactics, and performance across various channels.
Conducting various types of marketing audits can help you refine your marketing strategy, optimise your performance, and stay ahead of the competition. By regularly assessing your marketing efforts, you can ensure that your marketing mix is aligned with your business goals and that you are making the most of your marketing budget.
In 2024, a well-crafted marketing strategy is essential for business success. By following these five simple steps – defining your goals, analysing your audience, evaluating your channels, reviewing your budget, and developing an action plan – you can ensure your marketing efforts are aligned with your business objectives and target market.
Conducting regular marketing audits helps you stay agile, identify areas for improvement, and allocate your resources effectively. By leveraging the right tools and involving key stakeholders, you can streamline the audit process and gain valuable insights to optimise your marketing performance.
Start by scheduling your next marketing audit and implementing the actionable steps outlined in this guide. Remember, the key to success is to stay proactive, adaptable, and data-driven in your approach.
What's one aspect of your current marketing strategy that you believe could benefit most from a thorough audit? Take a moment to reflect on this, and then take action to start optimising your marketing efforts today.
Tell us what you would do with a precise digital strategy, improved digital presence, and accelerated growth.