What Is A Marketing Audit?
Robust marketing and advertising policy are a must-have for any successful sales campaign. You need to examine, assess and improve upon the whole marketing scenario from time to time. This could be right from the print media in the form of pamphlets and flyers to online campaigns. But does auditing of these marketing helps? If yes, then what’s a marketing audit exactly?
Your marketing audit aims to identify the successful campaigns and weed out the ones that take up resources but don’t yield satisfactory results.
Your marketing strategy and marketing policies need exploring and in-depth studying at repeated intervals. This will help you evaluate your marketing strategy’s effectiveness and success in increasing sales and revenue.
Unless a marketing audit is carried out, the business owner will never know their input expenditure versus the sales generated from such marketing activities. They will also be unable to compare both and work out if the efforts and input gone into marketing are worth the results or not. Hence, marketing audit at intervals is important for a business to track its progress.
How to Do a Marketing Audit?
Once a business owner or marketing manager undertakes a marketing audit, they develop insights into both their product and its outreach as well as the entire marketing ecosystem. It allows the business owner an in-depth vision of what is being done right and wrong with respect to marketing the product.
Following is a step-by-step approach to conducting a marketing audit:
#1 Be Clear in Setting Marketing Aims and Objectives
The goals you set for your marketing activities should cover all its aspects. They should be well thought out and take current and future sales expectations into consideration. These objectives should increase the product and company’s visibility across different marketing media like print, electronic, web-based, etc. There should be a focus on maintaining and preferably growing market share.
#2 Research Your Prospective Buyer
This is an important aspect of any marketing audit. The entrepreneur should have a clear idea about who his consumers are, what they do, and what content they like. There should be a definite buyer personality in the entrepreneur’s mind, which he can then target and pitch his products to. It always helps to know the geographical location of his future buyers, their job titles, their ethnicities, etc.
#3 Know Your Competitors As Well As Your Product
In a marketplace flooded with so many products and services, yours must stand out. You should have a mastery of your product advantages, its USP (unique selling proposition), as well as know your marketplace inside out. A sound marketing audit can help you do so.
#4 Keep a Tab on Your Inventory
A successful marketing audit will never fail to carry out inventory from time to time to ensure a smooth supply of the goods that are in demand. All the marketing and advertising campaigns will fall flat if, ultimately, your product does not reach the client on time.
#5 Develop Insights from Available Information
An effective marketing audit is nothing, if not insightful. It should provide data on various marketing aspects and help you, the business owner/manager, come to fruitful conclusions instrumental in successful marketing in the future.
#6 Create an Action Plan
Lastly, a marketing audit is a blueprint in place based on all of the above. This helps you deliver and achieve all your sales goals.
If you can answer the question “What’s a marketing audit?,” it would be easier for you to improve your brand presence. Connecting with the customer is not difficult but tricky. Hence, dissecting the marketing strategy is important. The more effort you put in strategizing the activities, processes and objectives, the more you can build the core systems of your business growth.
Hopefully this blog helped you to understand what is a marketing audit and how to do one. Have questions feel free to reach out to one of our marketing specialists who will gladly walk you through completing your own marketing audit.
