What is a marketing audit? And why your small business needs one.
When you hear the word “audit”, the first thing that jumps to your mind probably isn’t marketing
You’re probably thinking about taxes and the humongous pain and stress which comes with receiving an HMRC audit.
Never fear. Marketing audits are far less pressure and stress.
A marketing audit is a programme specifically designed to help you tailor your marketing efforts towards what your target audience wants and needs.
Auditing your company's effectiveness with its budget is a detailed process that takes time to refine, but the data you receive at the end can be transformative once you begin to implement it into your marketing campaign.
Ultimately, auditing your small business will save you time, energy and stress as you move towards achieving a far more effective marketing mix.
S.W.O.T. Your marketing strategy
The first part of the marketing audit considers your marketing strategy, where you'll analyse your goals and your assets.
Let's say you want to double your website sales in six months. You might simply set your goal as doubling your online traffic during this time. You figure that twice as many leads inevitably means 2x the customers, right?
Not necessarily.
Gaining general traffic is probably not what you need, especially if your sales funnel is not yet working well. Instead, your first task is to get to the root of why people are (or are not) clicking the “buy” button on your site.
To understand that requires you to go through what we know as the SWOT analysis.
S: Strengths
W: Weaknesses
O: Opportunities
T: Threats
Start by listing all of your business’s current strengths and weaknesses, covering everything from funding to branding. You need to know your product or service inside out, and why it's the best one for your target market.
Once you are clear on that, you can capitalise on it in your next marketing launch. Make sure you play to your strengths and plug the gaps in your biggest weaknesses.
Maybe your problem isn’t that you aren’t getting enough traffic; perhaps you need to rebrand your services more towards a different demographic, or refine your product to reflect a new trend.
After you've considered strengths and weaknesses, move on to opportunities and threats. Make a list of all of your current opportunities, even the ones you’ve dismissed.
Why?
Because seeing them all written out will help you to determine if you’ve neglected something lucrative. It will lend you a new perspective on your current situation and help you to make a fresh decision about what route your marketing efforts need follow.
You also need to take a brutally honest look at the threats to your small business—both internal and external. Do you have a production process that is harming the environment? If so, that could be damaging your social image. Do you have a lazy employee? They could be hurting your overall productivity. Are you aware of an enemy in the business world, hampering your growth? Is there a way you can improve that relationship?
Discovering your opportunities and threats then having a plan to capitalise on the opportunities and remove the threats is crucial for ensuring that you have the best possible marketing campaign in place.
But, if this all sounds a bit daunting, our digital marketing strategy team can help you - we've been doing this successfully for years.
When to perform a marketing audit
There are many reasons you might want to audit your business's marketing plan. Below, we look at some of the main reasons and what you should focus on.
Business rebranding audit
When rebranding your business, carrying out a marketing audit is essential. Because you are creating a new incarnation of yourself, you need to take a few steps back and gain a new perspective.
You may still have the same target audience, but their view of you is about to change big time. This change can work to your company's advantage… or drive you under. It’s all about how you present yourself in word and deed.
Be aware of the values that are most important to your audience and reflect them in your company slogans, logos, advertisements, products, and customer interactions, whether in store, on the phone, via email or on social media.
You need to make sure your consumers know that you are the same brand they’ve always loved, but that you are reinventing yourself to become even better.
Don’t be a Disney movie sequel. Be sure that the changes you are performing do justice to the entire rebranding purpose and improve yourself. Take a long hard look at your whole brand, cut relentlessly, implement life-giving changes, and keep only the best of the best.
Auditing the reason for rapid growth
Rapid business growth is a great problem to have, which is why we don't often step back and question it. But understanding where that growth is coming from is often the key to unlocking more.
A marketing audit will help you determine what your most prominent form of marketing power is.
Dig into the returns from each of your current marketing channels to understand which is bringing best 'bang for your buck'. More importantly, make sure you understand, or at least have a testable theory, as to why that winning channel delivers as well as it does.
Capitalise on your discoveries to grow your business further.
Auditing to beat the competition
If you have a rival—and every business does—you need to stay ahead of the curve. The truth is, they know this too and will fight tooth and nail to outperform your business and steal your customers.
A marketing audit will show you current demographic trends and help you predict technological and societal advances which could alter your future marketing plans.
Your audit will also show you where the competition is out-performing you and vice versa. With this knowledge, you can emulate what makes them successful and remove the parts of your campaign which do harm.
Redefining your target audience
When you are redefining your brand, there is a chance your target audience will require some redefinition as well. If so, you need to begin your research from a social media perspective.
Social media is such a pervasive form of online marketing that it has a wealth of data you can't ignore. If you want to know your new target market’s interests, workplaces, struggles and desires, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. are the way to go.
Use their vast databases to gain relevant information about your target market's traits. The information you collect will shape the way you write and present your newly defined brand and marketing campaign.
How to conduct a marketing audit
Understanding how to perform marketing audits needn't be tricky. While the needs of every business differ, the general outline for conducting a review is the same.
Follow the simple steps below and you'll be surprised at the data you gather and things you learn about your own market and company.
Step 1: Create an overview of your company
Pulling out your original and revised business plans is an excellent place to start. You can see how your business has evolved over the years just by looking at any amendments to your original documents or seeing how different your business is today from what you originally envisaged.
Use your business plan review to determine what changes you've made are serving your business and which ones are hurting it.
Alongside the business plan review, use your SWOT analysis to assemble your corporate overview. This will help you form the core of who you are as a business which, in turn, will help you formulate how you need to move forward.
Step 2: Describe your marketing goals and objectives
With your company overview in hand, the next step is to determine your marketing objectives and how realistic they are from your current position and resources.
Listing 4-6 marketing goals is ideal for helping you narrow down what is possible for your small company and will help you pinpoint the road you need to take to achieve them.
Think about both long and short term goals. Your long-term goals should encompass everything from this year through to 5 to 10 years. Your short-term goals should be no longer than 12 months from now.
Write down your ideas and figures for making those happen but don't worry yet about breaking this down into month by month projections.
Step 3: Describe your ideal client and their qualifiers
Every salesperson knows that selling an item to someone outside of the target market is incredibly difficult. The majority of your transactions will be with those people who want and need what you offer.
Determining who those people are and what makes them a part of your market is crucial. Most small businesses have 3-5 target market qualifiers which are used to refine how you communicate with your customers.
Your qualifiers depend on your market. They might be as simple as age and gender, e.g., you only ever successfully sell to women over 35, or they could be more specific. Think about what the people you successfully sell to have in common; these are your market qualifiers.
Knowing your ideal clients/customers and the qualifiers that capture the essential elements of them will help tailor your marketing towards that group in the future.
Step 4: Know your product or service
Go through and outline your products and services. Do these services go together?
It is best practice to ensure that every one of your products or services links together in some way or another. If you sell cameras, for example, lenses, tripods and photography books and classes make sense. Knitting needles and cake decorating lessons do not.
Take Starbucks, for example. They sell coffee, coffee beans, pastries, pastry mixes, mugs, flasks, and dozens of other subcategory items which have a common theme. Products that easily link together sell more gross items than those that are harder to compare.
Why?
Because once you get an initial sale of your core item (e.g., a cup of coffee), it's a smooth Segway to add a syrup, a pastry or mug.
Check your own product mix.
If you have a product or service which has no link to your core, then drop it. Likewise, if there's a noticeable gap in your product mix, e.g., the camera shop without lenses, then you are probably leaving money on the table.
Step 5: Describe your previous marketing encounters and results
For this part of the marketing audit, analyse your current and historic marketing activities to see what worked and which have failed. Learning from your past mistakes is the most potent way for a business to move forward.
Get as many specific numbers as you can about the analytics behind your consumer’s choices and your corresponding marketing strategies.
When you have all the data you can collect, audit it by asking questions like What worked? Why? What didn’t? Why? What are we still doing? Is it still working? What is making it work? Will it work in the future?
Starting with the past in this way is instructive in pointing you towards your future marketing efforts.
Step 6: Scrutinize your competitors
Who are your competitors and what makes them compelling to your consumers? This is part of your marketing environment.
Take a moment to be objective here. Consider their products and services as if you knew nothing about your industry. What makes your competitors' offers appealing? Is it their materials? Is it the way they write their adverts? Is their product genuinely better than yours? How so? What can you do to improve it?
With the objective phase complete, put your industry knowledge cap back on.
What is your competitor missing? Where are they sloppy? Have they gained their success through unfair means? Do they cut corners or misrepresent information?
Use the best of what they do well in your own marketing and plug their weaknesses with your offer to create the best opportunity to take their customers for yourself.
Step 7: Brainstorm your communication strategy
If you are a mind mapper, this will be your favourite part.
Now that you have all of this fascinating information at your disposal, it is time to put it to use. Begin outlining your communication strategy.
What psychology will work well with your consumer? What are your keywords and phrases that will grab their attention? What is the most valuable thing about their experience with you? How are you serving them?
Throw those answers into a few snappy words or phrases, and you’ve got the beginning of a marketing campaign.
Next, you need to consider social media and content creation. Think about your company publicity; how do you want to be perceived?
What kind of content will engage your consumer the best? Will they be interested in videos or article posts? Will infographics or polls gain more engagement? Should you perhaps engage with your brand evangelists for extra support through interviews and reviews?
The possibilities here are truly endless, so have fun with this. Now you've completed your first marketing audit you have the data to back up your decisions, so don't be shy, be bold!
Summing up a small business marketing audit
Marketing audits do not need to be scary. It's merely a process designed to help walk you through exactly who your company is, why it exists and who it serves.
The questions asked in the audit are tailored to tighten your marketing plan to save you time, money and energy.
Increasing your traffic isn’t nearly as important as discovering why your current visitors are not buying. A marketing audit will help you rediscover your target market’s current needs and desires so you can make changes accordingly.
Consider carrying out a marketing audit before rebranding, redefining your consumer or jumping on upcoming trends.
The steps to performing a marketing audit are detailed but crucial. Taking time to answer the tough questions thoroughly might help you discover the business breakthrough you are looking for.
We appreciate that, as a small business owner, it is hard to find the time for exercises like this, which is why we can step in and give you a hand.