The Marketing Audit

The interactions and relationships of a business with its customers largely depend on the marketing plan, which ultimately affects the sales and hence the success of the business. This makes the marketing plan one of the most crucial components of any business.

However, making a marketing plan is not enough. You need to audit it regularly to make sure it stays updated and continues to bring in the desired results. The only remaining question is how to do a marketing audit? Let’s find out!

Top 5 Things to Audit

A marketing audit can be the difference between a successful business and an average business with stagnant growth. Here are the top five things to keep in mind when performing a market audit.

Your Competitors

Markets are generally very dynamic, with hundreds of vendors coming in and switching marketing every day. This means your competitors may change with time. Plus, competition levels in the market are bound to elevate as your brand progresses and gains recognition. Therefore, competitor audit is essential to understand who your competitors are and how they are doing. Having this knowledge can help you make smart business decisions and gain a competitive edge over your competitors.

What's your Unique Selling Point?

Your Customers

The next step in marketing audit is to evaluate your customers. The goal of auditing customers is to understand how your brand is perceived by your target audience. Auditing customers will allow you to identify your strong suit and unique selling propositions (USP). On the other hand, it will also bring forth areas of the marketing strategy that need more work.

Your Team

Auditing your team can give you valuable insights about your business processes and operations. The ultimate goal is to identify gaps, improve business processes, and increase team productivity. One way to audit your team is to perform time audit for productivity with the goal to improve time management skills.

The Supply Chain Quality

Your Suppliers

As a business, it is important to audit your suppliers regularly to ensure functional and efficient quality management. It will also help you eliminate any risks and costs associated with the suppliers. Supplier audit includes collecting information about the supplier to identify general conditions of the production. You may want to evaluate things like cleanliness, organisation, storage conditions, equipment, machinery, and quality management efforts. Doing so will give you a clear picture of your suppliers.

Your Goals

Your marketing goals must be smart and comprehensive. Many people confuse marketing goals with business goals. However, these are two very different areas. Your business goals specify what you want to achieve from the business while your marketing gaols specify what you need to do to achieve your business goals. Marketing goals may change more frequently than you realise. Therefore, auditing your marketing goals is essential to keep your marketing strategy in line with your business goals.

Valuable Insights about your Business

These are the five main areas you need to evaluate to do a knockout marketing audit.

Now that you know how to do marketing audit, you can analyse these key areas to gain valuable insights about your business and marketing. If it sounds like a lot, you can always consult a marketing strategy agency to help you out.

Can we help?

If you are looking for a marketing firm to perform a comprehensive marketing audit, we can help you out.