A marketing audit takes an objective look at your current marketing activities, strategies, and performance. The goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and identify opportunities for improvement.

A marketing audit identifies the biggest strengths and weaknesses of your current strategy. It highlights what plans, processes, and practices are most effective at meeting goals. Just as importantly, it builds a foundation for future decision-making by identifying opportunities, gaps, and areas for improvement.

To get the best results, your marketing audit should be objective, systematic, and recurring:

  • Objective to ensure your it’s free of bias
  • Systematic to ensure your audit is structured, organized, and measurable
  • Recurring so you can discover and address problems early on

Keep in mind that a marketing audit can encompass your entire operation or a subset of it — such as a specific campaign, process, or focus (e.g., social media marketing).

Elements of a Marketing Audit

A comprehensive marketing audit may include one or more of the following elements:

1. SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis outlines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your marketing. Using this framework, you can take inventory of your marketing assets and roadblocks.

2. Competitive analysis

As the name suggests, a competitive analysis takes stock of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. It puts a magnifying glass on their products, prices, marketing strategies, campaigns, and target audience.

3. Market research

Even if you think you know your customers through and through, market research can reveal even deeper insight into their needs, preferences, motivations, and behaviors. On top of that, you can tap into emerging trends and new opportunities in the marketplace, helping you stay ahead of the curve.

Who does a marketing audit?

A third party typically conducts a marketing audit. This is for a few reasons.

First, your audit needs to be as objective as possible. With this in mind, outsourcing to a third party – rather than conducting it internally — is the sounder option.

On top of that, third-party firms have more experience in conducting audits — and that experience really matters. Often, they’re better equipped to identify best practices and opportunities for improvement, and they may have access to specialized tools, technologies, and research capabilities.

No marketing plan is perfect. By running a marketing audit, however, you can capitalize on what’s working and resolve what’s not. The result? A more optimized strategy that drives results.

To read the full blog, visit our partner HubSpot’s blog. Do you need a marketing audit or simply need help improving your marketing performance? Contact Us today to learn more about how Goose Digital can help.