Why a Marketing Audit is a Healthy Choice
When you start seeing a new doctor, one of the first steps they want to take is to give you a complete physical exam. They want to get a baseline of your current health so they can catch any problems early on, provide you with feedback on how you’re doing, and outline steps you can take to improve your well-being.
The same goes for your marketing program’s health. We recommend a complete marketing audit as a first step of every strategic marketing plan. This will tell us where your brand is now, what’s working well and what needs more attention. It also helps us identify new opportunities and provide a prescriptive path to reaching your defined objectives. So, what’s involved?
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Discovery Session
In this workshop-style session, we sit down with you to find out how your brand is “feeling” right now. Is it healthy? Any known issues? Symptoms that could be pointing to potential performance problems in the future? Areas where you’re knocking it out of the park on a regular basis?
The goal is to learn as much as possible about your organization, your current marketing program, your audience personas and your goals. This helps define the diagnostic tools we need to bring to bear in your particular situation.
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Competitive Analysis
Know thine enemy, as the saying goes. In this process, we take a deep dive into your competitive landscape. Who are the players? What are they saying? Why are they winning business? Or not?
We make an objective and subjective examination of areas like messaging, engagement, reach and key differentiators to identify your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, compared to your competition.
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Website Analysis
We all know that modern marketing is powered by a quality web experience for your customers and prospects. That’s why it’s beneficial to periodically go through your website with a fine-toothed comb.
Is it current – both in terms of messaging and technological compatibility? What are the performance metrics and analytics telling us about visitor behaviour and engagement? Should we be adding more content? New formats? Advanced functionalities?
Again, we make an objective and subjective examination and provide actionable recommendations to improve performance.
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SEO Analysis
This diagnostic is a constantly evolving tool, just like search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms themselves. We go ‘under the hood’ of your analytics and AdWords programs to determine what’s working, what’s not and what you should do next.
Knowing your goals is important here, whether they’re improving your organic search ranking or lowering your cost-per- acquisition (CPAs) from pay-per- click (PPC) campaigns. There’s always lots of opportunity, so we often have to pick and choose what to tackle based on your priorities.
The key thing to recognize about SEO is it requires constant attention or evolving program. It is not a “set and forget” element of your marketing program.
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Content Audit
Compelling content that adds value to the prospect’s or customer’s buying journey is fundamental to modern marketing success. But content development can also be one of the costliest, most time-consuming portions of your marketing program.
That’s why it’s a really good idea to conduct an organization-wide content audit. You just never know who in your organization is hiding a really great presentation on their flash drive that could become your next top-performing on-demand webinar! Or you might discover a good whitepaper from five years ago that simply needs dusting off and sprucing up to turn it back into a valuable conversion tool.
We help you gather your existing content and objectively identify the best pieces to use, update or convert to a new format to squeeze every last drop of value out of your content assets. Then we perform a gap analysis so you can concentrate on developing new content that will make a real difference to your overall marketing efforts.
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Lead Flow Analysis
With between 75 and 90% of the B2B buying process occurring online before a prospect ever interacts directly with a human sales rep, it’s increasingly important to understand and optimize your lead flow.
What is the buying cycle? How long is it? What do customers need to know at each point of the cycle? What content consumption or user behaviours indicate interest, engagement and sales-readiness?
We work with you (and hopefully your sales team) to create alignment and reverse-engineer your funnel metrics based on revenue and business objectives, then build a prescriptive path to help move prospects through from discovery to engagement, nurture to sales.
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Marketing Automation Audit
We see a lot of organizations that have a marketing automation platform, but are struggling to see its full value. Our Marketing Automation Revive 35-point checklist helps us take thorough stock of your existing platform deployment, allowing us to make recommendations for increasing your return on investment.
If you’re not using automation already, we can work with you to define your needs, select a platform and define your key performance indicators.
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Marketing Strategy Audit
Your strategy should be your prescriptive path to modern marketing health. Incorporating all of the findings and recommendations from the previous seven steps, it becomes the roadmap upon which all future tactical activities are executed and measured.
Even the most successful program can benefit from the fresh perspective that comes with a marketing audit. You’ll find yourself answering a lot of questions you may not have been asked before. Questions like ‘Why was this done?’ or ‘Have you ever tried…?’ Ones that are aimed at uncovering new ideas and new opportunities. Or just validating the ones that are already working for you.
Does your brand need a health check-up? Contact us to get a pulse on your current program.