How a Marketing Audit Can Help You Create an Action Plan
It’s difficult to know where to turn when there are so many marketing options available.
An audit will help answer key questions, allowing you to create an action plan fit for your needs.
There are so many ways to market your business, it can be really difficult to know where you should be spending your time and budget. For a lot of my clients, this is one of the biggest question marks: they want to know what areas of marketing they should be working on to achieve their goals, and what they should do more of to grow their business.
Common questions I get asked when I first meet new clients:
Should I be blogging more often? I don’t have time!
Posting on Facebook more often? Why am I not getting any engagement there?
Investing in sponsored Instagram posts? I tried them once but didn’t get any sales.
What about LinkedIn, should I be using that? I don’t really know what to do there.
And is anyone still using Pinterest? Someone told me I should.
All great questions.
And I’m here to help find the answers. But… first I need to dig a little deeper.
Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for one business doesn’t necessarily work for another. So, it’s impossible for me to tell you what you need to do to reach your goals without first doing a little discovery myself.
That’s where the audit comes in!
It’s my starting point for most projects. Without it, I would just be going in blind and relying on guesswork and intuition. Which might work. But ‘might’ doesn’t sound very reassuring when you’re giving away your hard-earned money to a marketing professional!
What is a marketing audit?
Simply put, it’s a process of examining your marketing activity, understanding what’s working and what isn’t, identifying any patterns and spotting any opportunities. A good marketing audit also looks externally at what your competitors are doing and what’s going on in the market to figure out where you could stand to gain an advantage.
Why do you need it and what do you use it for?
Without knowing what is and isn’t working, it’s easy to waste time doing things that simply aren’t giving you the desired result. And for a busy business owner, that’s not something you can afford.
It’s also impossible to know what marketing activity you need to do next without having this information.
What’s included in a marketing audit?
This will differ depending on what each business needs. The majority of my clients focus on digital marketing tactics only, so I tend to start with a thorough website review. Here, I’m trying to answer some key questions:
What pages are driving the most traffic?
How long do people tend to stay on your site for?
How many pages do they visit?
Where is your traffic coming from?
What keywords are you ranking for?
How many conversions do you get each month and where do they originate from?
And many more…
I do a similar analysis for all the other channels: social media, email, video, guest blogs, digital PR. Essentially, I’m trying to pinpoint what’s working, what’s not working, what could be done better, and where are the opportunities.
I then take a similar approach with competitors. Key questions include:
Where do your competitors get their traffic from?
What keywords are they ranking for?
What sort of content are they sharing on social media?
How much engagement do they get?
What channels are they using that you’re not?
It’s not a cookie cutter-job by any means. Before diving in, it’s important for me to understand your business, your objectives, challenges, the desired outcome. All of this data is meaningless if you can’t apply it.
What happens next?
You’ll be given a comprehensive, but easy-to-read document that contains all of the findings from the audit. It starts with a detailed account of all the information that was analysed and the conclusions that were drawn, followed by actionable marketing recommendations, i.e. what you should do with this information.
I like to approach things in bite-size pieces, allowing my clients to receive and digest this information and make the right decisions for their business. So, while proposing all of the recommendations, we can prioritise where to start and create a bespoke action plan that is right for your business.
A small business with a limited budget and almost no staff cannot have the same action plan as a medium sized business with an in-house marketing team! So, while the data and the recommendations are useful, they can be tailored to fit the needs of each individual organisation.
How long does it take?
It’s a time consuming process. It’s important to not only gather all of the data, but also analyse it and draw conclusions from it so as to make realistic and actionable recommendations. I tend to turn these around within 1-2 weeks, allowing for enough time to go through all the info, without losing the momentum and excitement around finally getting some answers!
How much does it cost?
The cost varies depending on the amount of research needed and how much time it’ll take. After a 30-minute chat, I can provide you with a no-obligation quote.
So, if you’ve been struggling with your marketing and not knowing where to turn, perhaps a marketing audit is just what you needed to find your direction. If you’re interested to find out more, get in touch to discuss further, I’d love to help.