Marketing Audits: Best Practices

A marketing audit is a great way to assess the health of your current marketing efforts against two separate benchmarks: 1) How you compare to your industry peers and 2) How your marketing does or doesn’t align with overall best practices.

While we always do a mini audit as part of any project, sometimes we have clients who want to start with a deeper understanding of where they currently stand and what their options for evolving and improving their marketing team and efforts might be.

For example, last summer we worked with a very large company in the contracting space to conduct an audit of their marketing strategy, process, content, and team. The company was under new management, and the leaders wanted an experienced, objective perspective to help them understand:

• How good their marketing team’s executional skills were
• Did their marketing team have the right people in the right seats
• Were their efforts keeping up with their peers
• Options for a stronger marketing roadmap that could be implemented immediately

When conducting a marketing audit, we review these key areas:

• Strategy: Messaging and Plan
• Tactics and Content
• Competitive Landscape
• Process
• People/Team
• Budget

Step One: Strategic Review

We first check broadly to see if our client is using the key building blocks for strong marketing:

Building Block	Definition	Learn More
Positioning Statement	The foundation for all messaging. Its core components are: Target Customer, Competitive Set, Point of Difference and Reasons to Believe	Watch our Positioning webinar –  Positioning: Laying the Foundation for Sales and Marketing Success
Marketing Plan	What you want marketing to accomplish for the organization, how you’re going to do that, how much you’ll spend and how you’ll measure success	Watch our Marketing Planning webinar – Maximizing Your Marketing Budget
Marketing Calendar	A one-page overview of all core marketing activities for the year
Brand Style Guide	The rules for how to use the brand to ensure that it looks and feels the same regardless of who uses it, where it’s used, or how	Typically, this is something your creative agency will develop for you.
Competitive Landscape	What kind of marketing are your peer companies doing	Get the sample template.

Step Two: Execution Review – Best Practices

We then assess how the client is doing on each of the Step One building blocks versus best practices. For easy visualization, we like to rate things using a green-yellow-red scale.

Step Three: Execution Review – Industry Peers

Industries vary widely in marketing sophistication and it’s important to recognize that what is essential for marketing a chicken sausage sold at retail is very different than what’s needed for marketing an environmental services firm.

Step Four: Next Steps

As with any analysis, the meat is in the “so whats” that come out of the process. Next steps after an audit can include things like:

• Updating the website
• Adjusting marketing team job descriptions and project lists
• Shifting tactical spending
• Defining the difference between Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads
• Implementing a Creative Brief process
• Developing a Positioning Statement
• Building a more strategic one-page marketing plan

Conducting a marketing audit doesn’t have to be complicated. Following these simple steps will help your marketing team take a crucial step back to objectively evaluate where your company marketing is now and how it could evolve to be more strategic. Even if you don’t have a full-time marketing best practices leader on your team, conducting a competitive review is a great place to start getting a more objective perspective.