Doing a marketing audit: Definition
The marketing audit is a systematic and independent analysis marketing activities of a company. It allows you to obtain a precise state of play of the current marketing strategy, including its strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.
This methodical examination can be considered as a control tool to verify the adequacy between the marketing actions implemented and the strategic objectives set.
It is carried out using various methods and tools, and can cover various areas, such as digital marketing, the position of the company or even the customer relationship.
The marketing audit thus provides a global vision of marketing performance, and guides the company towards areas for improvement to be explored in order to achieve its ambitions.
What is the purpose of a marketing audit?
The main objective of a marketing audit is to assess the effectiveness of a company's marketing strategy. This involves a detailed analysis of the marketing activities in progress, the means and actions put in place, and their impact on the global business. The audit also serves to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy, thus making it possible to adjust and improve marketing actions.
Another important purpose of the marketing audit is to provide a global vision of the company's offers and their performance. In other words, it helps assess how offers are perceived by the market and how they compare to competing offers.
Finally, the purpose of the marketing audit is to measure the company's performance in relation to goals set. This makes it possible to determine if the goals are being met and, if not, what are the obstacles to achieving them.
Who does the marketing audit?
The marketing audit can be carried out by different actors depending on the needs and resources of the company. In some cases it is the internal marketing team who takes care of this task. In this case it is often to take a step back and initiate important projects for the company. This is the objective of our tool, to make a point with 24 well-chosen questions to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy. We wanted it to be simple and effective, it is probably insufficient for an extremely detailed analysis, but it is very effective in supporting where it hurts.
One external auditor, such as a specialized marketing agency, may be called upon. This option offers valuable objectivity and external perspective to identify areas for improvement. Specialized marketing auditors also have the expertise to carry out the necessary corrective actions at the end of this audit.
In both cases, auditors should have a solid understanding of the components of marketing, including:
- The competitive environment : to assess the positioning of the company in the market.
- Customer data : to assess the effectiveness of lead generation efforts and the customer journey.
- The performance of the website : to assess the effectiveness of digital marketing.
- The return on investment of marketing campaigns : to assess the effectiveness of marketing spend
Example of an audit plan: How to conduct an effective marketing audit?
Evaluate your knowledge of your target and its market
Assessing your knowledge of your target and your market is a crucial step in the marketing audit. To do this, it is essential to carry out a thorough analysis of your target audience. This analysis should include a study of their needs, behaviors and expectations. It is also important to understand how your offer is perceived by your target audience.
At the same time, market research is another key element. This involves analysing market trends, opportunities, threats, and competition. The objective is to determine how your business is positioned in the market compared to its competitors.
To carry out these analyses, several methods can be used, such as:
- Surveys with your target audience
- Analysis of your internal data
- The study of market trends
- Competitive analysis
The objective of this section of the audit is to ensure that you have a clear vision of your target and market, otherwise there is no point in hoping that your marketing plan will have any effect.
Evaluate its positioning
The position is an absolutely fundamental element for the success of your marketing strategy. In general everyone considers that they have a clear positioning, but the reality is that they are often a bit empty.
Why?
Because it is either insufficiently embodied by your strategy, for example due to the absence of content. Either it is empty of meaning, a good test consists in asking yourself whether a company could defend a positioning completely opposite to yours or not. If not, it's suspicious.
The good example is: “We create quality, really focused on our customers”.
So go defend the opposite to see.
The right positioning is differentiating and above all it is explicit. If it is only you who understand or identify it, it is because there is a problem in your marketing strategy, certainly several.
Evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing
Audit your website
For audit your website, start with assess its technical performance. This includes page load speed, mobile compatibility, and accessibility. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights for a detailed analysis.
Afterwards, analyze the user experience on your site. Ask yourself questions about navigation, the clarity of information and the ease of carrying out key actions (purchase, registration, contact, etc.). Behavioral analysis tools like Hotjar may be useful for this task.
But above all, assess its ability to respond correctly to the questions of your target audience and to propose coherent conversion paths. A site with a Interesting UX and easy to access can completely miss its subject if the content or the conversion strategy is not properly thought out.
The most common mistake is to design a site that focuses on what you do and to believe that your visitors will see all of your pages. You need to understand how the web works and how users explore a site to take advantage of it. Otherwise, the results are known in advance: none.
Audit your organic audience - SEO
The SEO is a powerful tool for audience acquisition. You know it, but it is often a bit scary because it is not acquired simply by giving money to Google.
SEO requires work, time and therefore money. But it is, as you know, a key investment for a company that wants to prosper over the long term. In addition, a good SEO is the guarantee of having material for your marketing strategies, without an audience, none of your actions have an impact.
A good SEO audit will focus on 3 key elements:
- The content : If there is nothing to reference, no need to ask yourself how to get to the first page.
- The technique : Because it will have an impact on the speed at which your actions will have an impact but also and above all on their resilience.
- The popularity : The more people talk about you, the more Google will consider you reliable, the more quickly you will dominate the SERPs.
We have written a dedicated guide for you to succeed in SEO audit.
Audit your organic audience - Social networks
For audit your organic audience on social networks, start by listing all of your active accounts. Analyze how each account is performing in terms of reach, engagement, and audience growth. Consider the differences between each platform to understand what content works best where.
Use social media-specific audit tools to get accurate data on your audience: demographics, location, hours of activity... This information will help you refine your content and targeting strategy.
Note that the audit should also include an analysis of the consistency of your branding across the various platforms. Make sure your accounts accurately reflect who you are and what you value.
As with the SEO audience, this social audience is the fuel for the future performance of your marketing strategy. It is certainly less resilient and more expensive than SEO, but it is no less relevant.
Audit its content
The audit of your content is an essential step in measuring the impact of your marketing strategy. This involves reviewing every piece of content you've posted, whether it's on your website, blog, or social media.
For each element, assess its relevance, quality, and performance. Analysis tools can help you gather data on engagement rates, views, shares, comments, and more.
It's also helpful to identify content that can be reused or updated, and what content is missing or duplicated. Don't forget to check the semantic alignment of your content to optimize your SEO.
Finally, don't ignore the qualitative aspect of your content: is it interesting, useful, engaging for your target audience?
Here is a summary of the key points to check when auditing your content:
- Content performance (engagement, views, shares, etc.)
- Relevance and quality of content
- Content that can be reused or updated
- Missing or duplicated content
- Semantic alignment for SEO
- Overall editorial quality.
The final objective of this audit is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy, in order to refine it and improve its effectiveness.
Audit your online advertising
Auditing your online advertising is an essential step. We are talking about SEA (search engine advertising) here as well as social ads campaigns.
It is therefore a question of sifting through your advertising campaigns on various platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc. For each campaign, analyze its return on investment (ROI), the cost per click (CPC), the click rate (CTR), and the conversion rate.
Analytical tools specific to online advertising can help you gather this data. You can also look at the creative elements of your ads: their design, their message, their call to action.
Make sure that your ads are well targeted and that they meet the expectations of your audience. It can be interesting to study the performance of your competitors to identify opportunities or areas for improvement.
Here are a few things to check when auditing your online advertising:
- ROI, CPC, CTR, conversion rate
- Coherence and relevance of creative elements
- Audience targeting and segmentation
- Comparison with the competition
Evaluate the effectiveness of your customer relationship
Customer relationships are an essential vector of satisfaction and loyalty. To assess its effectiveness, several criteria can be taken into account. Customer satisfaction is a first measure, evaluated through questionnaires, interviews or claims analysis.
It is also a good idea to measuring customer loyalty : retention rate, purchase frequency and average basket are relevant indicators in this regard.
The perceived image by customers is also to be considered. It can be evaluated by surveys to identify the difference between the real image and the desired image.
Finally, the comparison with the competition can be an effective way to assess its performance in terms of customer relationships.
