For many of us, the very word audit is intimidating, conjuring images of numbers-packed spreadsheets and sums that never seem to add up the same way twice. Put marketing in front of it, and now you have an even more daunting term. Yet conducting regular marketing audits and marketing asset audits—ideally once a year, according to most experts—is a key to profitably growing and maintaining your business.
Fortunately, conducting a marketing audit isn’t as complicated as you might fear. “It just involves taking a careful look at all the efforts you’ve got in place,” says marketing consultant Susan Tyson, who specializes in conducting audits. “Start by looking at the very big picture: your goals, target audience, how well you understand them, how well you’re communicating your brand message. From there you can drill down and look at the individual channels. Take a look at all your campaigns, what works, and what could be improved—your email campaigns, your websites, your sales collateral, etc.”
If that still sounds like too much of a hassle or a strain on your already-tight resources, consider the costs of not regularly auditing your marketing. For starters, we all know the axiom about not being able to improve what we don’t measure. If you can’t qualify your goals and quantify the ROI of the marketing efforts you’re making to reach those goals, you’re all but guaranteed to be overspending on some tactics and underspending on—or flat out overlooking—others. “There could be marketing efforts going on that because they’ve been around for so long, you forgot they’re there,” Tyson says. “There could be programs you had instituted some time ago and maybe stopped using but you’re still paying for.”
By the same token, without knowing what marketing assets you have access to, you could end up scrambling when the time comes to implement a new program or campaign, says Colleen Sabatino of consultancy Sabatino Marketing LLC. “You need to be sure you have the freelancers, content, and other resources necessary to achieve your goals.” Otherwise, you might find yourself scrambling at the last minute, “and that could cost you more if you have to rush to meet a deadline. At the same time, when you see what you already have to work with, that could change the direction of your marketing.”
Conducting your marketing audit now, as you prepare to close out your books at the end of the year, will equip you to make the new year successful. So, let’s get started.
For many of us, the very word audit is intimidating, conjuring images of numbers-packed spreadsheets and sums that never seem to add up the same way twice. Put marketing in front of it, and now you have an even more daunting term. Yet conducting regular marketing audits and marketing asset audits—ideally once a year, according to most experts—is a key to profitably growing and maintaining your business.
Fortunately, conducting a marketing audit isn’t as complicated as you might fear. “It just involves taking a careful look at all the efforts you’ve got in place,” says marketing consultant Susan Tyson, who specializes in conducting audits. “Start by looking at the very big picture: your goals, target audience, how well you understand them, how well you’re communicating your brand message. From there you can drill down and look at the individual channels. Take a look at all your campaigns, what works, and what could be improved—your email campaigns, your websites, your sales collateral, etc.”
If that still sounds like too much of a hassle or a strain on your already-tight resources, consider the costs of not regularly auditing your marketing. For starters, we all know the axiom about not being able to improve what we don’t measure. If you can’t qualify your goals and quantify the ROI of the marketing efforts you’re making to reach those goals, you’re all but guaranteed to be overspending on some tactics and underspending on—or flat out overlooking—others. “There could be marketing efforts going on that because they’ve been around for so long, you forgot they’re there,” Tyson says. “There could be programs you had instituted some time ago and maybe stopped using but you’re still paying for.”
By the same token, without knowing what marketing assets you have access to, you could end up scrambling when the time comes to implement a new program or campaign, says Colleen Sabatino of consultancy Sabatino Marketing LLC. “You need to be sure you have the freelancers, content, and other resources necessary to achieve your goals.” Otherwise, you might find yourself scrambling at the last minute, “and that could cost you more if you have to rush to meet a deadline. At the same time, when you see what you already have to work with, that could change the direction of your marketing.”
Conducting your marketing audit now, as you prepare to close out your books at the end of the year, will equip you to make the new year successful. So, let’s get started.
Top-Level Audit: Marketing and Marketing Asset Audit
Some people use marketing audit and marketing asset audit interchangeably. They aren’t interchangeable! A marketing asset audit is a physical audit in which you inventory and analyze your entire library of marketing assets, tools, and skills. Throughout this process, you’ll gauge whether your found assets are sufficient to use into the future by determining their past purpose and success as well as future viability and useability. This audit should include assets that are both physical and digital: sales and marketing collateral and content (print and digital), landing pages, blogs, video and images, facility signage, trade show materials, branded merchandise, etc. Most audit specialists advise including the members of your marketing team and their specific skills as assets. A colleague’s knowledge of Figma, Photoshop, InDesign, or HubSpot may not be tangible, but it’s definitely an asset that is being used to achieve goals.
A marketing audit identifies and reviews marketing functions and tactics. We suggest structuring it as a series of smaller, focused audits of your marketing efforts: digital marketing, marketing automation, marketing channels, event marketing, blog posting, CRM, SEO, analytics, etc. Document existing benchmarks, goals, objectives, marketing processes, assigned owners, etc.
Both audits should conclude with a performance evaluation and a look-back report on conformity and execution.
Top-Level Audit: Goals
Most likely, your organization has some top-level goals: to increase the top line X percent and the bottom-line Y percent. But what are the supporting goals that will enable your business to reach these overall goals? Perhaps it’s growing your customer base, increasing your average order value, generating repeat orders from existing clients, winning a new audience, expanding your product line, boosting web traffic, or, most likely, some combination thereof. Be specific about the parameters you’ll use to determine success: for instance, “within 12 months we will increase our customer file of active buyers by 8 percent without exceeding a customer acquisition cost of $12.50, and at least half those new customers will be from businesses with more than 500 employees.”
Each supporting goal is apt to require a different suite of marketing assets and functions. If you intend to attract more younger customers, you likely want to invest more in social media and ensure you have the SEO keywords in place to attract them to your website, whereas if your top priority is increasing your average order value, you might want to promote product bundles at the point of sale. But don’t worry about which assets you need for each goal just yet. At this point you want to simply rank these goals by highest to lowest priority, with key performance indicators for each.
Top-Level Audit: Audience
Once this goal audit is completed, you want to analyze your audience. You can’t be confident that you have the optimal marketing assets if you can’t define your target audience. Don’t forget that audiences change over time, as do their media consumption habits. The customers who accounted for the lion’s share of your revenue three years ago might have aged out of your offering. Or maybe the psychographics of your target market remained the same but these individuals no longer respond to the same types of marketing: those who relied most heavily on, say, search engines the last time you conducted audience research might now turn to blogs and influencers before making a purchase.
As you well know, the ways to define and segment your customer base are almost limitless. Less important than how you identify your customers—by demographics, psychographics, firmographics, or behavior—is that you do so, period, and then compare your target audience with your existing one. Only then can you assess the gaps between the audiences you need to reach to achieve your goals and the audiences you have—and from there determine which marketing tools will help close those gaps.
Top-Level Audit: Competitors
Hand in hand with defining your target market is analyzing your competitors, in keeping with the axiom “Keep your customers close and your competitors closer.” We dedicated a previous article to this topic (“Competitive Research: Understanding the Who, What, Where, and When of Your Competition,” Q2 2023 issue of BEYOND PRINT). When homing in on your competitors within your target markets, catalog which marketing tools they use. This could reveal opportunities they’re taking advantage of that you’re overlooking. A direct competitor that has for years been mailing print catalogs to an audience nearly identical to yours clearly has found the practice profitable, so perhaps you should test the catalog waters as well.
Campaigns, Assets, and Data
Now it’s time to examine your current marketing plan, the campaigns within it, and the channels used to carry them out. When listing each marketing campaign, be sure to map it back to at least one of your supporting goals. If a campaign doesn’t benefit any of them, note that. Perhaps you’ll discover you overlooked an ongoing goal, such as maintaining your share of voice in your market sector. Or maybe you’ll conclude that this particular program should be modified to serve one of your supporting goals or even terminated. Likewise, every marketing channel used by your organization and every asset within each channel should support at least one campaign.
Once you complete this portion of your audit, you’ll know what you have in terms of assets and campaigns. Congratulations! But—and you knew there was a “but” coming—this information is not actionable if you don’t know how successful the marketing programs and campaigns have been.
Measuring the success of your marketing efforts might entail gathering less-than-obvious metrics. Let’s say your organic Instagram posts about your annual widget sale generated twice the online sales as your organic Facebook posts about the same sale, despite appreciably more people seeing the Facebook posts. Taken at face value, that would suggest expending more resources on Instagram than Facebook. But a deeper dig might reveal that the Facebook link to your website’s sale page was broken or that other, more successful Facebook posts used in situ photography rather than the straight-on product shot in the underperforming post. Or an email campaign that at first glance might appear successful could have generated enough unsubscribes and spam reports to impact list size and even deliverability going forward. Or your email response might have dropped significantly, but only after you introduced a seemingly successful SMS campaign that did little more than cannibalize your email sales. In a marketing audit, as in marketing, nothing exists in a vacuum.
And . . . Action!
Now you have the information you need to map out your marketing efforts for the coming year with confidence that each effort will support one of your goals. The metrics will show whether unprofitable campaigns need to be updated, revamped, or terminated—and if the latter, whether that means you can eliminate the production of certain assets. For instance, if the data indicates that a certain affiliate program should be discontinued, you no longer need to produce digital assets in the requisite dimensions if they’re not used for anything else.
Conversely, if you opt to proceed with a new program or channel, your catalog of assets can show you what elements you already have and what you still need to create. If you’re launching a print catalog, for instance, you might have enough product and lifestyle photography among your digital assets that you don’t need to set up a new photo shoot or you just need a smaller, less expensive shoot than anticipated.
“People tend to jump to add things without analyzing what they have,” Sabatino says. “Something else people get wrong is not mapping back to their goals. Just accumulating assets, if they’re not working toward the goals you have set, isn’t worthwhile. Your marketing audit and asset audit are almost like a checklist: Yes, I have this. No, I don’t have this. What would it cost to get that?”
Sabatino compares conducting an annual audit to spring cleaning. “Nobody wants to do it, but once you do, you realize what a difference it can make.”
In-House or Outsource?
When opting to conduct a marketing audit in-house, organizations generally have two reasons for doing so: it costs less to use staff than to hire an outside consultant, and no outside consultant can possibly know your business as well as you do. Yet both of those can be compelling reasons to turn to a third-party expert to lend assistance or perform your audit.
By viewing your marketing tools and efforts from an entirely new point of view, an outside source might suggest approaches and tactics that might never have occurred to you or that you didn’t even know about (after all, if you had, you might have already tried them). A third party will undoubtedly have firsthand experience with tools and methodologies that worked for other businesses, both within your market sector and outside it.
Outsiders might also have innovative ways to measure your results and be able to see, from their more distanced and impartial point of view, how one campaign affects another. What’s more, because they’re not as close to your business as you are, they can have a better sense of how your customers and prospects—who, after all, are also outside parties—are receiving and interpreting your messages. To you, as the creator of the marketing campaigns, it might seem obvious how your catalogs and e-newsletters are communicating your unique selling proposition. But an outsider can point out where that message isn’t clear.
And because they don’t know how much blood, sweat, and tears went into creating a particular campaign or how much the owner’s spouse loves the postcard creative, an impartial auditor will find it easier to be brutally honest about what appears to be working and what isn’t. Writers from William Faulkner to Stephen King have said how important it is to be ruthless and “kill your darlings”—favorite turns of phrase, characters, and subplots that don’t benefit a piece of writing. It’s just as important, especially to your bottom line, to do the same with your marketing campaigns and assets. Doing so isn’t easy, of course, which is why writers have editors and marketers and turn to third-party auditors.
As for the other reason some businesses give for conducting audits in-house—that it’s cheaper to do so—this may very well be a false economy. For one thing, what will be the cost to your business to take a few employees away from their existing tasks to perform the marketing audit? “The biggest challenge is that people just don’t do the audits,” says Tyson. “They’re very often relegated to the very bottom of the task list.”
For another, the same fresh perspective and lack of attachment to the status quo that a third party brings to analyzing your marketing also enables them to discover cost savings along with new, more profitable tactics—all of which can pay for the expense of hiring the outside auditor while also improving your marketing.
This article originally appeared in BEYOND PRINT as syndicated content and is subject to copyright protections. All rights reserved. Image(s) used under license from shutterstock.
