Why every business can benefit from a marketing audit

Marketing audits are a key component in assessing how effective your marketing activities are performing. Carrying out regular marketing audits will help you to make confident, data-driven decisions when conducting your marketing campaigns, and you'll feel confident in making decisions on where to strategically place your time and budget to make the biggest impact for your brand. In this guide, I’ll be sharing all the details on the importance of a marketing audit, the key components, how to perform a marketing audit on your business, the process and best practices to ensure you’re doing it right. Let’s jump in. 

Key takeaways

• Perform regular marketing audits: To succeed in business, you need to perform regular marketing audits. I suggest a minimum of once a quarter to ensure your marketing activities stay on track. 

• Data-driven insights: Data is power. Use your data to assess what’s working and what’s not. Use these insights to drive your next marketing campaign and consider what needs the most resources based on your data insights into your current marketing. 

• Really dig deep in your research: Marketing audits take time. But the time you take is well worth the investment. Really dig deep into your marketing activities to nail what works and what needs improvement to create a clear growth vision for your future marketing strategy. 

• Stay ahead of the game: Perform regular marketing audits to keep an eye on the market, customers and competitors to have a clear understanding of what’s going on and strategically align your strategy to stay ahead of the game. 

What is a marketing audit?

A marketing audit is an in-depth evaluation of your current marketing activities. Your key goal from a marketing audit is to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategies and campaigns. Going into a deep examination to determine what’s going well and what needs improving. To pinpoint what to spend time and resources on so that your marketing activities align with your business objectives.

Assessing all the tiny details like your marketing channels' performance, what your customers are saying, competitor analysis and trend insights. All this will be explained later in this article. 

Benefits of a marketing audit 

Holding regular marketing audits on your brand produces a wide range of benefits. Sure, it takes a bit of time, but the payoff? Big. Here's a rundown of the benefits of a marketing audit.

Producing more engaging content 

The more you know about your customers, the better your content will be. If you know how to speak to them, it will form a better connection between you and the customer. Relationships will start, trust will build, and they will more likely want to buy from you. 

Higher conversion rates

A marketing audit assesses what’s working and what’s not working so well. Finding out what works means you can focus more time and energy on those marketing activities, and your conversion rate will naturally increase. 

Data-driven decision making

You’ll keep seeing this repeated throughout this blog, as this point is so important. Data is everything, and your data is king. These are the hard results that show you how well your marketing is performing. It shows solid results on the marketing strategies that are working and those not doing as you hoped. This data is key in driving the direction of your future campaigns and knowing where to place your resources. 

How to do a marketing audit 

Now you know the importance of a marketing audit, let's get stuck into how to conduct one for your brand with our marketing audit checklist.

Step 1: Define your objectives

Without establishing clear objectives for your marketing audit, you’re really taking a shot in the dark. Before conducting your marketing audit, you must understand why you’re doing it in the first place. What are you looking to achieve or highlight from your marketing audit? Are you looking to assess the success of your recent marketing campaign? Perhaps you want to explore more opportunities for business growth or want to improve your current marketing performance. 

Define those objectives before getting stuck into your marketing audit. Having these goals will streamline your process and ensure a clear vision for your marketing audit. 

Step 2: Gather data

Now the juicy stuff. It’s time to start digging into your data and highlighting the trends within your marketing. Collect data from all the marketing channels that you’re currently using within your marketing campaigns. Be thorough in your search and collect data from all angles. Assess the data from all marketing assets like your images, videos, text, visuals, marketing collaterals, and anything that can give in-depth insight into the performance of your marketing campaigns. 

Data can be collected using a variety of analytic tools, so make sure you have good marketing tools and software in place to track, record and display your marketing activities. I highly recommend investing in some software to keep an eye on your marketing efforts. Trust me, they’re very much worth the investment. 

Step 3: Assess your marketing performance

It’s time to assess your current marketing efforts against your key performance indicators (KPIs). This includes your conversion rates, customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value. Again, this is collected through data on the all-important analytics software I mentioned earlier. Use these insights to assess the marketing activities that are working and need improvement. It’s important to compare this data to industry insights to assess your position in the market. 

When assessing your performance, you must thoroughly assess all marketing channels to really gain deep insight into your current marketing. These marketing channels can include: 

• Strategy and planning

• Brand positioning

• Digital and traditional campaigns

• Content and SEO

• Social media and email marketing

• Analytics and reporting

• Customer journey and touchpoints

Step 4: Get researching on the market, competitors and trends 

Now for some outside insights. Let's find out what’s going on out in the market, with your competitors and what your audience wants to help direct your marketing campaigns. 

Assess the trends

What’s going on in the market? Any new trends within your industry and your customers? Things change fast, especially in marketing, so it’s super important to keep your finger on the pulse and stay in tune with where the trends are headed.

Important reminder: Before investing your resources into a new trend, make sure you do your research first. Not every marketing trend is right for your company, so assess whether the new marketing strategy aligns with your business objectives before diving headfirst.    

Your competitor insights 

Do you know what your competitors are up to right now? Performing a competitor analysis is an essential part of any marketing audit, so you know what the competition is up to and identify gaps and opportunities in the market. 

When conducting your competitor analysis, do your research on all their marketing activities on social media campaigns, their website and their overall marketing approach. Use this data to identify what they’re doing well at, and use this to assist with your marketing campaigns. 

Your customer insights 

Gather insights into what your customers are saying about your brand. Great places to look are review sites like Google My Business, Trustpilot and Tripadvisor to gain an understanding of their thoughts. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok are great places to head to review comments on what your audience is saying. 

Use this data to paint a picture of what your customers want so that you can better connect with them and build stronger relationships. Give your customers what they want, and your performance will ultimately level up.

Perform a SWOT analysis  

Another great way of gathering data is by performing a SWOT analysis. Essentially, a SWOT analysis is a tool used to assess your brand’s (S) Strengths, (W) Weaknesses, (O) Opportunities and (T) Threats. It’s a really handy tool to find out what you’re doing well at, what needs improvement, critical things to focus on and insights that can help your business grow. 

Step 5: Make data-driven decisions 

From all the data you collected from your market research, SWOT analysis, competitor insights, your own data and key performance metrics, now you’ve got all the knowledge to make data-driven decisions on your future marketing campaigns. Use the data to adjust your marketing plan and allocate resources to where you find great opportunities.

A fully comprehensive audit should provide you with clear, actionable insights into how to direct your marketing strategy, which follows your business goals and objectives. If you still feel unsure about your direction, it’s probably time to dig a little deeper into research. 

Marketing audit best practices

Be thorough in your research 

Leave no stone unturned and really dig deep into your marketing. The more you discover in your marketing campaigns, the more successful your marketing audit and your future marketing strategies will be. Sure, it might take a bit of time, but the deeper you dig, the bigger the rewards.

Deliver actionable insights 

The main goal of your marketing audit is to identify and highlight the actionable insights you can implement immediately to improve your marketing strategy. Your report should go beyond data diagnostics, but prioritised recommendations with timelines and measurable outcomes. 

Focus on identifying key areas that can lead to improving your marketing strategy and generating growth results. Whether your actionable insights involve updating your social media marketing campaign or assigning your budget to other marketing activities, make smart actions based on your findings. 

Document everything

From key data to all the small findings, make sure to document everything you discover during your marketing audit. Even the small things can lead to big ideas and discoveries later down the line. 

Continually assess and refresh 

The market doesn’t stay the same, so why should your marketing strategy? Something that worked last year does not mean that it will work today. Keep conducting marketing audits to maintain a deep understanding of your current marketing activities and adjust to what is working best. 

The continuous monitoring of your marketing strategy will give you that edge of keeping up to date with the current trends and ahead of the game. It will help you to adapt quickly to change and ensure you’re not losing resources on marketing activities that are becoming ineffective. 

How can we help?

At Mogfish Marketing, we take marketing audits beyond the basics. We’ll find the issues and give you clear, actionable steps to fix them. Need a fresh pair of eyes on your website? Let’s have a cuppa chat! Or head to our marketing audit and marketing strategy services page to explore how we can help you.

Marketing audit FAQs

How often should a marketing audit be conducted?

We recommend that you conduct regular audits to ensure your marketing stays on track. The world is changing, meaning your marketing activities need to adapt regularly, too. I conduct marketing audits once every three months (four times annually) to ensure the marketing for my clients stays relevant and continues to align with their business goals. 

How long does a marketing audit take?

The timeframe of a marketing audit really depends on the size of a company and its marketing activities. Marketing audits can take anywhere from two days to two weeks.

If your team simply does not have the time to take on the complexity of a marketing audit, that’s where an external marketing expert can help. Have a cuppa with Lauren at Mogfish Marketing to explore your marketing audit options. 

Who should perform the marketing audit – internal team or external marketing expert?

For best results, a marketing audit performed by an external marketing expert rather than the internal team will be more beneficial for your brand. Using an external marketing expert for your marketing audit will mean that you will receive a fresh, unbiased perspective on your marketing. While your team may have a deeper understanding of the brand, an external marketing expert will learn this too, while discovering opportunities for improvement that your team might miss. 

Is there ongoing support after the audit?

If you choose to work with Mogfish Marketing for your marketing audit, full support is offered after the audit is conducted. Support includes strategic guidance to align with business goals post-audit and educating teams on audit findings. 

We also offer full marketing strategy and content creation services, so if you want to outsource the management of your marketing campaigns or are looking for support on your strategy, we’re here to help with that too!