How to Conduct a Marketing Audit
When attempting to improve your company’s standings in the public eye, it’s best to know where exactly you stand, and this is what a marketing audit achieves. Before enacting any major marketing campaigns, SEO improvements, or PR objectives, you’ll want to know the strong and weak spots in your company. You need to know the areas that can be improved and optimized to bring your website more traffic, your store more sales, and your business higher profits. This article takes you through the stages necessary to conduct a sweeping marketing audit that’ll put you in the best position to enact positive change for your brand exposure.
Schedule
A quick note about when to embark upon marketing audits: they should frequently be scheduled alongside your business’ marketing strategy, not just there to inspect when sales begin to dip. Scheduling a periodic audit of your marketing techniques, both its merits and pitfalls will help you tweak and tighten your campaign to avoid a cliff-edge drop in sales that can result from the less-than-frequent analysis of the marketing methods your company is using.
Questions
To begin your audit, you’ll need to ask a wide variety of questions and take a self-reflective and objective perspective to assess where your company lies in comparison to competitors. You need to use all the information at your disposal (and gather more information and data) to help you understand the state of your business at present. Think about your resources, your past marketing schemes, the possibility of outsourcing help, your customer-facing or customer interaction process, the profitability of your product, the structure of your website, and the keywords that’ll draw people looking for a company like yours to your online store. Your over-riding question should be: how can it be improved?
Review
Most companies will engage in forms of marketing without even realizing it; the classic example is web pages, which are your flagship digital marketing vehicle on the world wide web. Reviewing your current marketing apparatus is a savvy way of planning for a new and improved campaign. Companies use their advanced software to perform a comprehensive audit of your site’s infrastructure and SEO rankings to help you plan your next marketing campaign for increased exposure and sales. It’s about tinkering with your existing formula to draw in traffic thanks to the structure of the internet as a whole.
Analysis
Once you have your primary data gathered so you can see how your company fares when running through Google Analytics or other digital marketing data-crunching software, you’ll be able to conduct your analysis. You’ll be able to discover the weak points where you’ve been missing custom due to poor phrasing, a lack of pivotal keywords, or a poorly set-up website. The analysis leads you directly into planning your new marketing campaign and ends the auditing phase, but it must be conducted with the largest amount of up-to-date and reliable data possible to make meaningful gains for you and your company.
Marketing audits are a crucial part of business, helping you discover where you can improve your exposure and ensuring that your company is never in the position where it’s scrambling to understand why sales are plummeting. Use the tips above to get your next audit up and running with ease.