Marketing Audit

A marketing audit is the revision of your marketing system. It answers one important question. Are your marketing efforts aimed at bringing value to your customers and revenue to your business or keeping your marketing team busy?

In other words, did you spend your $1,000 on marketing because you knew it would bring you X sales or just because? Do you address today’s pain points of your audience or the ones you identified several years ago?

Marketing audit in a nutshell

Who needs a marketing audit?

Mature companies striving for efficient marketing or preparing to scale. Startups will benefit from going straight to digital strategy development, which is a simplified version of the marketing audit.

Why order an audit if we have an in-house marketing team?

Internal marketing teams know their market well. Expertise creates biases. Extrabrains will bring a different perspective, expertise and best practices learned in other markets.

How often should companies run a marketing audit?

Every time the CEO feels their marketing is inefficient. Preferably each time before developing a long-term marketing plan.

Marketing audit in detail

A marketing audit gives you several perspectives of your marketing performance:

• The big picture. It’s about understanding your customers’ needs, the relevance of your value proposition, and the clarity of your messages.
• Magnifying glass review of marketing tactics. Are you overspending with your paid traffic campaigns, is your blog fully SEO-optimized, is your onboarding comprehensive and sufficient, etc.?

The core stages of a marketing audit

1. Examine client’s marketing activities

2. Research the market: customers and competitors

3. Craft the action plan highlighting what to keep, change, stop or start doing

Point #1 is very individual for every client. Ideally, we would need to have access to all your marketing data, shadow, and interview your support team for some time to get a better understanding of your customers’ experience. Depending on the available data and your willingness to share it with us, this part might either be tiny or huge. Some clients prefer to skip it all and let us prepare the strategy with an “outside view” to avoid any biases.

Strategy audit

Strategy audit will verify if your daily marketing efforts are still aligned with your northern star. We will take a close look at the following elements:

• Understanding your customers’ pain points. Depending on the market, business setup, and the availability of internal data, we will ground our research on open-source data, interviewing your customers, or interviewing your target audience.
• Verifying your product-market fit. We will critically assess if your product features meet the demand of your customers.
• Understanding your competitive landscape. We will assess if you deliver value to your customer better than your competition.
• Verifying your product development pipeline. We will assess if your planned portfolio extensions or product development work will bring more value to your customers.
• Verifying the relevance and clarity of your marketing communication. We will make sure that your messages resonate with your audience and correctly communicate your value proposition.
• Optimizing the sales funnel. Based on the learnings, we will revisit your sales funnel to make sure your marketing communication is effective and efficient.

Digital marketing audit

A digital marketing audit will give you a fresh look at the efficiency of your marketing campaigns and clear instructions for improvement. It will cover the relevant channels and instruments for your market, including:

• SEO performance: on-site SEO, internal linking, keywords cannibalization cases, thin content cases, underperforming content requiring rejuvenation.
• Lead generation via paid traffic campaigns: targeting accuracy, landing page conversion optimization, the relevance of the messages, cases of overspending.
• Nurturing campaigns: relevance of lead magnets, the efficiency of the email marketing.
• Onboarding process: clarity of the product tour, stickiness of different product features.