Marketing Audit: A Comprehensive Guide

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A marketing audit improves the performance of your company’s marketing activities and improves the ROI of your advertising campaigns.

An audit should be a regular part of your marketing strategy and should not be carried out only in terms of crisis. When you perform marketing audits on a regular basis, it helps you to keep your campaigns in sync with your business goals resulting in improved profits.

If you are a marketer or agency looking to find the best steps to carry out marketing audits, then you are in the right place. In this article, I am going to discuss how to perform a marketing audit step by step.

Let’s start by understanding what marketing audit means, then I will discuss the benefits and components of marketing audit. Thereafter, I will share the exact steps to conduct a marketing audit comprehensively.

Contents

What is a Marketing Audit?

A marketing audit examines and analyzes the objectives and goals of a company’s marketing activities. An audit helps the company analyze its marketing efforts to see whether they are planned and executed efficiently and reach the original marketing plan’s goal.

Benefits of Marketing Audit

A thorough audit solves customer challenges and allows you to take a fresh look at your product or service.
It helps to identify the top-performing marketing channels.
You can find the highest sales-generating team in your organization.
It lets you check the weaknesses and strengths of your marketing efforts.
You get recommendations to improve the efficiency of your marketing campaigns.

Components of Marketing Audit

Marketing audit consists of several components. You have to analyze the different channels that are used in your marketing strategy along with the performance of your team.

Here is a breakdown of the different components of marketing audit:

1- Five Forces Analysis

Competitive Rivals
New Market Entrants
Substitute Products
Power of Suppliers
Power of Customers

2- SWOT Analysis

Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats

3- Website Audit

Web Design
Indexability
Page Speed
Traffic
User Experience

4- SEO Audit

Authority
On-Page SEO
Organic Rankings
Content
Link Profile

5- Social Media Audit

Organic and Paid
Brand Monitoring
Influencer Marketing

6- Email Marketing Audit

Email Campaigns
Email Content

7- PPC Audit

Search Engine Ads
Social Media Ads
Video and Retargeting Ads

8- Marketing Tools & Resources Audit

Efficiency of Teams
Pricing and ROI

9- Marketing Team Productivity Audit

Team Workflow
Staff Performance
Other Factors

Now that you have understood the various parts of the marketing audit, let’s proceed with a detailed audit of all the components.

How to Conduct a Marketing Audit

Every marketing audit requires you to work with past data. Therefore, we have to use various marketing audit tools to extract the required data at different stages of the audit.

Here is the detailed marketing audit plan of every component discussed in the last step:

1- Five Forces Analysis

Porter’s Five Forces Analysis is undertaken to understand the competitiveness of the business environment. This framework was created by Harvard School Professor, Michael Porter. It consists of the below five forces:

Competitive Rivals

Find out your competitive rivals. How many rivals do you have? What are their products and services? Which channels are they using for advertising? How much profit are they generating? Which are their best selling products? Are the customers happy with their services or products? You need to analyze everything.

You can use tools such as SEMrush and SpyFu to find out the traffic acquired by your competitors, the advertising channels they are using, the ad copies they are running, the estimated value of conversions they are having, the investment they are making to acquire, nurture, and convert customers.

Related: SEMrush Review

New Market Entrants

In every industry, new competitors might enter with a variety of new products and services. Some of these services might be better than yours. People are always in search of products or services offered on a lower budget and as these companies are new in the industry, they sometimes offer products and services at half of the price you are selling to your customers. Therefore, you should keep an eye on the new market entrants as they can pose a threat to your existing market share.

Substitute Products

Find out whether your customers are looking for a product substitute that you are selling. You can conduct surveys to identify the substitutes your customers are using and why. Based on the data, you should immediately improve your product or add a new feature to your existing product to stop people from joining other brands.

Power of Suppliers

Suppliers can raise their prices and exert pressure on businesses. The bargaining power of suppliers equals the bargaining power of customers. The more suppliers a market has, the higher will be the negotiation, and the risk of pressure will be less. On the contrary, if there are just one or two suppliers in the market, then they can apply pressure on the company by raising their prices or by reducing the availability of products. Therefore, find out how many suppliers are there in the market for the product you are selling. The more, the better.

Power of Customers

Analyze the buying power of customers.

2- SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Do you know what your business strengths are? If your answer is NO, then you must perform the strengths audit. First, you need to identify and list down the strengths you think your business has.

These strengths can be your employees, financial strengths, location, your product or service pricing, offered features, or customer service.

This audit helps you find the business strengths that you can further use to acquire more customers and to retain existing customers.

Weaknesses

Like strengths, almost every company has some weaknesses that they always try to improve. These weaknesses can include poor services, lack of management, less number of clients, poor teamwork, or business location.

By doing an audit, you find various strengths that can be solved. Solving them can make your clients network and relationship better. These small points can sometimes lead to huge loss in terms of revenue and branding.

Opportunities

By doing SWOT auditing, you may find new opportunities that help your business to grow. These opportunities can include new courses, services, products, training, technology or partnerships.

But sometimes these new opportunities can be a threat for your business. But how? For example, maybe you find a new service that you wish to launch but you found that the same service is already covered by your competitor.

So, you must analyze new market opportunities to keep updated with the trends.

Threats

Finding external threats is a great way to secure your business from any problem. Sometimes threats can be so big that your company can even lose clients. These threats may include new rivals, alternatives, an increase in competition, or increasing unemployment.

3- Website Audit

The first step is to audit your domain or website to bring out the elements that can be optimized for a better user experience.

Web Design And Responsiveness

Having a good website design is crucial in terms of user engagement. Since 50.81% of global traffic in 2020 was generated via mobile devices, you should not ignore the responsiveness of websites.

You can use tools like Mobile-Friendly Test and Responsinator to check website responsiveness.

Let’s take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test as an example, first visit the website. Now, enter your website URL as shown in the image below:

But if your site is not responsive like the above website then your competitors might outgrow your sales.

Indexability

Is your website indexable and are search engine bots able to scan your website? To get higher rankings and traffic, it is essential to get your website pages indexed.

To check the indexability of your website, you can use Google Index Checker by SmallSEOTools or install the SEO Indexability Check chrome extension.

Related: Make Google Index Your Site

First, put your domain name in the given field and click on “View Index Status”, same as the below image:

Now, as you can see in the image below, we are getting an “Indexed” status as a result.

But it is only for the home page, to check the indexability of every page on your website, you can use sitemap.xml. Sitemap.xml allows you to check which pages are indexed or not. To check the sitemap of your website, just type sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml at the end of your domain URL as described below.

Here, you can check all the pages on your website.

The other useful method to check web pages indexability is to use Google Search Console. To check, just go to “URL Inspection” and enter the webpage URL you want to check indexability status.

After a few seconds, you will get results similar to the image below.

As you can see, our page is successfully indexed on Google. If you get a not-indexed result, then you can click on the “Request Indexing” button to make an indexing request to Google.

Related: Online Sitemap Generators

Page Speed

Page speed is considered a top-ranking factor among Google’s 200 ranking factors. You can lose up to 7% conversion by just a delay of 100 milliseconds in your website speed. A good website speed is under 3 seconds, so try to make your website loads under 3 seconds to avoid losing conversions.

Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom can be used to check website speed. Apart from speed, you will also get other details like performance score, page size, and resource requests.

Related: Website Speed Test Tools

Let’s take Google PageSpeed Insights as an example. First visit the PageSpeed Insights and enter your website address as shown in the image below.

It will take a few seconds to run the analysis and after successfully analysing your website, PageSpeed gives you the speed scores on desktop and mobile.

Now, you need to check your competitor’s website score. For example, the Search Engine Land site.

As you can see, Search Engine Land has poor website speed as compared to Search Engine Journal.

To improve the website speed, we can take few steps:

Compressing images on the website.
Reducing server response time.
Removing unused CSS and JavaScript code.
Adding Lazy Loading on the website.
Using a good web hosting provider.

Traffic

Another important website audit component is traffic. You should know how many visitors are coming to your website so that you can set weekly and monthly traffic goals. To check traffic, you can use Google Analytics as almost every marketer uses this tool to check website traffic with other details like traffic source, location, bounce rate, page views, and sessions.

Related: Website Traffic Checkers

As a Google Analytics alternative, we can use Matomo, Finteza, and Woopra.

User Experience

When it’s about conversions, User Experience (UX) can make a huge impact on it. Doing a user experience audit can allow you to find loopholes in your website. Further, you can optimize these areas to boost websites UX.

Tools like Hotjar, Optimizely, and Crazy Egg can be helpful in optimizing user experience.

4- SEO Audit

SEO is an essential part of the success of any website. Analysing your websites SEO can give you opportunities to optimize your website for better performance. Below are the components of SEO auditing:

Authority

Having a good authority on your website can give you better rankings on the search results. We can calculate websites authority by metrics, DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority).

DA and PA are metrics introduced by Moz (leading SEO tool). To check authority, just click on this link and enter your website URL, after that you can check your domain authority as seen in the image below.

Related: Top Bulk DA Checkers

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is a must when it comes to website optimization. On-Page SEO audit checklist includes keyword content word count, density, XML sitemap, Robots.txt file, image alt tags, header tags (H1-H6), and meta title and description.

Related: Tips To Improve On-Page SEO

Auditing all these metrics manually is almost impossible. Here, we can use SEO auditing tools like SEOptimer, SEO Site Checkup, and SEMrush SEO Site Audit.

Organic Rankings

Do you know for which and how many keywords your website is rankings? Knowing organic rankings for a website will give you an overall performance idea that you can further use to optimize your website for keywords that are on 2nd, 3rd, or above pages on search results.

Related: How To Check Google Rankings

Ubersuggest and SEMrush are names of some tools that allow you to check the organic rankings of your website.

Content

“Content is King”, we all have heard this line in our life. Quality content can help you in winning the SEO game. Around 72% of marketers admitted that good content helps to increase user engagement and converts too. This stat describes that content is a must-have marketing channel for every website.

Content auditing lets you find pages with low or zero content. You can use tools like SEMrush Content Audit to perform content auditing.

Related: Best Content Writing Tools

Link Profile

Backlinks come under the top 3 ranking factors. Having quality backlinks is a very important and difficult task at the same time. The measurement of link quality depends on various metrics like domain authority, domain age, niche relevancy, location, and content.

Auditing your website’s link profile is a time-consuming task if done manually. To automate this process, marketers use tools like Ahrefs, LinkResearchTools, Majestic, URL Profiler, and Monitor Backlinks.

Related: SEO Link Building Tools

5- Social Media Audit

We need to audit social media in three faces that are organic, paid, and brand monitoring.

Organic and Paid

Organic and paid audit includes metrics like impressions, engagement rate, user interaction, clicks, followers, and conversion. Tracking social media performance can help you in boosting your brand name over social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

Tools like Sprout Social, Keyhole, and Socialbakers analyses your organic and paid performance over social media channels and gives you reports.

Brand Monitoring

Do you know how many people mention your brand on social media during conversations? Monitoring your brand on social media channels allows you to see how people are interacting and talking about your brand and services.

By brand monitoring, you can also avoid having a negative conversation about your brand on social media.

Awario and BrandMentions are some of the best tools that can help you in doing a complex task that is brand monitoring.

6- Email Marketing Audit:

According to research, around 293.6 billion was sent and received every day in 2019 and it will increase to over 347.3 billion by 2022. Here are the sub-topics comes under email marketing auditing:

Email Campaigns

When performing email campaigns audit, there are some metrics that include bounce rate, open rate, CTR (click-through rate), conversions, and unsubscribes rate. To create better email campaigns in future, you need to study and analyse all these things.

For your email marketing, if you are using email service providers like Sendinblue, Mailchimp or similar to these then you don’t need to use any external tool to audit the things. These email service providers provide you with in-depth performance reports of all your email campaigns,

Email Content

Are you sure you are using high converting and engaging subjects, body and other texts in your email? Having engaging subject lines and body text with proper multimedia like images and videos can boost CTR by 300%. Your active email marketing tools can help you in optimizing your email content.

Related: Best Email Marketing Examples

7- PPC Audit

In 2018, marketers spend around 50 million dollars on display advertising. If you or your clients are advertising products or services using ad networks like Google Ads and Bing Ads then performing PPC auditing is necessary.

Related: PPC Tips For Beginners

Key metrics included in the PPC audit are targeted keywords, ad copy, ad cost, location, and return on spending (ROI). Tools like WordStream Google Grader can help you in analysing your PPC campaigns.

Search Engine Ads

Search engine ads are one of the best ways to advertise your products and services online. You can run ads on search engines like Google and Bing. By using Google Ads and Bing Ads, you are enabled to run various ad campaigns on search engines.

Related: Top Google Ads Statistics

For a successful search engine ads audit, you need to measure your ad copies, bids, CTA (call to action), targeted channels, total ads running cost, and the return on investment (ROI). After that, you need to compare all these metrics with your competitor’s ad campaigns to check whether you are doing better or lacking behind.

Doing all these things manually is not a good option, you can use some tools like Spyfu and SEMrush.

For example, by using SEMrush’s Paid Marketing Tools, you are able to identify your competitor’s ad strategies and their ad copies.

Also, you can check competitors targeted countries, ad types, devices, and formats.

Social Media Ads

Similar to search engine ads, you should also audit your social media ads to check if you are lacking behind your competitors. Social media is emerging day by day, there are billions of users active on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Auditing your social media ads include:

Are you targeting the rough audience?
What are your targeted countries?
Check whether your targeted age group is right?
Are you adding the right CTAs?
Check mobile and desktop traffic on your ads?
Re-check your ad-copy? Are you writing converting content?

Apart from these, you also need to check the CPC (cost per click), CPI (cost per impression, your targeted keywords, and ROI.

There are some decent social media analysis tools that can help you in analysing your and your competitor’s social media ads campaigns. You can use tools like Phlanx and Social Blade.

For example, go to the Social Blade website and enter any Twitter profile username in the search box.

Now, it will analyse the Twitter profile you entered and give similar results as the image below.

Here, you can check the followers, following, likes, tweets, engagement rates and much more analytics data that you can use on your social media campaigns for better optimization.

Video and Retargeting Ads

Videos are getting more popular day by day. Whether it’s for entertainment or for education, People love to watch videos on their mobile and desktop. Brands use video marketing as one of the marketing methods.

Related: Video Marketing Trends

To audit video ads, you need to check which of your videos are doing poorly, areas where you can improve your video content, title and description of your videos, targeted keywords, good attractive thumbnails, video quality, and buyers intention.

Tools like TubeBuddy can help you in optimizing your videos and checking competitors’ video analytics.

For retargeting ads, you can use tools like AdRoll that allows you to retarget the ad campaigns again with full-proof strategies.

8- Marketing Tools & Resources Audit

Every business has lots of work like marketing, promotions, employee management, and other business-related work. Using marketing tools is very important especially if you are growing your business. Here is why marketing tools are important:

They help you in automating time-consuming tasks.
They help in tracking your marketing campaigns.
They help you identify weak points in your business.
They help you optimize existing or future products or services by creating various surveys.
They help convert traffic into leads and sales.
They help you provide excellent customer service.
They help track and analyze user engagement.

But the majority of these tools are paid, which means you pay some sort of money to use these tools. But for cost management, you need to measure where these tools are delivering a good return on investment.

9- Marketing Team Productivity Audit

In a marketing team, different people work with various designations like SEO, paid marketing, social media, email marketing and content marketing. And measuring employee productivity is something that gives you insights into how employees are working and their work performance.

The work environment is also an important aspect of good teamwork progress. Also, in this Covid time, almost every company is working remotely and in this case managing team and work is a bit difficult task.

Here, you can use tools like Trello, Asana, Slack, Zoho Workplace, and Teamwork. These tools allow you to track team performance, communication, project management, time tracking, collaboration, automatons, and document management.

Related: Project Management Tools

Team Workflow

When working in a team, it is important to have a workflow. You can use tools like Asana and Slack to manage your entire team.

Using these tools, you can assign work to every team member and track their working time and behaviour. Even you can do conversations via voice and video calls.

Staff Performance

Are you checking your staff performance? No, then you are missing areas where you can improve your business by tracking the team’s performance. You can use various time tracking software like Timeneye and TMetric to track your staff performance for any given task.

Checking the staff performance gives you an idea so that you know how much time is invested in a particular task by a team member.

Here is a guide on how you can evaluate staff:

You need to set performance standards.
You can set some specific goals like any work deadline.
Monitor the staff throughout the project completion or year.
Do a one-on-one or face-to-face session with the staff.
Provide your valuable feedback.

Based on these points, you can easily evaluate your staff and can give them perks like promotional or incentives.

Other Factors

There are other factors including how staff members are handling the clients. For this, you can use CRM software like Zendesk that also allows you to add team members to handle customers so that you can check their performance.

Also, whenever you want to notify your teams about any new update or new, you can use Slack or some other team management tool.

Conclusion

Marketing audits give you an opportunity to find any specific area in your marketing efforts that can be improved for better performance. Businesses perform marketing audits very often for their own brand or clients business. It is true that marketing audits take time but it is also worth the time investment.

So, we have covered every step included in a successful marketing audit. Whether you are in the digital, health, real estate or medical industry, the above guide can help you analyse your business for more growth.

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