If you own a business or you are a manager, there is no doubt you conduct a financial audit. But how often do you do a marketing audit? This is one key area that many people ignore, but your business success depends on it.
Marketing auditing is as important as financial auditing, the reason why we put all the information you need to know about. You will learn what marketing auditing is, its importance, and how to conduct it in this article.
What is a Marketing Audit?
A marketing audit is described as a comprehensive and systematic analysis of internal and external business marketing environments. It covers the goals, objectives, strategies, and principles, which pinpoint weaknesses and possible opportunities. With this information, appropriate action can be taken to help the business perform better in the market.
Marketing audits help you, as a business manager or marketer, to understand the prevailing marketing conditions and formulate a marketing plan.
Who Should Conduct a Marketing Audit?
Like financial auditing, marketing auditing should be done by a third party. A professional hired by the organization. You can also have an in-house team to do it, but that is not recommended because of the possibility of a biased outcome.
With a professional marketing auditor, you get unbiased results and recommendations depending on the analysis conducted. Also, these experts know how to do the business audit and present the results. They are often comprehensive and systematic.
Why Do You Need to Conduct a Marketing Audit?
What is a marketing audit? The question is already answered, and now we move to reasons why it should be done. Here, we present five main reasons why conducting a marketing audit is crucial for your business.
Help to realign your business activities with goals
Every business, whether a startup or a large enterprise, has a marketing strategy. But how do you know that the business strategy you implemented is in line with the business goals? Your marketing plan can lead you astray if you do not conduct a marketing audit regularly to evaluate the performance of a given strategy.
With a marketing audit, you can look back at your marketing plan and business plan. That ensures your daily activities contribute positively towards achieving the goals.
Identify the Performance Marketing Strategies
Marketing is a resource-intensive activity for any business. Managers and entrepreneurs spend on this activity to boost sales, but how do you know how it performs? Continuously running an advertising campaign that does not generate leads or increase sales is a loss to an organization.
Conducting a marketing audit will help you know the performance of a marketing strategy. With this information, you decide on what should be improved, implemented, or stopped.
Identify New Marketing Strategies
Market conditions keep on changing. A marketing strategy that was effective months ago can become obsolete or better ways of marketing your business can come up. With detailed research conducted during marketing auditing, you can discover what your competitors are doing better than you. You get exposed to new ideas and better marketing strategies for your organization.
Understand Competition in the Market
As part of marketing auditing, you should do market research, understand your target audience, and evaluate the competition. That helps you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. You can, therefore, formulate a better approach to get to your target audience.
Save Your Organization Resources
A regular marketing audit will let you know if the implemented marketing strategy is working or just a waste of time and money. The earlier you identify that, the better for your business.
How to Conduct a Marketing Audit
Step 1: Choose an Auditor
You can do auditing yourself or hire a third party, but the latter option is preferred. A professional third-party marketing auditor is more reliable because they will objectively do the job.
Step 2: Mark a Date on the calendar
Marketing auditing should be done regularly. That means you can set a quarterly plan, semi-annual plan, or annual plan. Set a date when the exercise should be started and repeat it at regular intervals. Inform the chosen auditor, who should agree with the dates.
Step 3: Set the Objectives
Objectives are the goals or reasons why you need to conduct the auditing. Ask yourself what you intend to gain from it and the improvements you want to make. Setting objectives will guide you through the entire auditing process.