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Digital Marketing Audit
Recommendations based on a comprehensive, strategic assessment of your company's marketing activities and objectives.
What is a Marketing Audit?
A marketing audit is a comprehensive, strategic assessment of a company's marketing activities and objectives.
Today, companies engage in a myriad of public relations, marketing, and advertising. It can start to feel like you are stuffing everything into a packed garage. How do you know if it's working? If your communication is properly integrated? Or, if you are overdoing it?
The audit takes into account all aspects of the company's marketing strategy, including its brand, mission, vision, market, goals, target audience, communication, distribution, and results.
In a nutshell, the audit provides an opportunity to assess how well aligned and effective marketing and communication are with the desired goals of the company.
Marketing Audits should be:
- Comprehensive:
Evaluates all internal and external communications and marketing efforts.
- Systemized: Follows a series steps in accordance with current industry standards.
- Free from Bias: Independently conducted to avoid influence from those who are implementing the company's plan.
- Repeated: Conducted yearly or every two years.
- Productive: Produces data-driven recommendations.
Our Audit Process
Time to organize the garage.
Get to Know You
A Proper Introduction
The marketing audit process typically begins with a review of the company's brand identity, business goals, and current strategies.
Remember, our goal is to identify strengths and weaknesses in the company's marketing strategy, as well as to identify any potential areas of improvement. Keep in mind that there is no right or wrong answer. By taking a look in the mirror, we can paint a clearer picture of where you are and where you would like to be.
We will provide you with an online form to complete which will help us scope the project and estimate a timeline. Every business is different, so the process will vary based on your needs.
Market Analysis
Targets, Competitors, Trends
The next step deals with looking at the space you occupy so that we can benchmark your performance against competitors and assess overall competitiveness in the marketplace.
Target Audience
While we look at the current engaged audiences in different spaces, we want to also identify who the target audience. This will help to identify potential gaps in reach. Who are the primary and secondary targets? What are the challenges that they face? Demographics and psychographics? Types of media and media habits that they use? Ideal outcome with stated audiences?
Competitive Analysis
Identify 3-5 competitors and run a high-level comparison of each of the organization. The analysis can look at size, location, services, market penetration, digital footprint, sentiment, strengths, weaknesses etc.
Industry Trends
Primary and secondary research into your industry. Where are the key places to be for your industry? What are the top trending communication strategies, topics, and distribution for your industry? What technical resources do they employ?
Beyond Yourself
The key to this part of the process is to turn the mirror outward to get a clear view of the space you want to occupy.
The Audit
Internal and External Communications Review
There are six major categories of communication pathways. Using a systemized approach, we will collect relevant data, organize it, and perform an analysis.
The audit will be broken down based on the following Integrated Marketing Communication Channels, with detailed information for:
- Advertising: Television, radio, print, signage, SEM
- Sales Promotions: Loyalty programs, discounts, coupons, BOGO, samples
- Public Relations: Media relations, press kit, content distribution, community relationships, brand awareness and sentiment, internal communications
- Brand Visibility: Product placement, venue identification, event sponsorship, licensing opportunities, branded merchandise, brand cohesiveness
- Digital Platforms: Website, social media, email campaigns, SEO, SEM, CRM
- Personal Contact: Sales process, contact centers, customer services, client communication, influencers
Time to Dance
Findings and Recommendations
In addition to having access to the raw data, you will also be provided a report that includes high-level summaries for each category and subcategory, examples, and key recommendations.
Designed with your branding, the report can serve as strategic guideline for your management and leadership teams. A typical report will be organized in the following way:
- Introduction:
Organization background, mission, vision, brand identify, business goals, current communication strategy
- Market Analysis: Competitor analysis, industry trends, target audience, insights
- Audit: Key findings, examples, and recommendations for all integrated communication pathways
- Recommendations: Current strengths and weaknesses, specific suggestions for where to increase or decrease efforts, gaps are identified, and action items are laid out. The report is provided to you as a PDF and can be presented to your team.
Next Steps
Implementation is Key
The marketing audit is an important tool for ensuring that a company's marketing activities are aligned with its business objectives and that its marketing strategy is effective. Your audit may have identified areas for improvement that we can help with such as website design, content creation, social media campaigns, integrated marketing campaigns, SEO and more. We are happy to discuss future engagements and support for your company as well as recommend trusted providers.
Audit
Pricing
Like financial audits, the cost of a marketing audit will vary based on the time requirements.
We offer free consultations to learn about your needs and size of the engagement. A proposal with a detailed plan, estimated timeline, and pricing structure will be sent following the scoping call.
Marketing Audit Tips
Learn how to improve your marketing, public relations, and advertising.
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