Most organizations are familiar with financial or quality audits, but when’s the last time you heard about a sales and marketing audit?
^Probably right before you clicked on this article.
The word audit has a lot of negative connotations, but when you’re the one choosing to “get audited” it’s the best thing in the world for your organization—because you’re the one choosing to find areas for improvement, instead of pretending they don’t exist.
A TOTAL Marketing Audit
An effective marketing audit looks at your entire sales/marketing funnel from top to bottom, and from bottom to top.
Any assessment of this type should include a review of your:
- Marketing strategy
- Tactics
- Target audience
- Branding
- Messaging
- Channel engagement
- Performance metrics
- Client experience
The key takeaways you’re looking for
Strengths and weaknesses. Pinpointing what you are doing well and what you could improve upon sounds simple enough, but sometimes you are too close to see clearly. Getting an objective and outside perspective is the key to understanding how your audience is hearing you—or how they might be tuning you out.
Strategic planning. An effective audit will evaluate where you are right now and the path you need to be on to reach your 5- and 10-year goals. If you have plans to scale, your marketing strategy and spending need to align with that.
Target audience engagement. In our experience, sometimes the best thing a marketing audit can provide is a reset of focus. If your ideal customer walked in right now, what would they look like? What would they be looking for? What questions could you answer for them? Marketing messaging has a tendency to drift all over the place if you don’t stay focused on speaking to your ideal customer in clear, compelling, and creative ways.
Branding and messaging. When you go to a job interview, you’ve got to look your best. That alone won’t get you the job—you’ll have to actually be proficient to do that—but looking polished and saying the right things is a good start. Your marketing is the ultimate job interview with potential clients, and your marketing audit should be the practice interview that helps you to see areas where your branding and messaging aren’t aligned.
Channel optimization. Maybe you are killing it on Facebook, but your email campaigns are hardly ever opened. Perhaps your website gets a lot of traffic, but your Instagram account is like a playground after the ice cream truck drives by—deserted. A marketing audit should help you understand what is underperforming, what you should do about it (if anything), and what opportunities you have to make a bigger impact.
Is it time for a TOTAL Marketing Audit?
If you’ve never had a marketing audit or it has been more than a year since your last one—it’s time.
Let’s talk about what a TwoTone TOTAL Marketing Audit could do for you.
With more than 10 years of agency experience, Jenny has had the privilege of working with a large variety of brands. She loves partnering with other business owners and entrepreneurs, and specializes in brand development. From digital marketing to online course creation, Jenny’s knowledge and skillset has prepared her to be a successful creative director.
