Conducting a regular marketing audit is an essential low-cost way to drive business improvement for any business. If you’re struggling to achieve growth and generate enough leads or sales inquiries, it could be down to the fact that your marketing strategies and communications are amiss.
If your business has plateaued and you don’t know where to turn to pick things up, it’s time you considered investing in an independent audit of your marketing plans and activities.
Marketing audits are like health check-ups, but for your business. Undertaking a marketing audit provides the opportunity for you to stand back and revisit your goals for the business, and if done right, can save you thousands of dollars. An audit allows you to realign your plans and once again question who your target audience is, redefine your brand persona, and check in with your milestones.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is waiting until the crisis point to conduct a marketing audit. Just like regular health checks, regular audits can be a great way to avoid future problems. If you’re a new business, an audit provides a great starting point to launch your initial strategy and can set you on the right path from the get-go.
When conducted at regular intervals, marketing audits can help you identify which strategies have worked and which haven’t, providing the chance to implement the necessary changes.
There’s no single definitive answer as to how much a marketing audit will cost or how long it will take, as the amount of work and feedback provided will, of course, be dependent upon your budget.
At Marketing Search, we recommend you undertake audits in small bites, progressively working through all the aspects of your marketing and communications activities in due course. Start in order of priority, addressing the most pressing requirements first and work your way through. Our search engine provides a comprehensive list of qualified marketing specialists in your area, so we can find a suitable marketing professional within your budget.
Not 100% sure what a marketing audit entails? This is a good basic article to give you a general overview.
Discovering what marketing tools, strategies, and measurements are working for your business is no easy task, especially if you have limited in-house resources. This is where hiring an experienced marketing professional comes in.
The first step to having an effective marketing audit done is to find someone suitably skilled and have them access the marketing and communication activities you wish to have reviewed. Hiring an independent outsider will not only save you time and ensure things are done correctly, but it’s also valuable to have someone not involved with the business look at things from an unbiased perspective.
You will generally need to provide such information as:
Whatever scope and budget you allocate, the marketing audit will (at the very least) give you the opportunity to step back, reconfigure what you’re doing, reboot your plans and clarify ways you can move forward productively.
Once the marketing audit has been done, if you don’t have the budget to engage a specialist to address the areas of concern, you will still be armed with the knowledge of what needs to be done. You can then set about prioritising your time and resources to address the issues and begin to make progress.
A professional marketing audit can provide a significant amount of value, as it objectively identifies where things are currently at and what areas need tweaking to improve results.
The level of advice and recommendations you receive from independent marketing auditors will progress as you move up the pay scale, from building simple action plans to highly detailed marketing plans that can be implemented internally or by hiring a specialist.
If any aspect of your current marketing activities is not meeting your expectations, including those under the management of your incumbent providers, or you simply need a chance to recalibrate for future growth, it’s time for an independent marketing audit be undertaken.
By choosing a quality specialist provider using Marketing Search, your marketing audit can be readily streamlined and customised in a cost-effective manner. Using our comprehensive search database, we can connect you with a specialised marketing professional who has intimate knowledge and proven experience in marketing activities that need objective, independent investigation and reporting.
At Marketing Search, we can search for the right marketing specialists to run an audit of most aspects of your marketing activities, either in isolation or collectively across multiple areas. Independent auditors can conduct assessments into many of your key marketing practices and processes including:
Written by Neil Anderson
20th December 2022
Neil Anderson is the founder and director of Growthandsearch.com a privately owned business specialising in the provision of business growth-related knowledge and services for Australian small and medium size businesses operating in the services sectors.