And why you should be thinking about doing your marketing audits more often
Marketing audits are often overlooked as they are time-consuming and don’t have a specific return on investment aligned with them. But they are a necessary part of any ongoing marketing strategy and marketing department’s efficient running. Marketing audits can be across the entire spectrum of marketing, or you can be auditing just a single channel. We often find when carrying out marketing audits that these retrospective reviews are not being carried out on any sort of regular basis. In some cases, they have never been carried out.
We’re going to dig into the benefits of carrying out marketing audits, across both the full spectrum and single channels, while also highlighting how you can prove a return on your investment in that auditing process within this blog.
Single Channel Marketing Efficiency
When looking at a single marketing channel, it is often reviewed independently away from the rest of the marketing mix. But this is wrong. You need to look at a single channel in relation to the rest of the marketing mix, especially when you’re carrying out marketing audits.
Social Media Marketing Audits
Each channel can have an impact on the other channels. For example, when you look at social media and you see one social media channel not performing, do you just assume that social media isn’t for you?
Some people will.
But others will see that as something to continue to experiment with, but on other channels, finding where their audience is.
Benefit
Finding a channel that isn’t working isn’t a bad thing; instead, you can see this as an opportunity to change and also reduce time being spent on ineffective channels, and another opportunity to make cost savings within marketing.
Email Marketing Audits
Now another common one for single-channel auditing is email marketing. An email marketing audit will look at a number of factors. First of all, email deliverability. This is a technical audit to make sure that everything is set up correctly. Because if it isn’t, you’re not going to be getting through to the audience you have. Next, we look at the data within the audience. We review their engagement, how long they’ve been in the list, and in some cases check to see if they are in multiple lists within the same platform.
Benefit
Here is one of the key benefits of single-channel marketing audits. By reviewing email marketing list data, and purging unengaged and poor-quality data from your system, you can actually see a positive ROI from the marketing audit through cost savings.
SEO Audits
SEO marketing audits are important to carry out regularly because best practices change, targets and goals change, and your website evolves. It is also a chance to do comparative auditing against your competitors, which highlights any opportunities and gaps that they have left or that are in your current strategy. It also helps to ensure that your organic search optimisation is in line with your overall marketing strategy.
Benefit
During the audit, you’ll find a large number of quick-win opportunities that can make a significant impact on your organic online presence.
Website Audits
Website audits don’t just look at SEO, but they look deeper into the website. A website audit will look at page structure, navigation, UX, data flow, content, interactivity, and much more. While the other channels are there to drive traffic towards the website, the website is responsible for educating, nurturing, and capturing your prospective customers’ attention for long enough to convert them into a lead or generate a sale.
Benefit
The benefit of carrying out marketing audits on your website, or even better, getting an external resource to carry out that audit, is that websites evolve over time and often get left unchecked. Yes, there will be visual updates to core pages. But digging down deeper into the content that actually has a significant impact on your site’s performance and your digital reputation, these parts often get left alone. A marketing audit on this channel will bring a renewed interest to these deeper parts of the website and reinvigorate other channels at the same time.
PPC Audits
Carrying out audits on your paid ad channels is key in maintaining effective control over your marketing budget. Without regular spot checks, how do you know that you’re spending money in the right places and being found for the right things? In the past, we’ve carried out audits on Google ad accounts which have highlighted potential savings of at least 20% of their ad spend just from poor maintenance of targeting alone.
Benefit
By carrying out an audit on your paid ad channels, you can very quickly recover the costs of carrying out a marketing audit against this channel alone. The bigger benefit here is that your channel will be able to be optimised more efficiently and that saving will compound over time.
There are a number of other channels that can have marketing audits carried out against them in a single-channel approach. I will talk about those in later pieces of content.
Full Spectrum Marketing Audits
These full spectrum marketing audits will cover all active channels that you are present on. You can even use these to audit channels you are not already present on, but your competition is. This helps you to find weaknesses in their strategy and opportunities for you to get easy wins with your marketing strategy.
When we carry out a full spectrum marketing audit for clients, we interview the client, talk to their current providers, gain access to their marketing tools, website, email marketing, CRM, social channels, and anywhere there is a marketing presence.
We don’t just look at the front-facing side of their marketing, so how good is their content? No, we look at the data as well. This is where the richness of marketing audits comes to light. We dig through each individual channel and also compare it with other channels in the marketing mix. We look at how each channel works with the other channels.
That way we can make our recommendations on which channels to keep, which channels don’t need to be there, and also which channels to consider adding to your overall strategy.
If you want to carry out your own marketing audit, drop us a message. We can either help you do it in-house or we can carry it out for you.
We go further on this in martech audits for B2B companies.
