Marketing audits for small businesses should be done semi-annually.
When did you last perform a marketing audit for your small business?
Most small businesses wear many hats and don’t have enough time or resources to give their marketing the attention it deserves. That’s why Matrix Marketing Group is here to help. Ge a marketing audit template free.
We specialize in creating powerful, organic digital solutions to drive real business results. From website design and development to email marketing campaigns and social media management, we have the skills and expertise to help your business grow. Contact us today to get started!
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you know what your monthly web traffic is?
- Do you know which web pages are driving the most traffic and why?
- How are you doing relative to your competitors?
If you don’t have those rights, you should go through a marketing audit soon. You’re missing a lot of low-lying fruit and might have a few blind spots. With Matrix Marketing Group’s expertise, we’ll help you identify where you should invest your resources. We’ll create a plan to get the most out of your marketing efforts and ensure success for your business. You can trust that our team will consider your best interest and develop solutions tailored to your unique situation.
Can you tell me if your 90-day forecast is within +/—10 percent? If so, you are doing great. How about +/- 5%? Can you do that for every gate in your sales funnel, like a demand waterfall?
Although Matrix Marketing Group suggests doing a 360-degree marketing audit, these can be broken down. Marketing audits are like digital marketing audits.
You must know your process and the metrics in every section across your sales pipeline. If not, you better learn to. Your marketing audit will uncover the gaps in your marketing strategy.
There are tons of marketing audit templates and marketing audit templates, but we have married 130 data points in 10 categories with live feedback.
What is a small business marketing audit?
Marketing is crucial for small business success. This is a no-nonsense guide for conducting a marketing audit so you can maximize your marketing budget.
Marketing audit definition.
A marketing audit thoroughly reviews your small business’s marketing plan, objectives, strategies, and activities. The goal is to determine what’s working and what isn’t and identify areas for improvement.
You have to review your whole revenue model periodically. You are surely moving to the bottom of your sales and marketing funnel. When was the last time you did that?
Are Your Marketing Efforts a Shot in the Dark? Let’s Turn on the Spotlight!
Imagine having the clarity of seeing your marketing strategy from a bird’ s-eye view and understanding every nuance of your campaigns. Our comprehensive audit delves into the core of your marketing DNA, dissecting each campaign with surgical precision to identify the powerhouse strategies and weed out the underperformers.
You must begin there if you don’t have your revenue model mapped out. But wait. Before you do that, you must understand how your target customer will enter and progress through the buying decision and what part your brand will participate in.
After performing a 5,452 marketing audit in the first half of this year, we uncovered that 74.1% want to generate more leads. These companies do not have enough to sustain a steady pipeline without substantial direct sales and advertising.
After generating leads, lead conversion is a top priority going into 2022, with 86.6% of companies focusing on website conversion and overall lead conversion. Two primary issues are exposed here:
- Web traffic is not high-quality
- On-page SEO must be reviewed for bounce rate
The marketing audit for small businesses will show how you are doing with your MCL and MQL and how they convert to sales.
Did I mention this is not linear Add a few different channels, and throw in an e-commerce site looking at omnichannel marketing? Multi-channel marketing will work, but it’s not connected to your other channels.
Next, you need to evaluate the performance of your various marketing activities, identify the winning ones, and eliminate or — modify — the ineffective campaigns. This section will review some metrics to monitor and suggest refining your internet marketing strategy.
Identify Opportunities with a Marketing Audit
When reviewing your marketing activities, figure out what you want to improve.
Absolutely! Here’s a compelling breakdown of how to achieve this:
Unearth Hidden Gems: A Marketing Audit for Growth
Is your marketing hitting the mark? A strategic marketing audit can be a goldmine for uncovering hidden opportunities to boost engagement and propel your brand forward.
Imagine identifying underperforming channels draining your budget, discovering untapped markets brimming with potential customers or refining your messaging to resonate more deeply with your target audience.
A marketing audit is an investment that pays off in spades. By examining your marketing efforts closely, you can gain a clear picture of your marketing strengths and weaknesses, set realistic goals, optimize your campaigns for maximum impact, and stay ahead of the curve.
- Do you want more web traffic?
- Do you want more people to come to your blog?
- Do you want to convert more visitors to your home page into leads?
Get into the mindset of continually looking for new opportunities. The marketing audit for small businesses will turn up your low-hanging fruit.
Set a Metric for Your Marketing Success.
Your metric should be quantifiable and involve a set time frame in almost all cases.
For example, “Increase website leads by 127% over the next 90 days.”
You must understand your marketing and sales goals and objectives. What is your visitors to leads (MQL) capture ratio? How many of those visitors come back? How many were purchased from you? How many are active in your pipeline?
This marketing leads calculator will help you with your funnel and sales pipeline.
Refine Your Marketing Strategy.
Your marketing strategy has to be subordinate to the corporate strategy; therefore, everything in the marketing plan must be compatible. To achieve this, you need a mission statement for the organization and the marketing department.
Unfortunately, the value of these statements has been undermined because the mission statements have become favorite terms for politicians, and the comments are used to express party objectives in an anonymous way. In reality, however unfortunate, creating a mission statement connotates it as a most valuable and practical activity.
As a college prof, I ask my students on the first math day. Why are you taking math? Typically, the answer is, I have to. Then I step in and say what the semester is about and math. I expect them to exit my class, not memorize formulas and reverse engineering math problems. That’s easy.
I want them to understand the number, where they came from, and what impacts their actions may have to change that outcome. It is that simple.
Now, can you analyze how your programs performed in the last quarter? Last week? Today?
If you know this, you can make changes to achieve your marketing goals by doing less of what doesn’t and more of what works.
If you are running an e-commerce website, about 1 to 5% intend to purchase something. So, let’s walk through some math.
You’ve just launched your new eCommerce website. The website looks beautiful. Pricing is right on target. But after about three months, you wonder why sales are not coming in as rapidly as you might have thought. So, let’s walk through some simple math.
Your product sells for $300 each. Your monthly web traffic is 1,000. Suppose you have a 3% intent-to-purchase rate and 70% cart abandonment. How many will you sell within 30 days?
- Monthly web traffic = 1,000
- The product sells for $300 per month
- 5% of the visitor’s purchase
- 70% abandonment rate
Share your figure here: @mmgtweets. Okay, the answer is at the end of this post.
This trend has been going on for years. CEOs and business owners have lost all patience with marketing.
A study by the London-based Fournaise Marketing Group stated that 73% of CEOs think Marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be. Ouch.
Sound familiar? If so, you are in trouble.
But you can fix it.
Marketers today are far from demonstrating how the marketing strategies and campaigns they deploy grow their organizations. The top line is customer demand, sales, prospects, conversions, or market share.
We have seen this over and over in many small businesses. They do not have a marketing plan (how about micro-plans?) or a documented plan they can use to execute and measure marketing success monthly.
While some small businesses have a marketing plan, they may not have identified operational strengths and weaknesses and established performance standards that can be benchmarked and tested.
So it doesn’t surprise me to read a report like the one from the Fournaise Marketing Group. A marketing audit for small businesses turns up some significant issues and opportunities.
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There are three primary gaps we have observed over the past 17 years. These gaps are in marketing talent, marketing technology, and marketing strategy.
The shortage of digital talent has been going on for years, but it can be seen in the right brain – left brain argument. The left-brain folks can’t understand tech, and vice versa. This is not true. But the shortage is real. I’ve used micro-training to boost skill sets and carve time out for your staff.
If you allow your marketing staff to take time out for training, your investment will pay off in the long run and help with retention rates. More importantly, you will keep training staff, and your marketing efficiency and effectiveness will go up.
It’s no secret that colleges and universities are not kicking out that talent. I know I teach it.
There is a clear talent shortage in the US, which is particularly true of specialized skills, which are at the center of the competitiveness of the US economy.
A marketing audit is a method Matrix Marketing Group uses to identify and realize underutilized marketing resources.
Those who have attempted to undertake a marketing audit know that all too many questions ask not of themselves yield information that will lead to practical and profitable actions.
For example, the answer to the question, does management recognize the importance of designing the company to serve the needs & wants? Is the target market right? Is my marketing messaging getting a response?
Translating into immediate practical recommendations with a marketing audit is difficult.
So, where do you start?
It all starts right here with a marketing audit for small businesses. This is the most important part of your marketing plan and occurs before your marketing plan is even written.
A marketing audit for small businesses is to the marketing department, and a financial audit is to the accounting department. It comprehensively reviews a business’s marketing environment, objectives, strategies, and activities. In particular, it helps you examine your company’s marketing effectiveness.
The audit results become the blueprint for strategic decisions and future marketing plans.
The marketing efforts in most businesses, large and small, can always be improved. Most companies’ marketing programs are damaged and need repair.
This is always true whenever a company hires a new marketing manager. Sales are down, and the company’s current marketing activities are either not working, poorly executed, or promptly.
How to do a Marketing Audit Examples for Small Business in Simple 6 Steps
There are six steps in the marketing audit for small business processes. Whether complete or mini-audits are conducted, these steps remain the building blocks of the process.
How to Perform a Marketing Audit
- Assign Auditor(s). Total objectivity is one key to the success of a marketing audit for small businesses. If you are the main architect of your marketing plan, you should not do the audit. Find associates who you respect to audit your plan. This could be an internal or external person(s), or both. Make sure whomever you choose can be candid, honest, and constructive.
- Decide when the audit will be conducted. A Marketing Audit should be conducted annually. However, it can also be done when major management changes show the current marketing conditions.
- Determine which areas will be audited. There are no hard, fast rules regarding how a Marketing Audit must be. The Marketing Audit should be as complete as necessary to identify neglected and under-use marketing resources.
- Develop Marketing Audit forms. Use your audit criteria to develop a template you can provide your auditors. For each of the marketing plan sections you are testing, create questions to assess that section’s completeness and effectiveness. For example, in goals, you might ask, Are the business, sales, and marketing goals defined clearly? And can each goal be measured and tracked? Make sure the template is comprehensive, easy to use, and includes a scoring system to determine the overall readiness of your marketing plan.
- Implement the Marketing Audit. Several implementation decisions must be made. These may include the timing and duration of the Marketing Audit, the level of awareness the staff will have regarding the audit, how and when the audit will be performed, and in what format the final report will be prepared. The audit can begin.
- Present the audit results and translate them into action. When data collection is complete, the auditor(s) analyze the results and develop recommendations based on your marketing goals and best practices.
These should include a visual and verbal presentation showing the major findings and recommendations with specific actions to increase your ROI program efficiency and effectiveness. The results are also summarized in a final written report. Upon conclusion, it can include a recommendation that sets a course for a new company direction.
Following this process, you will ensure you have developed what will be on your way to creating a successful marketing plan. The marketing audit example pdf is available on the web.
Ensure you go into the process with an open mind and are objective. You do not have to take every recommendation from the audit results, but if you do not seriously consider each, you risk your company’s marketing potential.
Once you have evaluated your company’s previous startup marketing plan and its sales results, you can focus on developing your new one.
Let’s Look at Some Marketing Audit Examples for Small Business
Here are the 2023 observations from 5,724 small business submissions over the past three years. We sorted and parsed the data and found that most small businesses seek more sales leads and better lead conversions. These marketing audits for small businesses reveal some interesting facts.
Generating quality leads from marketing activities was high at 66.7% (3,818).
80 percent (4,579) of the respondents wanted to increase its conversion ratio (MQL to SAL)
The marketing assessment covers 130 data points, so nothing is left to chance. The assessment will uncover marketing activities that need to be improved and activities that need to continue.
Get a free marketing audit checklist pdf and assessment. The marketing audit template is free and also comes in Excel.
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Have something to say about conducting your marketing audit for small businesses?
General FAQs for a Marketing Assessment
What is a marketing audit?
A marketing audit thoroughly reviews your small business’s marketing plan, objectives, strategies, and activities. The goal is to see what’s working and what isn’t so you can identify areas for improvement.
What is the purpose of a marketing audit?
A marketing audit identifies whether marketing activities could be more effective. The company may carry out the review or with a marketing agency’s support.
What are the components of a marketing audit?
What is the importance of a marketing audit?
The function of a marketing audit is to identify two critical sets of data insights: strengths and weaknesses. Performance weaknesses give any business owner the insight needed to determine areas of improvement. Performance strengths are the exact opposite. They show what is currently working and driving marketing success.
