Marketing Strategy

Why a Marketing Audit is Such a Powerful Investment

So, first things first, what actually is a marketing audit?  Put simply it is a thorough review of everything that impacts upon the marketing of your business.  It usually comes as a surprise to most how many different elements of your business impact upon your marketing effectiveness.

Who should carry out a marketing audit?

  1. An external person will not be influenced by historical factors or personality preferences within the business
  2. A professional will undertake a complete 360-degree audit of your organisation’s marketing – not just those areas that you think need to be looked at.
  3. There are no potential repercussions to them based on their recommendations

Why carry out a marketing audit?

Using a driving analogy, you don’t just get in a car and drive.  You first decide on your desired destination and think through the best route to take to get you there (taking into account a number of variable factors – weather, traffic, time of day etc).  Indeed, you may also use a third party (a SatNav) to help you if it is somewhere you have never been to before.  You also need to consider whether you have enough fuel to get you there!

Our SME findings…

Now our full marketing audit takes 3 hours and involves ten times as many questions, but even a simple 2-minute test has thrown up some interesting stats about how SME businesses are performing with regards to their marketing, which we thought would be useful to share.

So far, from a sample of 86 responses the average score out of 12 is 5 (so less than 50%). 

What this shows is that although many businesses are successfully understanding and implementing some of the basic elements of marketing, there are other core fundamentals that are letting them down.  What this ultimately means is that they are no maximising their potential returns.

We are not going to go through all of the results but want to flag up some of key areas that stood out as it may get you thinking about how you would answer these example questions, and whether there is some further thought or analysis you could apply to in terms of marketing your own business.

Common problem 1: Lack of differentiation

Common problem 2: Lack of purpose

Fifty-eight percent of respondents didn’t think that all of their marketing activity had a sole purpose.  What this ultimately suggests is that SMEs might be carrying out activity, probably out of habit or because they think it is the right thing to do, without having any clear calls to action.  If your communications don’t actually tell prospective customers what “to do next” then they are much less likely to travel up your sales pipeline.

Common problem 3: Lack of tracking

What’s more is that 55% of respondents were not even tracking enquiries into their business

On top of this, 57% did not know how many enquiries they need to generate in order to reach their targets.  Bringing it back to the driving analogy, if you are not sure how far the journey is then you can’t know whether you have enough fuel in the car or whether you have allowed enough time to reach your destination – and there is every possibility you won’t get there.

Common problem 4: Understanding the “why”

Common problem 5: Exposure to risk

Final word…

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Ian Kirk

Founder at Opportunity Marketing

Ian is the founder of Opportunity Marketing marketing, with over 18 years of experience in successfully setting up marketing departments, creating marketing strategies and implementing these strategies across a wide number of SME companies in both the B2B and B2C sectors through a variety of channels.

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