What is a marketing audit?
Let’s start right from the beginning. A marketing audit is an in-depth check on what is happening inside your company (internal) and outside (external) of your company.
The external marketing audit focuses on the happenings that occur outside the company. Those happenings may influence the business and therefore, it is so crucial to identify those. The external marketing audit focuses on competitor and consumer needs, global changes such as directed by government, cultural changes, etc.
On the other side, the internal marketing audit, also known as self audit, reflects the image of the own organization. An internal marketing audit is fundamental for the creation a marketing plan. The person who conducts the internal audit needs to fully understand the company’s culture which includes also the knowledge about objectives, mission statements.
An audit can have several scope areas since to audit each possible aspect of your company can be very time and cost consuming. You may audit only the performance of your marketing plan, strategies, etc. In general, there are the following types of audits: Marketing environment audit, Marketing strategy audit, Marketing organization audit, Marketing productivity audit, Marketing systems audit.
An audit has 4 major characteristics:
1. Comprehensive – to find all information that you need you need to dig deep into the problem.
2. Objective – conducted by an independent person. It’s your business so your view will keep focus in the same direction. A professional person or a 3rd party, an auditor will have an open view to see the whole picture of your business.
3. Systematic – the audit needs to follow an order, a step-to-step guide on how to proceed that is made before the start of an audit.
4. On a regular basis – a marketing audit should be planned to be conducted on specific periods to avoid issues rising up. It is very poor leadership in management decisions when an audit will be conducted only out of a crisis; once something really went wrong.
When conducting an audit, it is important to ask the right questions. As an example, if the target is to find out if we deliver compelling customer experiences, questions can be:
What does the buyer’s journey of our customer look like?
How do they feel about our brand (for example, check on comments of customers)?
etc.
An audit can include the market overview, a critical path schedule, a customer research, a competitor analysis, and much more. A PEST analysis digs deeper into political, economic, social and technological factors and is used for an external analysis. To include a SWOT analysis is quite common and well regarded. These are known as elements of an audit.
Conclusion of why you want to conduct a marketing audit:
To detect external factors that may impact the business such as new regulatory law or the purpose can also be creating a basis for the company’s marketing plan. A marketing audit will benefit a company in several ways. Through reviewing all aspects in and around your business, new ideas on how to improve your business will show up. Your current strategy may be improved or reconfirmed. A marketing audit reassures you sent out a right message to the customer.
