5 Things You Can Learn From a Deep-Dive Marketing Audit

You have a quarterly marketing plan. You have a marketing team. You’ve tried a variety of marketing tactics, like email campaigns, organic SEO and social media marketing. But you’re still not seeing a jump in website traffic, leads, conversions or revenue.

Before you throw another tactic into the mix, stop to look at your marketing on a systems level and evaluate your strategies, tactics and implementation.

This is known as a marketing audit, and it helps you gain critical insights into your current efforts. During the auditing process, you’ll identify gaps and opportunities for better lead and revenue generation. Let’s explore five key takeaways you should expect from an in-depth marketing audit. 

Why is a marketing audit important for B2B companies in particular? One word: Alignment.

You would never throw a product or service on the market without ensuring it meets your target audience’s needs. Think about your marketing similarly – it should connect you to your target audience and provide the information they need to make an informed decision. 

Does your marketing support your revenue goals and clearly show what sets your company apart? After a marketing audit, you’ll know. 

Here are five insights you’ll gain from a marketing audit that can help you optimize your marketing, leads and revenue.

1. Does Your Strategy Make Sense? 

Before you get granular with your marketing audit, examine your overall approach. That may start with answering this question: Do you have one? 

You can’t align your marketing goals with your business objectives if you don’t have any. First, identify your ideal customer. How and why can your company help them? And what exactly do they need help with?

Maybe you know your personas but haven’t clarified what makes your solution different (and better) from your competitors. Not for everyone – for your target audience. You’ll want to think about: 

• What’s your story? How are you unique?
• What are the best ways to present your expertise to get attention? 
• How will you know if it’s going well?

Once you have your strategy, you should be able to quickly get to the other big insights from an in-depth audit. That’s why it’s important to start there and put in the time. 

This alignment is crucial because it ensures that every marketing effort directly contributes to your organization’s growth and success.

2. Do You Know How to Reach Your Customers?

Content is king in the digital age, and a marketing audit assesses your content’s relevance and effectiveness. Having the right content is critical to addressing your audience’s interests and needs.

But it’s not just what you share – it’s how you share it and where. For instance, TikTok may be popular, but do your B2B customers go there to look for services like yours?

(Maybe the answer is yes. But that’s the point! Ask yourself the question.)

Evaluate your existing content. Is it out of date, or could it be repurposed into a new format to reach more people? What’s missing? Are people engaging with your content?

Put this information together with what you’ve learned from evaluating your strategy. This will give you a blueprint for how to provide a more valuable, comprehensive user experience and drive engagement, leads and conversions.

3. How Are You Leveraging Your Technology?

A content management system (CMS) is no longer something that’s nice to have – it’s a must-have today. A marketing audit evaluates your sales and marketing tools to ensure they support your marketing efforts.

Especially if it’s been a while since you’ve thought about your platform and how you use it, this stage of your marketing audit should help determine how you can:

• Streamline Your Tech Stack: Do you have redundant tools or software? Are you spending money on subscriptions you don’t use? Identify what you need and focus your resources on those tools.
  
  
• Embrace Automation and Analytics: Automated workflows help you efficiently target leads and prospects while personalizing their buyer journey experience. Integrating analytics tools help you gain valuable insights into the performance of your marketing initiatives (more on that in a minute).

4. Are You Really Nurturing Your Leads?

Generating leads is vital but converting those leads into customers is equally critical. A marketing audit examines your lead generation and nurturing processes to maximize your return on investment (ROI). It serves as a compass, guiding you toward more effective and efficient lead-to-customer journeys.

Look at your processes and:

• Identify bottlenecks or gaps in your lead-gen and nurturing workflows
• Implement strategies to nurture leads throughout the buyer journey
• Improve lead scoring and segmentation for more personalized communication

The result? Your leads and prospects get the right information and engagement at the right time, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

5. Have You Embraced Data-Driven Decision-Making?

Hopefully you’ve spent some time reviewing and refining your key performance indicators (KPIs) at the start of the audit process. But do you know how to analyze and interpret your data to guide your business decisions and revenue goals? 

A deep-dive marketing audit focuses on KPI measurement and analysis to make sure that data-driven decision-making is guiding your company. Stay nimble – and humble. It may take a few tries to determine the data you need and what to do with it. Your audit should help you: 

• Determine which KPIs are most relevant to your marketing objectives
• Implement tracking and reporting mechanisms to monitor KPI performance
• Use data insights to refine your strategies, allocate resources and optimize ROI

Some people don’t want to know what the data has to tell them – don’t let that be you. This is the piece in your audit that helps you act on everything you’ve learned. It’s worth the effort: When done right, a successful audit is the catalyst for long-term marketing and sales results.