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Marketing audits are essential for brands looking to strengthen their digital marketing campaign strategies. Identifying areas of weakness in their campaigns can help businesses improve their marketing efforts and prevents wasted time and money.
For marketing teams unsatisfied with their brand’s current marketing performance, conducting a marketing audit is critical to determining what aspects of current campaigns are underperforming. Before you can create a successful game plan for your audit, it’s important to understand why they’re effective and how they can positively impact your bottom line.
This article will explain why brands should regularly create their own marketing audit reports to boost marketing success and identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current strategy.
What Is a Marketing Audit?
A marketing audit examines the strengths and weaknesses of a brand’s marketing campaigns to determine how effective they are in increasing brand awareness and reaching target audiences. When crafting a marketing plan, marketing teams should look at their past campaign efforts to determine the steps that will improve the reach of both their paid and organic/SEO campaigns.
Ultimately, a marketing strategy audit is a complete overview of the marketing environment for a specific brand. A marketing audit analyzes the internal and external systems within a brand to determine what strategy elements are effective or ineffective. These elements include content, ads, influencer partnerships, SEO, and other channels that have their own key performance indicators.
What Are the Different Types of Marketing Audits?
There are two types of marketing audits that brands should consider before conducting their first audit: internal and external audits. Internal marketing audits are conducted by the marketing team and those operating within an organization. Brands that frequently perform marketing audits will likely utilize internal audits for efficient results.
An external marketing audit is conducted by a third-party expert, providing an objective perspective and outside advice that may be challenging to get from insiders. While external audits tend to take longer and may be more expensive, they are beneficial for brands looking to discover the root problem affecting their campaigns.
Some may use the term “external audit” in a slightly different way. This may also refer to an audit of the general market and the current economy or environment. This kind of audit is less about understanding how your campaigns are performing and more about understanding how factors outside of your control (like consumers and the market) are changing.
Why Is It Important For Brands to Conduct a Marketing Audit?
An audit provides brands with insight into marketing activities, refamiliarizing the marketing team with their products or services. Understanding and implementing the audit process can help brands discover new ways of increasing conversion and sales rates and develop new strategies for reaching their target audience.
In other words, conducting an effective marketing audit allows brands to look at their current and previous campaigns objectively. Taking a deep dive into the data means marketing teams can get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, which helps them take steps to improve the success of future marketing campaigns.
Taking time to audit your campaigns is also a part of proactive planning, which is a significant contributor to marketing success. CoSchedule found that marketers that proactively plan their campaigns are 331% more successful than those that don’t.
For example, brands prioritizing influencer marketing campaigns should conduct marketing audits to determine how successful their brand partnership is overall. It can be easy to lose sight of the end goal when working with a partner in a creative capacity, so auditing your influencer marketing strategy ensures you’re actually benefitting from the partnership.
Furthermore, a thorough audit can bring new life to a campaign, even if you only make minor changes to the brand’s marketing strategy. A marketing audit is a time for team members and partners to brainstorm, suggest new strategies, and take action on the results of the audit.
How to Conduct a Marketing Audit
Crafting a functioning audit is a relatively straightforward process for brands already aware of the best audit practices. Brands new to conducting audits can look at marketing audit templates to understand what their audit should cover. Some primary focuses might include your website, social media accounts, email marketing strategy, SEO content, influencer marketing partnerships, and paid ads.
It’s vital to remember that you should perform audits on a regular basis—it’s not a one-and-done kind of thing! The more often marketing teams perform audits, the easier it becomes to detect errors before they cause damage to a campaign.
When conducting an audit of your brand’s marketing systems, you should know your current campaign goals and future goals for growth. Working with your marketing team to determine short- and long-term goals makes it easier to identify areas of a campaign that need improvement.
As you identify your campaigns’ strengths and weaknesses, your marketing team should make a plan of action. Which areas should you prioritize moving forward? Do you need to work on SEO keyword ranking? Is your team putting enough effort into finding influencers and partnerships that represent your brand in a positive light?
If you utilize influencer marketing in your strategy, audits often go hand in hand with influencer tracking. For example, brands partnering with social media influencers will want to set campaign objectives before crafting their strategy. Influencer marketing heavily relies on marketing audits to ensure that campaigns are effective and that an influencer is representing a brand’s products and services properly. Metrics gained from a thorough audit are invaluable to brands struggling to reach their target audience.
Final Words
Marketing audits are essential for a brand’s success with digital campaigns. Businesses prioritizing influencer marketing techniques should ensure they frequently audit their campaigns alongside the influencer they are working with.
The marketing audit process often requires extensive analysis that can be time-consuming for beginners, but marketing teams don’t have to navigate the process alone. Markerly helps companies make stronger connections with their target audience through effective influencer and digital marketing. We prioritize identification, campaign building, reporting, and optimization because a good campaign is built off of good data.
Contact us today to learn more about revamping your marketing strategy for success.
