The Secret Formula To Perfecting Your Marketing Strategy
When you have a marketing programme that comprises robust SEO (search engine optimisation) performance, optimised adverts and an experienced team, it's easy to believe that everything is working properly. Unfortunately, this approach can expose your brand to squandered ad dollars, doubled-up efforts, and underperforming campaigns. Fortunately, there is a simple solution: do a marketing audit.
A marketing audit is a meticulous review of a company's marketing objectives, strategies, and outcomes. Essentially, you analyse your marketing performance, which encompasses your marketing campaigns' objectives, methods, techniques, actions and offers.
A marketing audit can help you obtain new perspectives and discover challenges and possibilities. You may then use this information to create a new marketing plan that addresses those challenges and capitalises on the opportunities.
*Key elements of a marketing audit
Digital – This encompasses all forms of digital marketing communication, such as email marketing, online adverts, content on other platforms, and so on. Both the actual content and performance metrics should be included.
Social media – While social media can be considered digital, it's advisable to keep this separate if you have many active social media platforms. Factors to consider include the following demographics, engagement data, advertising metrics, and so on.
SEO – Your entire SEO plan, including current figures, keywords, goals, and so on.
Creatives – Any type of creative work or collateral that is used across marketing platforms. This consists of the engagement rate as well as other performance data.
Offline – It includes print ads, print articles, billboards, flyers, event and exhibition collateral, and so on.
Competitive benchmarking – If you have previously conducted any type of benchmarking, this should be included in your audit. Ideally, you should compare your company to the competition or industry norms in general.
It's recommended to set specific, quantifiable, and attainable goals for each of these important areas. Depending on your industry, you may have numerous objectives for each element.
*What to look for in a marketing audit?
A marketing audit can be split into two parts: the macro-environment audit and the micro-environment audit.
A macro-environmental audit considers issues outside of your company, such as:
A micro-environment audit includes aspects of your business such as:
To make sure you are not overlooking anything, it is crucial to conduct a 360-degree audit across both environments. A micro-environmental audit is simpler since you have complete control over all the variables. Doing both in isolation or only doing one of the audits is counterproductive. The two audits have to align. The results of one audit may have an effect on certain aspects of the other.
A routine digital marketing audit will help you identify which strategies are helpful for you and which call for an alternate approach. If you don't do these assessments frequently, you won't be aware of any areas where your efforts might need to be adjusted, or perhaps even completely repurposed for the benefit of your ROI.
The author is Global Head, Marketing Demand Center, TCS
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