Audit & Consulting

Marketing Audit: The Basics

A marketing audit is a strategy that businesses can use to find out what is most important to their target audience. After gathering such data, a company can then adjust its marketing strategy accordingly. When done correctly, this maximizes both their budget and their efforts while giving them an edge over the competition. 

If you’re a business owner, and you’re at all unsure of what your clients, leads, and prospects actually want from you, you’re putting your company at serious risk. But by performing an audit, you can do a deep dive into your efforts to uncover all of the associated strengths and weaknesses. 

It might not be a fun experience, but it is sure to be an enlightening one. In fact, it might be the very investment that saves your business. 

Why Conduct a Marketing Audit?

If you’re unclear what your target audience is looking for in a brand, aren’t sure if your marketing efforts are reaching their goals, or worry that you’re quickly running out of new prospective customers – a marketing audit is a smart move. 

Of course, whether you perform an audit or not will vary according to your market position, your competition, and your organization’s primary goals. That’s why it’s best to trust your audit to a professional team. 

These individuals know what to look for and have the skills to help you gain valuable insight into your marketing team’s performance. At the same time, they can provide useful advice to aid you in designing new objectives, strategies, and processes for future growth. 

How Does a Marketing Audit Work? 

Your business’s needs and budget will define the specific scope of any marketing audit. The process will also depend on what sort of information you’re out to discover. For instance, you can perform a targeted audit of just one specific marketing tactic – assuming you have reason to suspect it might be hurting your ROI. However, a full-scale audit that offers a comprehensive view of your efforts will always be far more useful. 

Though it will take longer and cost more, such an audit can cover everything from market research and competitor analysis to branding, SEO, and website design. While both strategies will give you answers, only the latter will present you with new opportunities to consider. Below, we’ll outline two of the most important aspects of the auditing process. 

Competitors research

A detailed competitor analysis can help you gain valuable insight into how your rivals operate. This can reveal any potential weaknesses in their strategy while highlighting the areas where they are most likely to dominate. Through this process, you can also learn more about industry trends and standards. This will help you ensure that your own efforts are keeping pace. 

You can also:  

• Establish your product or service’s value proposition. What makes your product different from others? How can this be capitalized upon?
• Discover what the opposition is doing correctly. In many cases, the following suit will help you stay relevant while you figure out how to match – then exceed – their efforts. 
• Find out where your rivals are underperforming. These gaps in their strategy can provide you with new opportunities to gain valuable market share. 
• Gain insight into their successes and failures via customer reviews. Where are they falling short? Where are they succeeding? What features does your product have that their customers might prefer?
• Establish benchmarks so that you can better chart your success as you grow. 

At Whales Ventures, we use a variety of powerful tools to perform an in-depth analysis of your competition. From Alexa and Keyword Spy to Ahrefs, Semrush, and Simularweb, we can generate fast, accurate results that produce pages upon pages of valuable data. With years of experience in the industry, we offer some of the most comprehensive consulting services on the internet. 

We will use all possible ways and channels to investigate your competitors and define what you could do better then they do.

• Websites
• Search visibility
• Paid ads usage
• Newsletters and emails
• Reputation and PR
• Phone/sales communication