Audit & Consulting

Marketing Audit: The Basics

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

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

It might not be a fun experience, but it sure is an enlightening one. In fact, this 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, whether your marketing efforts are efficient, 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 varies based on your market position, competitors, and primary goals. That’s why it’s best to trust professionals with your audit. 

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

How Does a Marketing Audit Work? 

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

Though it takes longer and costs more, such an audit covers everything from market research and competitor analysis to branding, SEO, and website design. While both strategies give you answers, only the latter one presents new opportunities to consider. Below, we’ve outlined two of the most important aspects of the auditing process. 

Competitors research

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

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 your rivals do correctly. In many cases, this helps stay relevant as you figure out how to match – then exceed – their efforts. 
• Find out where your rivals underperform. These gaps in their strategy can provide new opportunities to gain valuable market share. 
• Gain insights into their successes and failures via customer reviews. Where do they fall short? Where do they succeed? What features does your product have that their customers might prefer?
• Establish benchmarks to better chart your success as you grow. 

At Whales Ventures, we use a variety of powerful tools to analyse your competitors in-depth. From Alexa and Keyword Spy to Ahrefs, Semrush, and Simularweb, we can generate fast and 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 use all the possible ways and channels to investigate your competitors and define what you can do better.

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