Warning signs that your marketing needs an audit

Like many areas of marketing, clients often present to us with a symptom of something that is required, rather than searching specifically for that service. A digital marketing audit is a prime example of this.

For that reason I have pulled together some of the top warning signs suggesting that your B2C or B2B marketing strategy needs an audit. Do you recognise any of these reg flags within your business marketing?

Strategy keeps coming up in discussions, team meetings and agency recommendations

If strategy repeatedly comes up from your internal (or external) teams, it does signal that there may be some kind of disconnect which might be effecting the business in other ways.

For example, are your campaigns generating lower than expected results, even putting aside the results of the pandemic? Have you addressed tactical issues but the problems persist or keep coming back? The wider strategy may need a re-think and an audit will help uncover missed opportunities to feed into this.

Results are disappointing, or you are not selling the volumes of products or services that generate a high enough profit margin.

Whether marketing budget is spent in full or not, this is another sign that the business isn't spending the most time or money focused in the most profitable service areas or products. There are many reasons why this might happen, and sometimes this can occur in a non-transparent way, and might be revealed via your marketing audit.

Your marketing spend across channels is static and not reflective of variations and results

If there aren't regular reviews and agile systems in place to optimise spend on marketing activities to focus on the highest performing channels and tactics then an audit and revised strategy will pay dividends. To keep this running in the background will further improve performance and therefore provide improved ROI. This should include time / resources and offline activities as well as digital and paid media.

Accepted business practices allow activities which are not aligned with the marketing strategy or team

A very common one, and often connected with historical / entrenched practices or people internally or externally, or field sales staff and offline activities for example. It might appear that these kind of 'hidden' activities can be effective, but siloed activities away from the core marketing function can have a number of issues;

They are often not thoroughly tracked in terms of results and ROI, nor brought into the wider plan, reporting or budget. Operating separately means that information is often not collated and passed on to the bigger picture, such as CRM systems and the single customer view, but this can effect smaller businesses too. This is an example of the long-debated rift between sales and marketing functions, and how they can better work together for business benefit.
There are limited opportunities to enhance and improve performance siloed activities, and for both areas to benefit from the opportunities aligned activity can bring

Aside from the fact that social media channels such as Facebook reward engagement with customers with the way the algorithm calculates organic reach, generating two-way communications with customers online is key. Red flags on social media for prospective customers also include a business that is only focused on social media as a 'push' communications channel, is not responsive to reviews or comments, and doesn't reply to messages within 24 hours or less. If you feel your channels have been neglected, customers will notice and you will likely have lost business due to this, but it's never too late to address it.

Some of the ways you can uncover and fix these signs

Book a marketing audit to discover hidden data and opportunities
Book a customer service review to find out what your customers are saying and how responsive the business is to customer service requests
Buy a one-to-one marketing consultation or power hour to deep dive into your digital marketing activity and results