RSM U Recap: How to Conduct a Marketing Audit

In this webinar, RSM Marketing Director Calin Cooney discussed creating a marketing audit that works for your business. Marketing audits are essential to making sure your marketing is working for you. 

Main Points from the Webinar: 

Inspect what you Expect:

• Revisit your marketing strategy because marketing is constantly changing
• Ask yourself about your target audience, brand objectives and other baseline questions.
• Don’t waste time on ineffective marketing—because your competition is never sitting still! 

When is the best time to conduct an audit?

The truth is, there is no one right answer. Revisiting your marketing strategy periodically, though, will help you find pitfalls in your strategy. However, it isn’t a good reason to wait for a problem to arise to perform an audit. Putting out fires is never ideal.

Where do you start?

• Collect data and take inventory of your current efforts.
• Create a library of your assets, artwork, copy, profiles and other efforts made, so you aren’t starting from a clean slate with your marketing efforts. 

Time to take action. Let’s start with self-reflection.

• Set goals and ask yourself:
  • What do I want to learn? 
  • How can I make this measurable?

Different types of audits based on your goals

Content marketing audit

• Ensure there is brand consistency in all of your active channels.
• During this process, you can see if your content is up to date and consistent.

Systems audit

Ensure that the data you are tracking is correctly working:

• Make sure links are going to the right, working pages.
• Search for discontinued products still listed. If you can find it, your prospects can too. 
• Do this platform by platform.

Market audit 

• Analyze the current changes in market trends
• Ask yourself if your strategy still applies to any shifts in culture that have occurred. 
• Analyze price points in your market.

Strategy audit

• Take a fresh look at your market and your audience.
• Think about what uniquely separates you from your competitors.

What am I looking for?

• Audience interpretation

• • • Consider your prospects’ perspectives based on website analytics.
    • Reflect on their intent.

• Customer journey

• • • Learn how your audience feels connected.
    • Check content for various audiences. 
    • Make sure your messaging is consistent with your demographics.
    • Don’t force different demographics through the same marketing funnel.

• Content performance

• • Refine content that doesn’t lead to much interaction.
  • Look at high-traffic website pages with low session durations, which might indicate a disconnect and content that needs to be refined. 

No time? Ask for Help!

Sometimes, you might need to lean on the help of an independent party—*cough cough* like us here at RSM Marketing. 

Auditing your work can prevent you from filling gaps, so using a third party can help find your pitfalls. 

What should I ask my auditor to provide? 

You provide insight into your inventory and goals. Let them do the work to provide the key performance indicators (KPIs) to show you how to move forward.

Post Audit Actions

It’s time to look back at your goals and refine. 

Don’t think tactics; think strategy.  An audit helps resolve deeper strategy issues and leads to redelivering content to your users in an effective way. 

What will we get out of this?

• Teamwork 
• Pride among your team
• Strategy and
• Ease in getting future projects off the ground!

Want to find out more information about RSM Marketing?

Contact: Heather Snyder, Director of Strategy

hsnyder@rsmconnect.com

Questions and Answers from the Webinar

Q: How much time should someone expect to dedicate to a marketing audit?

A: It depends on how strong your marketing presence is. Don’t try to do it all in one day, do a few hours each week. Again, because it’s periodic, you might have to revisit some efforts. On average, it might take 10-20 hours spread out over a few weeks. 

Testing tech, and those smaller goals, can be knocked out in one day.

Q: What’s a red flag that indicates the first priority when an audit reveals that nearly everything needs to be fixed?

A: When you test tech and links are broken, or any breakage in the customer journey doesn’t work, it needs to be fixed. Look at reviews. Social proof and referrals are huge. If you find poor reviews, it needs immediate addressing. People trust their peers, so first, low ratings and poor reviews need addressing. They also will provide the context in their reviews. 

We’ll See you at the Next RSM U Webinar!

Don’t worry—the learning doesn’t stop here.  

Join us for Don’t Be a Drip! Creating Email Campaigns People Will Actually Want to Read, with RSM Marketing’s Content Team Lead Ryan Clem, on Wednesday, March 9 at 9:15 a.m (CST). 

Register for the live event here! And if you can’t join live, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording of the session afterward.