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What is a Marketing Audit and why should you do one?

A marketing audit is a fundamental part of the marketing planning process, primarily conducted at the beginning of the planning process, as a first step to developing a more streamlined plan and strategy. It’s a relatively small investment that can pay big dividends.

We sometimes call it a Marketing Gap Analysis, because it identifies the gaps in your marketing strategy. It consists of an analysis of the external marketing environment, internal marketing environment as well as an evaluation of the current marketing strategy. It helps you identify where you may be losing money and where you need to spend money going forward for a more robust ROI. It also helps you build a more consistent brand image while setting the foundation for an improved customer experience.

How Much Does a Marketing Audit Cost

Marketing Audits run anywhere from $2,500 – $20,000 with most of them falling in the $4,000-$6,000 range. If you really are not doing much at all to begin with, then it would fall in the lower range since you’d not have that much to audit. If you have a number of advertising campaigns and multiple websites, a very large site and numerous social platforms, it would skew in the upper ranges.

How Marketing Audits can save you money

You have to think of it as an investment and not an expense and here’s why.

It helps you identify where money is leaking and ineffective or identify areas where you could be enjoying a hefty ROI. It can often save you a lot of money.

If, for example, you are considering a new website and you have several now, one of the recommendations might be fewer sites or consolidating your sites into one. If you spent $10k on the audit and you followed through with the recommendation, you potentially could save $50k or more as well as the long term costs of maintaining and adding content to multiple sites. Not to mention the hassle and confusion of having too many. So in short, an audit ends up paying for itself either right away or over time.
Long term, it keeps you from hemorrhaging dollars spent on tactics that are a waste of money. Digital marketing changes fast and some things simply fall out of favor quickly.

Marketing Audit steps

We start with a discussion about your business goals and target markets so we know which direction you’d like to go. These steps are simplified but offer a good overview of what to expect.

  • Website review and recommendations
  • Analytics review and recommendations
  • Social media review and recommendations
  • Competitor analysis
  • Traditional marketing activities review and recommendations
  • Recommended next steps