What Is a Marketing Audit, and What Should It Cover?

What Goes Into a Marketing Audit?

A marketing audit goes through six areas in the order the answers depend on each other: what you sell and to whom, whether your numbers can be trusted, and only then the channels, the website and the case for spending more. A problem found early changes what every later finding means, which is why we don’t start with the ad accounts.

1. IMPACT Offering: is marketing promoting the offering that earns the most gross profit per customer after the cost of winning them, or the one that brings in the most revenue? The IMPACT Offering step shows how to compare them.
2. IMPACT Prospect: is it aimed at the buyer who is worth the most over the relationship, described well enough that sales would recognize one in the first conversation, including who is a poor fit?
3. Measurement: can you trace spend by channel to signed customers in a record you control, usually your CRM, or only to the conversions each platform reports about itself? The Channel Selection step covers what to check.
4. Channel Selection: which channels bring in the buyers worth the most, and what does each customer cost against the most you can afford to spend to win one?
5. Prospect-to-Lead Conversion: where are good buyers lost between the first click and the signed deal, from the page an ad sends them to through how long a lead waits for a reply?
6. Marketing Action Plan: what would you put more money behind, and which limit stops you first: the budget, the cost of each added customer or the team that delivers the work?

Measurement sits third in an audit, earlier than in a plan, because the channel and conversion findings that follow are only as good as the record they’re read from.

How Do You Do a Marketing Audit on a Company?

To do a marketing audit on a company, collect the numbers that live outside the marketing team first, answer the six areas in order, and stop to fix the record if it can’t tell you where signed customers came from. The output is a short list of changes, each with its likely effect on profit, an owner and how you’ll know it worked.

Much of the evidence sits with people who rarely see the marketing reports, so ask them first:

• Finance: what is the gross margin by offering and by type of customer, and how long do customers stay?
• Sales: which leads from the last two quarters became customers, and why did the good ones say no?
• The CRM: where did each signed customer come from, and does that match what the ad platforms claim?
• Operations: how many more customers could you serve next quarter without delivery slipping?
• The website: where does paid traffic land, and how long does a lead wait for a reply?

An audit that ends in a hundred-item checklist leaves the team guessing which items matter, so rank the findings by what each is likely to add to gross profit, with the ones that cost little and change a lot at the top. A digital marketing audit follows the same order and leans harder on the record, since each platform will supply a confident answer of its own.

What Does a Marketing Audit Look Like in Practice?

In practice a marketing audit reads like a short memo, with one finding per area, the evidence behind it and the change it points to. The example below is our illustration, built from the step pages, of what a review would surface for the company we follow through this site.

Ranked by profit, the page and the same-day call would sit near the top, because they changed the result without changing the spend, and the delivery limit would sit beside them, since it decides how much of any growth the business can serve. The full claims-versus-CRM comparison lives on How Do You Measure Digital Marketing ROI?, and the same six steps written forward as a plan, rather than as a review, are on How Do You Create a Marketing Plan?.

How Is a Marketing Audit Different From a PPC or SEO Audit?

A marketing audit asks whether the whole system produces profitable customers, while a channel audit, such as a PPC, SEO or content audit, asks whether one channel is set up and run well. Both are useful, but a channel audit can’t tell you that the channel is aimed at the wrong offering or buyer, and a well-run account selling the wrong thing still loses money.

Run the full audit when nobody can say which spend pays back, and a channel audit when the picture is sound and one channel is lagging or about to get more budget. The paid search version, with its checklist in order of what costs most when it’s wrong, is on How Do You Do a PPC Audit?. For the measures to judge marketing by between audits, How Do You Measure Marketing Effectiveness? covers them.

When Should You Get a Marketing Audit, and Who Should Do It?

Get a marketing audit when results have stalled while spend has grown, when you’re about to change agencies or raise the budget, or when a new marketing leader takes over, and have it done by someone who doesn’t run the work being reviewed. An agency auditing its own campaigns has every reason to find the problem somewhere else.

We should say plainly that 5K, which publishes this site, offers a free audit of the campaigns you’re running now, which looks at your ads and the tracking behind them and is narrower than the full audit on this page, so weigh what follows with that in mind. Whoever does it, ask to see the finance and CRM numbers behind each finding, and treat an audit that never asks for them as a channel review with a broader title.

The answer changes in three situations:

• There’s no plan to review yet, as with a new company or a new product, so the work is writing the plan, which How Do You Create a Go-to-Market Strategy? covers.
• Too few customers have come through for the numbers to mean much, so the useful audit is of the setup, followed by a full sales cycle before judging channels.
• Results dropped suddenly, which calls for a diagnosis of what changed, usually tracking, a site change or a budget shift, rather than a full audit.