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The marketing strategy in your business is what makes or breaks the success of your products and services. In fact, according to Databox’s state of business reporting, marketing is the most monitored and reported operation.
Even though everyone is aware of the importance of marketing, many people often feel like half of their marketing campaigns are a waste of money.
The problem? Figuring out which half.
And that’s where marketing audit reports come in.
Marketing audit reports provide you with a comprehensive overview of all the different marketing activities and performances in your company.
By analyzing the data you gather in the report, you will know which areas of marketing need to be improved and which are doing a good job generating sales.
Do you find marketing audits too complicated? Don’t worry, this guide will teach you all you need to know.
A marketing audit is a type of business report that analyzes the entire marketing structure of a business. It covers everything from marketing strategies, targets, practices, priorities, to the smallest marketing activities.
This report provides you with insight into how your company’s marketing activities are created and conducted. Also, you will see how close you are to hitting your original marketing goals.
Marketing reports help you identify your business’ strengths and weaknesses. Once you know which of your marketing efforts are paying off and which are failing, you can work on improving resource allocation and make better use of your staff’s time.
Compared to weekly or monthly reports, marketing audits require more in-depth analysis. However, you should be completely objective and realistic when creating them. You have to be specific and present information that is measurable and attainable. Only then can you and your internal stakeholders discuss these audits and create better marketing strategies for the future.
While there is no strict practice regarding how frequently you should conduct marketing audits, it’s best to do it once every few months.
By running these audits frequently, you will see where you should make changes in your strategy to reach your goals fasters. Even if there are no noticeable problems, it doesn’t mean that the strategy is perfect.
To get a comprehensive overview of your marketing activities, you should include data from all your marketing platforms. Each platform and sales funnel is important for understanding the bigger picture.
A good marketing audit should always be:
The term marketing audit doesn’t refer to only one report. Instead, it is composed of a few different types of audits.
The three main components are the external environment, the internal environment, and the marketing strategy. Within these components, we can identify seven different types of audits.
We’ll explain each.
The external environment segment of the marketing audit focuses on the main outside factors that have an impact on your marketing strategies.
This segment includes:
As the name suggests, the internal environment segment primarily focuses on the internal factors in your business.
Here are the three audits that fall into this segment:
This segment focuses on your marketing targets and strategies.
It consists of these two audits:
Now that you know what a marketing audit is, we can move on to the next step – running your audit.
Follow these seven steps to successfully run your marketing audit:
Creating marketing goals requires lots of creative effort. The goals should be thought out, comprehensive, and most importantly, realistic.
Your marketing objectives should always be in line with your other business objectives.
These are some of the most common marketing objectives:
Keep in mind that both long-term and short-term goals are important.
Long-term goals are those that you want to achieve in the next two or three years, while short-term goals are something you can do within the next few months.
Creating a detailed customer persona for what would be your ideal buyer is an indispensable step for efficient marketing.
To develop a customer persona, there are the things you should consider:
In marketing, we say, “keep your customers close, but keep your competitors closer”.
Acknowledging your competitors and their marketing efforts will help you create better strategies for your own company.
To do this, you can start by creating a list of names of the top five competitors in your industry. Include sections such as their business information, name, website, and HQ location. Categorize all of their products or services and make notes on which overlap with your own.
Related: How to Do an SEO Competitive Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide
Before running a marketing audit, you first have to know all the details about your own products and services.
For each product and service that your company offers, you should create a list of features, benefits, sizing, prices, distribution procedures, and overall historical performance of each item.
Once you have all of these metrics written down, compare your products/services to those of your competitors. This will help you identify your own strengths and weaknesses and let you know which aspects you can improve.
Each business should have a comprehensive document that categorizes current marketing assets. Create this document by adding all of your available brand materials and marketing collateral.
You can start with a spreadsheet that includes relevant information about each individual item in your inventory.
Here is a list of some of the things you should include:
After gathering all of your significant marketing data in one place, we can start analyzing it.
Go through all of the different segments in your marketing audit and make notes on your observations. You will inevitably find things that you can improve on and keep track of the aspects that are doing well so far.
Related: How to Analyze Data: 30+ Experts on Making Sense of Your Performance
When you wrap up the analysis process, you can start making informed decisions about your future marketing endeavors – make a marketing plan.
The first thing you should do is solve all the issues that you recognized while going through the audit. This includes fixing broken links, analytics-tracking issues, and finding gaps in your content.
Next, point out areas that you think your marketing team could easily exploit. For example, you can recognize some great opportunities in terms of relevant backlinks or optimize existing pages that already drive lots of conversions.
Finally, your main focus should be on the future.
Update your brand guidelines, identify future CRO opportunities, and research any networking openings that could be useful.
Since every business has different marketing strategies, there is no mandatory set of things that all marketing audits need to incorporate.
However, there are certain metrics that can be universally useful to include. These include branding, website activities, social media, SEO, and an insightful competitive analysis.
Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. How much traffic and new contact conversions do you get? How many new contacts do you get from organic sessions? How are your email campaigns performing? How well are your landing pages converting? You might have to scramble to put all of this together in a single report, but now you can have it all at your fingertips in a single Databox dashboard.
Our Marketing Overview Dashboard includes data from Google Analytics 4 and HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics and HubSpot Marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring your leads. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot and Google Analytics 4 accounts with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Knowing how to create a great marketing audit report can help you take your business to the next level.
Marketing audits are a bit more complicated to make than other forms of reports, but this guide will help you start off on the right foot.
Follow these steps to create a comprehensive marketing audit:
Analyzing the efficiency of your marketing activities starts with defining objectives.
Of course, you can create a few different objectives and categorize them by priority.
For example, your most important goal might be increasing the number of sales. Secondary goals could be increasing brand visibility, generating leads, engaging existing customers, growing your email list, and many more.
Once you and your key shareholders agree on which goals to prioritize, you can start developing a marketing plan that can achieve these goals. Go through the audit and make a list of activities that can be most beneficial in reaching your objective.
If you haven’t already identified your target audience, now is the perfect time to do it.
You and your marketing department should work on sketching out the ideal customer persona and if you already did this, you can check whether recent performances comply with your plan.
Using your social media followers, website visitor analytics, and email subscribers list can all help you gather demographic data on your ideal target audience.
If the data indicates that you are reaching out to the wrong audience, you should immediately see to the issues and make adjustments to your products and services.
Here is a full expert guide that will help you how to identify your target audience.
Every step in your sales funnel is important and you will have to gather data on each one.
This will help you answer questions such as:
It’s best that you start from the top. This means analyzing social media data, PPC advertising data, email marketing data, and SEO data.
Next, you move on to landing pages, CTAs, lead magnets, and the different forms.
KPI data should be included throughout the whole journey.
After gathering enough relevant data on your marketing performances, you should use your marketing audit to examine the efficiency of each activity.
The best way to make accurate ROI forecasts is to start with sales.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should overlook your other marketing goals. If one of your goals is to raise brand visibility, an engaging platform that doesn’t bring a lot of leads could be worth the trouble.
Although, you should remember that marketing objectives have a certain hierarchy. In the hierarchy, sales are most commonly come out on top.
The final step when creating a marketing audit is to use the knowledge you’ve acquired for future strategies.
This can be anything from allocating budget resources, adjusting the budget, or optimizing your content.
We recommend that you test your new strategies through each phase to make sure you are on the right track to meeting your goals.
If you are new to marketing audit reports, you are going to need all the help you can get.
Creating a marketing audit can take quite some time, especially if the data you gathered is segmented in different places.
This is why we recommend using marketing dashboards.
Dashboard apps can help you communicate marketing performances and overall ROI quickly and efficiently to all the high-ranking members in your company.
They are a key piece of the puzzle for any marketing team’s success. Not only will you be able to gather your data in one comprehensive report, but you will also have an easier time analyzing your current strategies and finding ways to improve them.
Marketing reporting software gathers, tracks, and displays all of the most important metrics and KPIs from your marketing channels. This is essential for efficient measuring and campaign analysis.
The things you include in your marketing dashboard depend on a few different factors. Your company’s size, marketing goals, type of marketing strategy, and overall business goals should all be taken into consideration.
A successful marketing dashboard should be adjusted to the specific needs of your business. This is why with Databox dashboards, you can customize the templates in any way that seems most appropriate.
Let’s check out some popular examples.
To stay on top of your website’s performance, you can use this free Site Audit Report Example.
This dashboard will help you understand the key aspects of your website and enable you to quickly recognize any issues regarding internal linking, indexing, HTTPS implementation, and many more.
Some of the questions this dashboard can answer include:
The key metrics included are errors, pages with issues, pages by crawl depth, notices, warnings, and site audit score.
These are the primary metrics, but you can also track some advanced ones like:
Use this SEO Report Example to track the performance of your on-page SEO and gain an insight into which pages on your website drive the most traffic.
SEO is one of the most important aspects of your website and it’s not unusual to have certain questions regarding it. For example:
This comprehensive dashboard will show you all of these things and more.
Some of the metrics included are organic bounce rate, organic sessions, organic goal completions, and sessions by channel.
If you use Google Analytics, you can also track pretty much everything related to traffic and conversions.
This includes:
The Website Performance Report Example will help you monitor traffic sources, audience behavior, and classify your most-viewed website pages.
You will also learn:
The metrics included in this dashboard are bounce rate, page views, new users, average time on page, sessions, users, sessions by channel, and plenty more.
Looking for a way to monitor the performance and ROI of all your marketing campaigns in one place? The PPC Report Example can help you with this.
You can use this pre-built dashboard to connect the most important PPC metrics from your tools and customize it later. Once you have imported all the significant data, you can also visualize it with only a few clicks to get a clearer picture of the operational side of your campaigns.
This dashboard will provide you with insight into:
Also, you can analyze key metrics such as CPC, CTR, impressions, amount spent, link clicks, amount spent by campaign, impressions by campaign, etc.
The Video Marketing Report Example is one of the best dashboards for tracking how video awareness leads to high-intent searches. You can import data from your Facebook and Google Ads and analyze whether or not they are generating any returns.
By using this dashboard, you can find out how your video content is creating awareness through your ad campaigns.
It helps you to:
When it comes to key metrics, there aren’t many dashboards that can compare to this one.
The Video Marketing report includes:
The email marketing program you use is a huge part of each business. To measure its effectiveness, you can use the Email Marketing Report Example.
This customizable dashboard will help you track email sessions, signups by campaign, signups by device, and give you a better overview of which parts of your email marketing strategy can be improved.
With this email marketing dashboard, you will have an easier time measuring the success of your strategy. Once you connect your GA account to the dashboard, you can learn:
The key metrics into which you will gain insight are email sessions, mail campaign sessions, email signups, device sessions, and landing pages from email.
Marketing audit reports are probably the hardest type of reports to create. This is because most businesses typically run dozens of marketing campaigns, which means there is a massive amount of data to gather. And once you do gather it, you will then have to analyze it and present it.
With new marketing tools being released every few months, doing all of this work manually is becoming a lot harder and more time-consuming.
Fortunately, there are marketing dashboard software like Databox that help you stay on top of your marketing strategies.
Databox can help you prepare better marketing audits that you can later use to develop your strategy and make data-informed decisions. With our pre-built dashboards, you can connect data from any marketing channel you use and gather it in one comprehensive report. This also makes the analysis process immensely easier since you will have all the key metrics in one place.
With this kind of overview of your marketing channels, you won’t have to worry about impressing your shareholders with an amazing marketing audit. What’s more, Databox also helps you turn your data into understandable charts through which you and your colleagues will easily spot patterns and weaknesses in your strategies.
Sounds interesting? Sign up today for free and upgrade your marketing reporting skills.
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At Databox, we’re obsessed with helping companies more easily monitor, analyze, and report their results. Whether it’s the resources we put into building and maintaining integrations with 100+ popular marketing tools, enabling customizability of charts, dashboards, and reports, or building functionality to make analysis, benchmarking, and forecasting easier, we’re constantly trying to find ways to help our customers save time and deliver better results.
Filip Stojanovic is a content writer who studies Business and Political Sciences. Also, I am a huge tennis enthusiast. Although my dream is to win a Grand Slam, working as a content writer is also interesting.
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