Business Mantra @ 1-2-3: 3 Reasons Small Business Owners Should Conduct Regular Marketing Audits

1 Challenge

·????????“My marketing strategies are not performing the way I expected.”

2 Questions

·????????“How can I better align my strategies with my outcomes?”

·????????“Do I need a marketing audit?”

3 Steps

·????????Sync your marketing activities with goals

·????????Discover new ideas and strategies

·????????Save time and money

In today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, marketing is a critical function for organisations in every industry. This is true for larger companies with dedicated marketing departments, as well as for small businesses and startups with small (or one-person) marketing teams and limited budgets. But sometimes, marketing efforts fail. When this happens, it can affect customer volumes, conversions, sales and profits. In some cases, it could lead to a regulatory slap on the wrist. And in the worst case, it may lead to business closure.

One-off failures are inevitable. But no business can afford consistent failures after investing time, money and resources into marketing research, planning and execution. This is why marketing audits are absolutely crucial. With such an audit, you can review your current marketing setup, understand what’s working and what’s not, and identify areas for improvement. An audit can also help you pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses, and discover opportunities and threats (SWOT), so you can make the right decisions about where, when and to what extent you should allocate your marketing resources now and in future.

A marketing audit is a review of your marketing plan, objectives, strategies and activities.

Here are 3 reasons you should conduct a regular marketing audit for your small business.

1: Sync your marketing activities with goals

In trying to grow a business and outperform its competitors, many small businesses get mired in executing day-to-day responsibilities. As a result, they lose sight of the big picture and fail to focus on their long-term marketing goals. When this happens, they struggle to remember why they implemented a certain marketing strategy. They also find it difficult to determine if they are executing it successfully. A marketing audit is a way to take a step back and review your marketing plan (and business plan too, if required). Armed with facts and data gathered from your research, you can understand if your daily marketing activities are actually supporting your business goals. If?not, you can do a further deep-dive analysis to find the gaps, and then put an action plan in place to close those gaps.

2: Discover new ideas and strategies

By definition, a marketing audit requires a significant amount of research, both internal (into your business) and external (business, regulatory and financial environment). It also forces you to be objective about your what-is versus your what-should-be. Thus, it can yield a lot of useful information about new marketing tactics and strategies that you may be able to implement in your own business. For example, you may discover that your competition is doing something never done before in the industry, or something that’s been done before but you never thought of doing. With an audit, you can take steps to leverage these strategies with a few modifications and create a new (or updated) marketing plan that has greater potential for success.

3: Save time and money

For small businesses, marketing is often a hit-and-miss kind of activity. Try one thing today and pour money into it. If it doesn’t work, try something else. Wash, rinse, repeat. For large firms with huge marketing budgets, big teams, and access to the latest industry intel and technology, this kind of strategy may be acceptable. But small businesses need more bang for their marketing buck, otherwise they just end up throwing good money after bad. This means that they cannot afford to randomly experiment with marketing, especially if they don’t have the financial or operational capacity to tolerate failures. A marketing audit provides a regular “check-in”, and can help you focus on the right activities that work best for your business. In the long run, you will save money – not to mention time – and improve your marketing ROI and financial bottomline.

Ready to plan your marketing audit?

To initiate a marketing audit, you first need to review all existing business and marketing documents to get clarity on goals. Then, compile a list of current strategies. Ask yourself: Why did we implement this strategy? What was its stated purpose? What success criteria did we define? Next, conduct research into external factors like competition, market, economy and industry, and see if your current marketing plan incorporates or considers them. Also do a SWOT analysis of your organisation to get a holistic picture of the good, the not-so-good and the possibly-good. Based on all this information, tweak your existing marketing plan or create a completely new plan.

If you don’t want to waste your money or resources, make a regular marketing audits a part of your business. The results will be worth it!

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