Marketing audit

A full review identifies competitive advantages

Most companies regularly conduct a financial audit, but how many conduct a marketing audit?  A full review of your company’s marketing and communication really helps to understand where your business is from a marketing perspective.  Through reviewing issues such as: customers and your target audience; your competitors; the marketplace in general and your internal situation; you will be more informed about the success (or otherwise) of previous marketing activities.  This information is invaluable in helping you to develop a successful marketing strategy and highlights what you will need to deliver the marketing strategy to ensure you meet your business objectives.

A marketing audit analyses the business objectives and understands what it is the business is trying to achieve and allows management to make informed decisions on their future marketing direction.

By conducting an impartial marketing audit, the team at Sonrons can provide a fresh pair of eyes and an outsider’s view of your previous marketing activities and assess your performance against your competitors.  A thorough marketing audit provides a benchmark for monitoring future marketing activity and highlights recommendations to improve the efficiency and performance of your company’s marketing activity.

A marketing audit is often used by a company reviewing its business strategy.  A marketing audit can inform management with an invaluable customer and market insight, vital to help them set realistic business objectives.

Aspects covered in a marketing audit include:

1. A SWOT analysis;
2. Customer and prospect research;
3. Competitor analysis;
4. Market overview – external factors covering a PESTLE analysis;
5. Marketing overview of your Internal factors assessing levels of internal communication.

SWOT Analysis from a customer perspective

1. Looking at the strengths and weaknesses of your business from a customer’s view;
2. The key is to understand what are your strengths that are also important to customers, rather than what you are just “good at”;
3. The area to understand is what are your weaknesses where the performance affects customer relationships and market opportunities;
4. The opportunities and threats available need to be considered to understand how you can maximize the opportunities and minimize the threats;
5. The opportunities and threats to any business come from the external factors affecting them.

Customer and prospect research

As part of conducting a marketing audit, Sonrons  can complete some direct market research with your customers and prospects to understand why they buy from your organization and perhaps why people do not buy.  It is really useful to understand what customers like and do not like about your organization so you can help develop and improve your products and services further.  An impartial market research exercise will help you gain clarity of what your customers really think.

Sonrons offers a full market research service in Eastern Europe and other countries.

Competitor analysis

To help you differentiate yourself from the competition, Sonrons will conduct detailed competitor analysis.  This could include mystery shopping comparing yourself and your competitors in areas related to service, or it could involve online analysis regarding website ranking and why your competitors are featuring higher in Google searches than your company.

The Internal Marketing Environment

Time to put your own business under the microscope.  An impartial marketing audit conducted by the Sonrons team will look at all aspects of your business from a marketing perspective.  Areas we would review include:

1. What resources does your company have for marketing & sales?
2. What promotional material do you use?  How do you use it?  How often?
3. What is the state of your customer relationship database?  How could it be used more?  How could it be improved?
4. What is your website like?

The External Marketing Environment

External factors are equally as important and will generally fall under three main environments. It is important to recognize that although we have no control over these factors they are still hugely influential and therefore very important to consider when setting your business and marketing objectives.

The Competitive Environment

Who are your competitors and what are they doing?

The Economic Environment

The PESTEL model is very useful for identifying the economic factors that will affect the decisions of your company.

What is the PESTEL model?

1. Political factors
2. Economic factors
3. Social factors
4. Technological factors
5. Environmental factors
6. Legal factors