How to run a marketing audit: the process I use with SMEs

Step one: agree what good looks like before you look at anything

An audit without a commercial goal is just a tour of your marketing. Start by writing down what the business needs marketing to deliver over the next twelve months, in numbers. Enquiries, average order value, retention, entry into a new sector, whatever it is.

Everything you review afterwards gets judged against that, which stops the audit turning into a critique of taste.

Step two: pull the numbers before you form an opinion

The baseline set is usually:

• Website analytics for the last twelve months, including traffic sources and the pages that generate enquiries
• Search visibility: what you rank for, what your competitors rank for, and what you do not appear for at all
• Every marketing cost, including retainers, tools, sponsorships and the ones nobody has reviewed for two years
• Enquiry and lead data, ideally with source, and what happened to each one
• Social and email performance, judged on engagement and conversion rather than follower counts

Gaps in this data are a finding in themselves. If you cannot tell where enquiries come from, fixing that is often the highest value recommendation in the whole audit.

Step three: review position and message, not just channels

This is the step most audits skip, and it is usually where the real problem sits. Look at how you describe what you do, and compare it with how your competitors describe the same thing. If the two are interchangeable, no amount of channel optimisation will fix your conversion rate.

Read your own reviews and testimonials, and speak to a handful of recent customers if you can. Customers describe the value of what you do far better than internal copy does, and their words are usually the strongest raw material for new messaging.

Step four: assess each channel on its job, not its activity

Every channel should have one job: awareness, consideration, conversion or retention. Judge it on that job. A LinkedIn presence that generates no enquiries is not failing if its job is credibility for a long sales cycle, and a beautifully maintained blog that nobody finds in search is not succeeding just because it is consistent.

Score each channel simply: keep, fix, or stop. Being willing to write stop is what makes an audit useful.

Step five: turn findings into a prioritised plan

Sort every finding into three buckets:

• Fix now: cheap, quick, and obviously broken, such as tracking gaps, weak calls to action or a slow site
• Fix next: needs proper work but has clear return, such as messaging, key landing pages or search visibility
• Decide: bigger commercial questions the leadership team needs to answer, such as which market to focus on

A good audit ends with no more than five priorities. If everything is a priority, the audit has failed and the report will sit in a folder.

How often to do it

A full audit is worth running when something material changes: new leadership, a new market, a flat year, or before you commit to a significant spend. Between those, a lighter quarterly review of the numbers and the priorities is usually enough to keep the plan honest.