Don't Let Your Marketing Strategy Fall Behind: Conducting a Quarterly Audit for Your Organization
Many small business owners fail to do a marketing audit regularly. They fall into the trap of thinking, ‘I know what my problems are and how to fix them.' But in reality, they don't really have a way of monitoring the success and failures of their marketing at all. This creates an even bigger problem because now unknowingly you and your team are recreating content that isn’t performing or resonating with your ideal customer and client. A marketing audit takes a deeper look into all of your existing marketing efforts and activities to determine how well they are serving your business goals.
So here’s the thing, marketing is a psychological understanding of your ideal client. So doing a quarterly marketing audit is a way for your to make sure you and your target market are still on the same page.
The word “audit” just explains the systematic way you will go about analyzing your marketing efforts for the past quarter. In your audit you are looking for:
Identify what is working and what is not
Identify new opportunities
(Re)evaluating your marketing goals
Becoming more cost-effective
Remember the goal is for us all to get your marketing to a Beyonce level of excellence lol.
To sum it up a quarterly marketing audit can help you clarify your goals and objectives.
Why do an audit every quarter and not monthly?
Although we do recommend you do a marketing review of your efforts every month this includes social media posts, email marketing, SMS marketing, blogging, and ads, to truly allow your content and marketing efforts to work the content needs time. You need at least 60-90 with any marketing objective to have solid data to know if it did or didn’t “work”. We put that in quotations because we don’t view any efforts as a failure, more so lessons. Besides even the worst campaigns still will produce data to make better data-driven decisions, but more on that another day.
Furthermore, at Irene-Marie Co. with our clients, we operate on a 12 week year. This means every quarter is a new year in their business. This creates urgency and improves productivity. So by the end of the quarter, the year is up in our world and now it’s time to see how we did!
Now let’s show you how to conduct a quarterly marketing audit.
Step One: What were the marketing goals?
The verrrryyy first thing I want you to know about your marketing goals is that they need to be directly tied to a business objective. Because who is going to be on the internet just because? Not us and you shouldn’t either. Identify 3 business objectives you want to improve through your marketing because you can’t try and achieve every business goal all at once. Some examples could be:
Grow email list
Raise brand awareness
Increase sales on a specific product
Grow SMS list.
Once you have decided what business objectives will be connected to your marketing goals now it is time to decide the methods you will use to get to the finish line.
Step Two: What are your marketing activities?
Go take inventory of all the ways you market your business. These are called your marketing activities.
Blogging
Email campaigns
IG & Reels
Tik Tok
Facebook
Twitter
Podcast
Paid Ads
Webinars
Downloadable Content
Pop up Shop events
Once you look all the way that you have been marketing your business, connect each activity with a marketing objective. Once it has an objective look to see what metric or data is associated with the activity and give it a new metric goal for the next quarter.
See below
Step Four: Analyze Why Your Marketing Is or Isn’t Working.
Once you have your metrics to look at, you can identify trends and see where your strategy is doing great or needs some extra attention. This is why it’s important to do an audit every quarter so that you can find the patterns and gaps in your marketing and content.
Sometimes simple changes can make a huge difference. For example, if you are regular Instagram posts aren’t performing it’s time to adjust the times you are posting them and the captions that accompany the posts.
Step Five: Change It Up
Once you have seen what is working or not working, begin to get rid of any content that isn’t performing and double up on the content and marketing efforts that are performing!
Boom you’ve done a thorough marketing audit!
Need Help with your Marketing Audit?
If this seems overwhelming, Irene-Marie Co. is always here to help walking you through a marketing strategy to help get your marketing just right. You can book a clarity call and we can conduct an audit for you and provide an action plan toward better preformance!
