How to Conduct a Growth Focused Marketing Impact Audit

The beginning of a new year instigates an itch for most Marketing Managers and CEOs to implement new marketing programs for the year.

Halt!

Before you get out the markers and the whiteboards, have you audited your marketing efforts for 2020 vis-à-vis the business impact and realities?

While implementing new marketing programs for 2021 is a significant step expected of any brand that is serious about growth; auditing your 2020 marketing efforts will help improve the success of your 2021 marketing programs.

Make no mistake, we do not focus this audit on vanity metrics and how colourful the campaigns were, but on marketing’s impact on the business objectives and overall business growth. This audit differs from the general marketing audit which focuses on little wins like the number of social media followers, blog posts published, etc. We expect that the general audit for the marketing department should precede this marketing impact audit.

As a business owner or marketing manager that understands the value of growth, here are 3 reasons all brands need to perform a Marketing Impact Audit.

3 Reasons to Audit Your Marketing Efforts

1.Marketing Impact Audit will help you understand what worked in 2020. Technically, take a cue and implement more of what worked in the previous year.
2. It will help you understand what didn’t work. With this, you will know what marketing programs to reduce or perhaps totally take out of your calendar.
3. It will give an obvious clue to what we should add to the marketing plan for the current year, giving the trends and innovation you noticed in the previous year.

Now that we have established 3 reasons your brand needs to carry out a Marketing Impact Audit, here are 8 important questions you need to find answers to in auditing the impact of your marketing efforts for 2020 before you implement any marketing program in 2021.

8 Marketing Impact Audit Questions

1. Revenue: What product or services generated the most revenue in 2020?

This gives a sense of the products or services that your market really wants. With this information, you can dedicate your marketing efforts and budgets to push these products and services.

2. New Business: What is the volume of new business versus repeat business?

This question helps you understand the satisfaction of your current customers and may warrant research to see what your current customers actually think of your products or services. While getting new clients/customers is a grand thing, there may just be something scaring away your old clients. It is common knowledge that customer acquisition is an expensive venture and it is cheaper to keep old clients.

3. New Business: What sources did our new business come from last year?

This question helps unearth the best platform(s) to reach the target audience and helps to focus the marketing efforts on those platforms. It is an open secret that resources are finite and whatever is available must be channelled to the right path to yield optimum results.

4. Customer Behaviour: Has the target market shifted in their buying patterns?

Focusing on the target audience’s buying pattern is important as it shows what service they need at each point in time and helps in understanding how to improve your services to fit their buying patterns. For example, COVID-19 has made delivery service an important part of most brick-and-mortar products. If you run a restaurant and do not have delivery services, clearly, your market will be restricted to your location. Customers haven’t stopped buying food, they have simply moved to the vendor who can deliver the food to them.

5. Marketing Channels: What marketing channels worked better last year?

Clearly, all marketing channels are not born equal. And the channel that worked best for a Real Estate Firm may not necessarily work best for a restaurant business or an Insurance firm. Each firm should understand their best marketing channel from their business audit and then set out to maximise the use of the channel.

6. Market Segmentation: How did we perform in the various segments of our market? And which segment(-s) should we focus more on this year?

With this question, you can find out the market segment that is pulling its weight and the one that is lagging. You can decide to have incentives to improve the segment(s) lagging and also put things in place to sustain the segment that is doing well. Sometimes, you may decide to do away with a segment that has been lagging consistently for a certain number of years.

7. Marketing Tool: What tools worked better for us last year?

In a digitally driven world, marketing tools have become an essential part of marketing implementation and one can barely do much without them. While they do great work, they can sometimes cost a fortune and with the high number of marketing tools out there, it is important to constantly audit to know if the marketing tool is delivering great value to the organisation while taking urgent steps to remedy or replace it if it is not delivering.

8. Messaging: What are we known for in our market? Is that what we want to be known for? Is there a need to change the narrative?

Is the marketing message in tandem with the brand? Is the brand known for what it wants to be known for? Is the message restricting the growth or enhancing it? Is there a need to change the messaging?

In a nutshell,

While these questions aren’t exhaustive, starting with these can help set your 2021 Marketing programs on the right path. Need to jump into your brand auditing right away, click here to download the full version of our Marketing Impact Audit Template.