Marketing Audit

Marketing Audit is an organizational marketing assessment approach with the purpose of analyzing the marketing approach. Marketing Audit is very useful exercise for any organization because it can reveal weaknesses and identify opportunities for improving the current marketing activities taken by the organization. Marketing Audit is strategic marketing assessment and goes beyond focusing on advertising or marketing campaigns but it is a tool used to analyze the overall organizational approach to marketing and selling the products and services.

What are the elements of an effective Marketing Audit?

The Marketing Audit should be strategic and comprehensive and it should assess the organization on the ability to analyze the environment, develop effective marketing strategies and execute those marketing tactics and strategies considering the following:

The General Business Environment

General Public

Politics

Technology

Culture

General Business Trends

Economical Trends

Environment

Demographics

The General Market Environment

Target Markets

Customers

Partners (Distributors, Dealers, Reps, Retail)

Suppliers

Competitors

Offerings

Products

Services

Pricing

The Overall Organizational Strategy

• Overall Organizational Goals and Objectives

• Strategic Business Units and Strategies

The Marketing and Sales Organization

• Marketing Research

• Marketing Analysis

• Marketing Information System

• Marketing Reporting

• Marketing Planning

• Marketing Strategy Development

• Marketing Tools and Applications

• Marketing Tactics and Approaches

• Sales Management

Why should you use a Marketing Audit?

The Marketing Audit will help you make sure your organization is very well positioned in the marketplace (external marketing fit), for example targeting the right market, offering competitive products and services, offering competitive pricing, having effective product and service development and improvement and you have competitive advantage in the marketplace. Internally the Marketing Audit will help you assess whether your organization has the required capabilities, structure and resources to pursue market opportunities and improve the market position.

As you develop the right Marketing Audit categories you would like to focus on you can rank yourself on a scale from 1 to 5 on each category / each question in your Marketing Audit list. For example, score 1 would mean poor performance for a category, 3 would mean average (just like any competitor and score of 5 would mean excellent / best in class performance for a particular marketing category.

Next, you can develop a list of importance levels for each category. For example, different marketing activities have different importance levels. It is very helpful to assign score from 1 to 5 for importance of each marketing activity / category in your Marketing Audit questionnaire.   

Why do you need two rankings in your Marketing Audit?

You need to rank yourself on how good you perform a certain marketing activity and a the same time how important is that marketing activity because this will help you identify the right areas for improvement. For example, if you score 3 (average performance) on a certain marketing activity and the importance is also 3 (average importance) in that case maybe you do not need to improve that marketing category but you would rather allocate resources to improve a marketing category which has 5 (high level of importance for your organization) and your current performance level is 3 (average marketing performance for that marketing category).

Example of organizing your Marketing Audit Information and Ranking your Marketing Performance and Importance: