Why Marketing Audits are Essential
Marketing audits are reviews of your current marketing activity.
Marketing audits give you valuable insights into customers old and new, as well as your prospects. These insights allow you to develop stronger connections with your current customers, whilst giving you opportunities to develop your prospects into becoming future customers.
It’s useful to review your current marketing activities to better understand what’s working, what isn’t working and where your greatest opportunities could be. If you fail to audit your marketing strategy often enough, you could end up never reaching your goals.
We’ve compiled a list of questions you may want to ask yourself when considering doing a review of your marketing activity, broken into segments:
Review Active Customers
What data do you hold?
Which are the most and least valuable customers?
How did you acquire these customers?
What communication was used? What offer? Which channel?
How do you currently segment them?
Did you acquire different customers using different methods, communications and offers?
How old is the information? When was it last cleaned?
How do you contact active customers and how often?
Is there an opportunity to increase the value of the customer via cross-sell or upsell?
What communications are the most effective?
How do you measure the success of your contact?
How do you measure the overall annual customer turnover?
Review Lapsed Customers
Who were they?
Where did they originally come from?
When did they leave?
Why did they leave?
Are there any indicators that identify lapsed customers?
Are there any current customers considered to be “at risk”?
Have you tried to get them back? If so, how?
Why did attempts to get them back fail?
Have you attempted different methods to get them back?
When could they come back?
What are the overall annual customer attrition and reactivation figures?
Review Prospects
What type of prospects are in your current pipeline?
How many quotes do you have out there?
What is your conversion rate?
How did you acquire these prospects?
Have you considered other ways of acquiring prospects, i.e. a purchased prospect list?
What information do you hold on them?
How old is the information? When was it last cleaned?
How do you follow up with prospects? Do you diarise in a CRM?
How do you follow up with prospects that you have quoted but haven’t won?
What is your forecast?
Are there enough prospects in your current pipeline?
Marketing audits don’t take place just once – they should be taken on an ongoing basis. You need to review and audit your marketing regularly, to check for any problems that may emerge over time.
