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Marketing Audit Report: What They Are & How to Make One

Marketing Audit Report: What They Are & How to Make One

Do you want to create a marketing audit report, but you’re not sure where to start?

Over the years, I’ve seen too many marketers create strategies and flip the switch to autopilot.

This is a great way to save time, but no system is perfect. And more often than not, you’ll miss crucial marketing opportunities if you don’t occasionally audit your efforts to look for improvements.

That’s why, today, we’re going to teach you how to create a marketing audit report.

Before we dive into the tutorial, though, let’s get clear on what a marketing audit report is and, more importantly, why they matter.

Section linkWhat Are Marketing Audit Reports?

When was the last time you really scrutinized your marketing?

No, I don’t mean when did you last run a report or make a small tweak to your strategy. I mean, when did you last go through all your marketing activities with a fine-toothed comb, analyzing and evaluating every aspect of your approach?

Because that is what a marketing audit report does.

It goes several steps further than your usual weekly or monthly reports, taking a deep and objective look at your marketing performance. Then it presents your findings for discussion, so you can make a plan for the future.

A marketing audit report should:

  • Identify all your current marketing activities
  • Evaluate their effectiveness against a set of pre-agreed goals
  • Present the findings in the context of the wider market and internal resources
  • Suggest where changes need to be made

Agencies will typically carry out an audit when they are hired by a new client. Brands tend to do them when they come towards the end of the current strategy.

But the best marketers know the importance of running audits more frequently, so they can evaluate their performance while there is still time to make changes.

Every marketing team should do an audit from time to time. Without them, it’s simply too easy to grow complacent. Just because there are no glaring issues with your marketing strategy doesn’t mean it is the best it can be.

Marketing audits can also help you identify areas where you are under-resourced. By bringing you clarity on what is working and what isn’t, an audit will help you allocate your budget and your staff’s time appropriately.

Your marketing audit should scrutinize every single marketing activity and show how it is helping you to reach your goals. It should also analyze the effectiveness of every platform and every sales funnel.

To do this, you’ll need to bring data together from all your marketing platforms into one comprehensive report. Every important detail must be included to give you the holistic view of what you’ll need.

With that in mind, let’s switch gears and dive into our tutorial on how to make an audit report.

Section linkHow to Make an Audit Report

Your marketing audit report is an essential business tool. There’s no point going through such an in-depth exercise unless you can present and summarize your findings, supported by evidence and data.

The report then becomes the basis for decision-making about your future marketing strategy, so it needs to be done well.

Here's how to put together an audit report that gives you the solid basis you need to plan your next steps.

Section link1. Identify your Marketing Objectives

identify your marketing goals

Before you can analyze the effectiveness of your existing marketing, you need to define what your objectives are. What goals are you trying to achieve?

You might break these down by priority.

Bringing in X number of sales might be your most important marketing objective. But you may also want to generate leads, increase brand awareness, grow your mailing list, keep existing customers engaged, or any number of other goals.

With these agreed upon, you can assess your current performance against your objectives. As you go through the audit, think at every point: “How does activity X help me achieve goal A?” Your report should make the answer to this question clear.

For more information on this, check out this helpful post: What KPI Metrics Make a Valuable Report for Small Businesses?

Section link2. Determine your Target Audience

You should have, hopefully, already identified your target audience when you first created your marketing strategy. If not, this is an excellent time to do so.

But even if you have customer personas already sketched out, this is an opportunity to check whether you were on the right track. Include demographic data on your existing and potential customers, including social media followers, website visitors, and mailing list subscribers.

Do they match your personas?

If not, dive deeper into your data to determine whether you are reaching the wrong audience and missing out on sales or if your idea of who wants your products or services needs adjusting.

Section link3. Analyze your Sales Funnels

analyze your sales funnel

The next step is to gather data on every single step in your sales funnel.

Where do potential customers enter your funnels? Where do they bounce? Which content has a decent conversion rate, and which isn’t performing as you’d like?

Start at the top of your funnel, with data from your social media channels, PPC advertising, email marketing, and SEO. Move down to your landing pages, calls-to-action, lead magnets, and forms.

Include KPI data for each step of the journey.

Section link4. Evaluate your ROI

Once you have as much (relevant) data on your marketing activities as you can gather, your report should evaluate how effective each one is while meeting the objectives you set at the start.

The usual way of assessing your ROI is to focus on sales.

But don’t forget your other marketing objectives altogether. If one of your aims is to grow your brand awareness, a platform that brings you plenty of engagement might be worth the attention, even if it doesn’t bring in many leads.

I say “might” because those marketing objectives have a hierarchy to them. And, unless your company is very unusual, sales are going to be top of the list. That means brand awareness is great, but only if it isn’t coming at the expense of more lucrative activities.

Section link5. Suggest a Way Forward

suggest a path forward

The final stage in your report is to take what you’ve discovered about your existing marketing and make a list of recommendations for the future. This might include reallocating resources, adjusting budgets, or optimizing content.

Or it might require a more in-depth overhaul. If it does, don’t forget to test and evaluate your new approach at every stage to make sure you are back on track.

Now that you have a general idea about what you should include in your marketing audit reports, let’s dive into a few concrete steps you can take toward actually making them.

Section linkHow to Make a Marketing Audit Report

At this point, we’ve looked at some tips on creating a marketing audit report. Now comes the hard part: actually making it.

You have a few options for this. One of the most common ways is to create audit reports manually.

That requires hours of transferring KPIs from one platform into a communal spreadsheet. Many marketers do this because they’re trying to respect a budget.

But at the end of the day, they lose more money in terms of hours worked than if they’d just opted for a report building tool.

And that’s where the second method comes in: creating audit reports with a software like Metrics Watch:

metrics watch homepage

Metrics Watch is one of the best report building tools on the market.

It allows anyone to quickly and easily create stunning and professional-looking reports in a matter of minutes, regardless of their technical experience/background.

Metrics Watch connects with and pulls data from your favorite marketing channels, such as:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Ads
  • Facebook (organic and paid)
  • Instagram (organic and paid)
  • LinkedIn (organic and paid)
  • Mailchimp

This allows you to audit the performance of your marketing campaigns for SEO, PPC, email marketing, and more.

It can also give you a quick glimpse of your eCommerce sales, so you’ll always be well aware of your bottom line.

And since Metrics Watch uses a codeless drag and drop editor, you’ll be able to make the reports in no time.

But what really makes Metrics Watch stand apart is HOW the reports are shared. Unlike other report building tools, Metrics Watch sends all the data directly to your customer’s or team’s inbox.

There are no messy PDF attachments to organize and no 3rd-party user role management to configure (like you’d find with report dashboards).

Instead, you simply send the marketing audit report to the people who need to see it in a format they already know.

And once everything is configured the first time, these reports can be sent automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Want to see it in action for yourself? Click below to start your 100% risk-free Metrics Watch trial today (no credit card required):

Start Your FREE Trial Now!

And that’s it for today! This has been an overview of marketing audit reports.

We hope you enjoyed the read, and if you did, then you’ll definitely want to check out the following resources:

These articles will have even more information on how you can create more efficient (and profitable) marketing reports.

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