Most business owners have a vague sense that some of their marketing is working and some isn’t, but they rarely sit down to look at the whole picture clearly.
A marketing audit doesn’t have to be a multi-week consulting engagement. Here’s how to do a useful one in about three hours.
Start with the question that matters most: where are your clients actually coming from?
Pull a list of your last ten to twenty clients. For each one, write down how they first heard about you and what prompted them to reach out when they did. If you don’t know, reach out and ask. Most clients are happy to share this. The data you gather here is more valuable than any analytics platform because it tells you the actual journey rather than the tracked journey.
Look for patterns. Are the majority coming from referrals? From a specific content channel? From a specific platform? From a specific campaign? From a specific type of introduction? The pattern tells you what’s actually working.
Next, assess what you’re spending time and money on.
Make a list of every marketing activity you do regularly: posting on social, running ads, sending email, networking, speaking, writing content, whatever it is. Estimate the time cost of each and any financial cost. Then compare this list to your client source list. Are you spending significant time and money on activities that are generating zero clients? Are you spending minimal time on activities that are generating most of your clients?
The gap between what you’re investing in and what’s actually working is your audit finding.
Then assess the funnel.
For every major traffic source that’s sending you interested people, ask: what happens to them when they arrive? Do they land on a page that converts? Do they get captured into an email sequence? Do they have a clear path to becoming a client? Or do they arrive and leave with no mechanism for follow-up?
Traffic without a funnel is attention without conversion. Identify where the traffic is coming in and where it’s leaking out.
Three hours. Three questions. Clearer picture than most businesses have of their own marketing.
What did you find?