How To Perform A Fully Internal Marketing Audit

Does any business like to be audited? Probably not. Just as most of us probably wouldn’t want a personal trainer kicking open our door and doing a strict evaluation of our fitness right here and now. That being said, an audit can bring certain uncomfortable truths to the surface, which can help us stop making mistakes. Where our financial and commercial validity is on the line, that’s a pretty helpful process.

Of course, marketing audits can sound like one of the corporate exercises big companies do to justify their budgets, but you don’t have to be cost-cutting or budget-justifying to get use out of them. The problem is that most people think you need to hire expensive consultants or have a massive marketing team to pull one off properly.

That’s not the case at all. Running your own internal marketing audit can give you important understanding into what’s working, what’s completely useless, and where you might be throwing money away on campaigns that aren’t moving the needle. The best part is you already have access to most of the data you need, and you understand your business better than any outside consultant ever could.

However, you do need to have discipline. In this post, we’ll discuss how to perform a fully internal marketing audit with care:

Gather All Your Marketing Data From The Past Year

We’d suggest you begin by collecting every piece of marketing data you can find from the last 12 months, which should include everything from social media analytics to email open rates, website traffic numbers, and any sales figures you can connect back to specific campaigns. If you can get a complete picture of what you’ve been doing and how people have been responding to it, that gives you the data to sift through.

Now, don’t worry about organizing everything perfectly right away, just focus on gathering it all in one place first. You’ll probably be surprised by how much data you have sitting in different platforms and tools that you haven’t looked at in months. Many businesses run campaigns and forget to check back on the results, which means they’re missing decent insights about what their audience has connected with and how or why. This step takes time, but it’s worth being thorough.

Review Your Current Marketing Goals & Whether They Make Sense

Look at the marketing goals you set at the beginning of the year and ask yourself if they still make sense for where your business is now. Many companies set goals like “increase social media followers” or “improve brand awareness” but never connect those goals to actual revenue or customer acquisition numbers that matter for their bottom line, it’s just a vague promise of improvement.

This is where an SEO expert mindset becomes valuable, because good SEO professionals know that “vanity metrics,” as they call it, won’t pay the bills. So for instance, instead of a hyper attention to likes and shares, think about metrics you can work with, like qualified leads, conversion rates, or customer lifetime value. Your marketing should be in service of those actual measurable results that help your business grow.

This can inspire the hard question of asking if your original goals were realistic given your budget and resources too. If you set out to dominate every social media platform but only have one person handling marketing part-time, that goal was probably too ambitious from the start. Realistic goals that you can actually achieve and measure are much more valuable than aspirational ones that leave you feeling like you’re constantly falling short.

Choose Which Channels Are Bringing In Your Best Customers

This is where you need to take a hard look at where your best customers are coming from and how much you’re spending to acquire them through different marketing approaches or channels. As we mentioned, counting website visits isn’t going to help here. Focusing on leads and going into which sources bring you customers who stick around, spend more money, or refer other people to your business could be at the heart of your strategy from that point on.

For example, you might figure out that while Google Ads brings in more traffic than your email newsletter, the email subscribers end up pulling in more valuable customers. Or, maybe an expensive social media campaign gave you lots of buzz but didn’t give you any more sales despite going viral twice, but your simple referral program has been quietly bringing in high-quality customers for months.

That’s not to say you should cut all your less-performing options, but it certainly helps to know them.

Take Time To Review Your Content Performance

They say content is king now, but that doesn’t mean all kings have been particularly competent, historically speaking. We’d suggest you go through all the content you’ve published over the past year and choose which posts achieved the best response from your audience. Be wide in your search, including blog posts, social media updates, videos, emails, and any other content you’ve put out there, looking for patterns in what topics, formats, or styles seem to connect with people most effectively.

Now, don’t just look at engagement metrics either because some companies make that mistake, try to figure out which content pieces helped your actual business results. That viral social media post might have gotten tons of likes, but did it bring in any new customers or did it just give you intangible brand exposure? That could be worthwhile, but can you quantify it in any increased sales? If not, the metric might not have been so helpful. However, a detailed how-to guide you published six months ago might still be bringing in qualified leads every week through organic search traffic, even though you thought it would be too niche to achieve that.

Such an approach helps you avoid feeling quite so narrow-minded in your goal setting, and perhaps realize different options work for your business better right now. That might not be forever, but no audit is supposed to give you permanent answers.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily perform a fully internal marketing audit going forward.