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Audit Your Marketing Performance: 16 Questions to Ask

By M. Michelle Poskaitis, CEO, Originations Marketing LLC

A marketing audit is a thorough examination and evaluation of marketing practices and results. A common technique that reaffirms strategies and expenditures while identifying inefficiencies and opportunities to improve market share, marketing audits offer a baseline benchmark on marketing performance.

Audits Tell What Works and Doesn’t Work

Marketing audits:

  • collect and organize information about marketing practices and performance
  • profile current market position, identifying strengths and weaknesses
  • provide guidance for adjustments that help you achieve goals more efficiently and effectively.

The result is an honest appraisal—exempt from organizational politics—of what’s working and not working, revealing:

  • how well your staff understands the market
  • cost efficiencies
  • effectiveness of current strategies and practices
  • fresh ideas to maximize limited resources
  • a more viable competitive advantage

Find Easy Ways to Cut Costs

Marketing audits also uncover simple cost-cutting tactics that can increase performance and maximize your return. A 15,000-member trade association launched an advertising campaign to promote publications. Using reader response cards in targeted trade magazines, they garnered hundreds of sales monthly. Orders shipped within 48 hours. The organization used an effective cross-selling strategy by including membership and conference information with every shipment.

What didn’t work? Once fulfilled, response cards were filed away, rather than source-coded and entered into a prospect database for future solicitation. By doing the latter, the association could:

  • save on list rental expenses
  • measure the value of advertising dollars spent
  • spend more wisely in the future
  • nurture relationships with prospects who already expressed interest

Useful Questions to Ask . . .

Here are some key questions to help you get a “quick read” on how well your staff and organization employs marketing principles.

…About Marketing Planning

  • Is there a written marketing plan that articulates goals, strategies, and tactics in terms of time, people, and money?
  • Is the marketing plan shared throughout the organization?
  • Does the plan include all the critical pieces? Is the plan thorough?

Sounds obvious, but many forgo the annual practice of developing a written marketing plan. Admittedly, this requires a hefty dose of discipline. But you can’t achieve a goal without first articulating it, identifying where you are, and determining how to get there.

Writing down your goal allows your marketing team to easily share information and avoid unforeseen breakdowns such as when the marketing department initiates a promotional campaign but forgets to tell call center staff, who find themselves deluged with questions.

. . . About Marketing Research

  • What do our customers want and need, and why?
  • What is our procedure for capturing, storing, and updating customer information?
  • How do we collect, analyze, and act on competitive information?

Your staff should be able to articulate a customer profile for each product or service and explain the want or need each product or service satisfies for each customer type.

. . . About Customers

  • Who are the primary customer groups that purchase from us today?
  • Which customers are the most profitable?

The correct answer isn’t necessarily “those who pay us the most per order.” Why? Because, if tracked, you may discover customers who don’t prefer big-ticket items may routinely spend more on multiple purchases over time.

Customer groups are defined by geography, type of industry, job title, type of training, purchasing pattern, demographics, or other significant characteristics. Understanding how your product or service fulfills a customer want or need and how wants or needs vary by customer type allows you to prioritize the market. It also helps you find the largest consumer groups that are most likely to buy repeatedly.

. . . About Cost and Price

  • What is our unit cost for each product or service?
  • How does our pricing compare to similar products or services?

Without an eye toward cost of goods sold and the competition, marketing initiatives will lack any focus on profitability.

. . . About Convenience

  • If our product or service did not exist, how much would it cost a customer in time, money, or other resources to satisfy the same want or need that we are satisfying?
  • Are there multiple venues for customers to acquire the product or service from us? How many? How efficient are they from the customer’s perspective?

With innumerable options available, ease of use and ease of purchase can turn into a competitive advantage or a deal-breaker. If you offer high quality at competitive prices and satisfy customers, but make them work too hard to buy, you risk losing sales.

. . . About Brand Communication

  • What is the single primary benefit that will motivate prospects to act?

Listen for a three-sentence answer that articulates the most sustainable benefit that gives the greatest leverage for the product or service, which cannot be owned by any competitors. If your organization doesn’t own the answer to this question, how will you communicate your value?

  • What single net impression or attitude, if adopted by prospects, will move them to make the desired behavior change?
  • What do we want the target audience to think and do as a result of our communication?
  • What is standing in the way of moving prospects or customers from what they currently think to what we want them to think?

There are no permanent, “right” answers in marketing. Customers’ wants and needs are moving targets, and marketing initiatives require testing and re-testing to find the most profitable formula. As such, the activity of examining your organization’s marketing practices and results is itself germane to productive marketing.

First published: American Society of Association Executives, Executive IdeaLink

Author of the ASAE best-selling book Smart Marketing for Associations: Marketing Plans That Work, M. Michelle Poskaitis’ expertise includes marketing planning, positioning, messaging and content development. A contributing writer and editor for association trade press, Michelle is CEO of Originations Marketing LLC and past chair of the ASAE Marketing Section Council. Contact: mmp@originations.net

© 2001, M. Michelle Poskaitis. All rights reserved.

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