Marketing audits: the spring cleaning your business needs every year. 

There are two main types of audits: internal and external. Internal audits look at the marketing strategy, team, systems and organization of processes and assets. External audits look at the competition, the market, the tech space and relevant trends.

When it comes to internal audits, there are 10 that you should consider completing this spring (or as you close Q2).

When to Conduct a Marketing Audit

Comprehensive marketing audits should be done periodically as trends, modes of communication and audiences are ever-evolving. But unless you have a decent amount of resources, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to do a full competitive audit each year. However, it’s still valuable to set aside time to review internal data, processes and performance. While you may do a more formal end of year report or summary to capture revenue or results year over year, taking time mid-year in the second or third quarter to conduct an audit can help you shift and improve strategy in real time if needed.

Ten Recommended Internal Marketing Audits

For “spring cleaning” exercise, consider undergoing these ten internal marketing audits:

1. Analytics Audit
2. Content & SEO Audit
3. UX Audit 
4. Technical Audit
5. Email Audit
6. Social Media Audit
7. Assets Audit
8. Testimonial/ Customer Review Audit
9. Audience or Persona Audit
10. Processes Documentation Audit

Conducting Website Audits

The first four audits — analytics; content & SEO; UX; and technical — are are related to your business’ website. If you are a digital product or service, or you bring in most of your audience through digital channels, your website is like your front door. Or, for the sake of metaphor, your engine. Nothing is more important than making sure that engine is running well.

In an analytics audit, you’ll make sure that you have properly connected your website to Google Analytics and are tracking all of the events or actions that you want to track. You’ll check in on your metrics so far this year and draw attention to anything that’s off trend.

With a content and SEO audit, you’re getting to the meat of your site. You can bucket content into categories that align with your key message points. You can also run your site through a keyword tool like SEMrush to look for ways to optimize. Then, look to address gaps as you plan your content going forward. Auditing content doesn’t have to stop at the website, but it’s an important place to start (engine!) Once you’ve review the web content, take a look at landing pages, print publications, social media, email and other content areas (some of which are covered below). 

UX audits are a chance to step into the consumer’s shoes, or, bring in real consumers to do this for you. Test out important flows on your site like adding to cart or completing a form. Proper UX testing should be part of your process whenever designing new interactions or webpages, but audits can help catch issues or challenges newly arisen.

A website technical audit is important to ensuring your site’s speed, accessibility and function. Proper code can affect UX, SEO and conversion rates. 

Auditing Email & Social Content

Like the web content audit, take a look at the themes or categories you’ve covered in your emails and social posts so far. Be honest about if you stayed on strategy or strayed for opportunistic reasons. Look at what themes or styles of content got the most engagement. Check on the freshness of your templates. All of these steps can help you adjust your strategy and content planning for the rest of the year.

Auditing Assets, Testimonials and Customer Reviews

This audit is a bit more in the weeds, looking at the elements that help with your overall content creation:

• Photography
• Graphics 
• Video
• Testimonials /Reviews

Do you have the right assets to match your messaging and content plan? Where are there gaps? What plans do you need to make (or what budget do you need) to fill those gaps? 

Audience/User Persona Audits

Auditing your audiences and user personas is more of a check-in than a true audit, since really auditing these would require looking at competitor and market research as well. For now, review the personas and intended audiences you had set at the start of the year against what your data is now showing. Does it still align? Are those audiences still priority? Do those personas still serve your content process?  

Process Documentation Audits

The most boring (or satisfying, depending on your perspective) audit of all is the process documentation audit — but man is it important. If you’re not adding a lot of new processes throughout the year, this may be able to wait until year end, but don’t let it go too long. Making sure you have a business-wide or department-wide system for documenting processes is critical to business continuity. Post-audit schedule some education sessions with your team to make sure everyone is on the same page about the processes going forward. 

How to Conduct an Internal Marketing Audit

1. Identify Goals: No matter what kind of audit you decide to dive into, start by reviewing your key objectives and marketing goals for the year  and any performance to date that is available. This will ensure that your audit is focused on reviewing information that is relevant and actionable toward your goal.
2. Establish Parameters: Decide on the depth of your audit and how far back you want to go. For a spring cleaning approach, you may be looking at the first two quarters of the year. 
3. Gather Data: Pull together all the relevant data points that will help you determine the successes and failures of the strategies or elements you are auditing. 
4. Identify Strengths and Weaknesses: It’s easy to just point out the issues or gaps when doing an audit. But how can you build on success if you don’t recognize it? Make sure to call out what’s working so that can also be factored in to future planning.
5. Synthesize and Look for Trends: Especially if you’re doing more than one audit, it’s important to look at the parts all together to see what themes are arising.
6. Develop an Action Plan: Based on the result of your audits, what needs to happen next? Organize the action items by priority and create timelines to ensure all needs are addressed. Again, make sure to also include what elements of the strategy should remain or be expanded upon based on positive performance.