While I was preparing the topic for this text, I read through what already exists on marketing audits. What surprised me is that almost all of it starts with the website, the channels and the campaigns, and very little of it says anything about how serious this function is, what role it plays, or why it matters that a company actually applies it.

So let me take it from the beginning.

A business owner usually knows that their marketing isn't working properly, but knowing it isn't enough.

What they don't have is an answer to where exactly it breaks. Is it the offer, the audience, the message, the channel, or what happens when an interested buyer finally gets in touch. Because none of that is visible, the fix gets sought by replacement. A new agency, a new website, a new campaign. Every one of those replacements is guesswork, and that is what gets paid for in both money and time.

A marketing audit exists so the guessing can stop.

What a marketing audit is

A marketing audit is a comprehensive, systematic, independent and periodic examination of a company's marketing environment, objectives, strategy and activities, carried out to establish where the problems are and where the opportunities lie.

The definition is Kotler's, and the concept was set out in 1977 by Kotler, Gregor and Rodgers in Sloan Management Review. The idea was borrowed from finance, where examining the books has long been governed by rules, done on a schedule, and entrusted to someone from outside the company. Marketing went without anything comparable for a long time. Money was spent, campaigns were run, and nobody outside the company ever went through the whole of it.

What it is for, and why it is not the same as tracking results

This is where the greatest confusion arises. A company tracks its numbers, watches them rise or fall, and believes it is checking its marketing.

A performance report and a marketing audit answer different questions. The report shows how well you are carrying out the plan, but it cannot show you whether the plan was any good.

A company can meet every monthly target, have accurate reports and have everyone doing the job as agreed, while the whole plan points at an audience that will never buy. The numbers will not reveal that, because numbers measure execution.

An audit is a review that questions the direction itself, and in marketing theory it sits exactly there, as an instrument of strategic control.

That is why it makes sense for it to come first. Every move that follows only means something once you know what it rests on.

Four conditions that make it an audit

For a review to be an audit rather than a quick look, it has to meet four conditions. They were set out in the original definition, and a serious audit is still recognised by them today.

Comprehensive. It looks at marketing as a whole, not at a single activity. A website review is a website review. It can be useful, but it does not answer the question of whether your marketing works.

Systematic. It follows a set order, from the market towards the activities. It does not begin with whatever catches the eye, because that is rarely where the problem sits.

Independent. It is carried out by someone who did not make the decisions being examined. A supplier assessing their own work will find it hard to say that an activity should be shut down. The same goes for the free reviews offered by someone who then sells you the fix. They can be useful, but they are not independent, and it is worth knowing that difference before you commission anything.

Periodic. It is done to a plan, not only when things go wrong. An audit in a crisis is emergency treatment. An audit to a plan is management.

The six areas an audit covers

An audit is divided into six areas, and the order is not arbitrary. It begins with what the company cannot influence and moves towards what it does every day.

It is worth noticing where the channels sit. In the last area, alongside the product, the price and the communication, so inside the marketing mix. Your website is one item within that area, social media another.

I am not saying they do not matter. I am saying that when the website and the campaigns produce no result, the reason is rarely in them. More often it is in something above them, where the decision was taken long ago, in passing, or simply assumed.

The questions a marketing audit asks

Let me be clear about one thing. My aim is not to suggest that you can work through these questions and consider your marketing audit done. It is so that you get a sense of how serious the function is, and which subjects need opening up.

That is why I give two questions from each area, so you can see how much you actually know about your own marketing. A real audit asks far more questions than these, and they differ from company to company, because a manufacturer and a service business do not carry the same risks or the same questions.

They are not complicated and they have no correct answer. They are worth something because they make you pause, and where you pause is usually where you need to dig deeper.

Environment

1. Who are your real competitors, not by industry, but by who the buyer compares you with before deciding?

2. What does the buyer choose when they do not choose you, and have you asked any of those people why?

Strategy

3. Why does the buyer choose you, put in their words rather than yours?

4. Who do you deliberately not sell to?

Organisation

5. When did you last see every marketing activity in one place, with its cost and its result beside it?

6. When marketing and sales give different answers to the question of who the customer is, whose answer prevails?

Systems

7. Where did the last good piece of business you won come from, and do you know that or assume it?

8. When did you last change a decision because the data showed you something else?

Productivity

9. What does it cost you to win one customer, and what does that customer bring you over time?

10. What would you shut down first if you had to cut marketing by a third, and why that?

Functions

11. Does the message say the same thing on every channel, or does each channel carry its own version of your company?

12. What do you do to bring a customer back, and who inside the company is responsible for it?

These questions do not give you a grade, they show you where to look.

Each belongs to one of the six areas, so the place where you paused tells you where to look first. If you stopped on the first four, the problem is most likely in how you see the market and your position in it, and no change of channel will help there. If you got through those easily but stopped on the seventh and the eighth, you have a direction but no way of seeing whether it is taking you where you set out to go.

That is also the logic an audit follows. From the symptom, through the real constraint, to the order in which things get done.

What an audit does not solve

An audit is a diagnosis, not a treatment. It shows what needs to change and in what order, but on its own it changes nothing.

There is serious research on this. In 1996, in Industrial Marketing Management, Douglas Brownlie examined why audits so often come to nothing. His conclusion was not that the findings are wrong, but that nothing is done with them afterwards. Nobody is made responsible for what, no measurable goals are set, no schedule is drawn up, and nobody follows whether any of it is being carried out.

That is why an audit should not end with a report. The findings only mean something once they are ordered by priority, once it is clear who takes on what, and by what measure it counts as done.

When you need an audit, and when you do not

How we do it

At EMESKA the marketing audit is the entry point, and for good reason. We do not propose a strategy to a company whose situation we have not seen.

We go through all six areas, in order. We speak both to the people who make the decisions and to the people who carry them out, because the answers often differ, and that difference is already a finding. We look at the data the company has, and we note the data it does not, because that says something too. Then we write the report, go through it together, and agree what gets done first.

How long it takes depends on the size of the company and on how much data exists. We tell you that at the start, when we agree the scope, rather than along the way.

What you get at the end is not only an assessment, but a list of what costs you money without returning any, what returns money but is underused, and the order in which to deal with it.

If you are not sure whether an audit is what you need right now, we start with a conversation about your goals and tell you honestly what you need first.

→ Marketing audit and growth potential analysis