It’s official. It’s September. For many business owners the Q4 freak out has begun!
This is the time you look at your numbers and say OMG “I’m not even close to my sales goal for the year.”
And the big question is: What happened?
The bigger question is: What do I do now?
The knee jerk response is usually to scramble to find those new clients, more sales, higher revenue.
This churn almost invariably leads to more panic and frantic activity but usually not better results.
Don’t panic. Do this instead.
Stop. Take a breath and see where you are.
And the best way to do that is with a marketing audit.
Understanding the Marketing Audit
Let’s start by demystifying the term. A marketing audit is a comprehensive health checkup for your company’s marketing strategies and activities.
It involves a thorough examination of your past, present, and planned marketing. Think of it as an expert diagnoses to uncover insights that pave the way for revenue and sales improvements.
Why is it Crucial?
Neglecting a marketing audit can have real consequences. Our client DynamicTech Solutions was too busy filling orders and onboarding customers to bother with a marketing audit.
They believed their strategies were foolproof and the market would keep loving their products. Oh, how wrong they were.
As customer needs evolved, DynamicTech Solutions found themselves losing ground to competitors who adapted swiftly to emerging trends.
Without a clear understanding of their marketing effectiveness, they couldn’t diagnose the real problem and struggled to reverse the decline in sales and revenue.
Focus Now. Plan Your Future
At Octain a Q4 audit is a two-step process.
Step 1: Address the urgency of Q4 with a discovery day. Here we focus on closing revenue gaps and finding new revenue opportunities to hit Q4 goals in a three-hour planning session with your management team. We take a few days – no more than a week – to analyze the data, evaluate alternatives and produce recommendations for quick wins.
Step 2: Plan for 2025. Our formal marketing audit covers all the bases to set your team up for a strong start to next year with a solid blueprint so that when Q4 2025 rolls around, you are on track with this year’s panic attack a distant memory.
Better Data. Better Results.
Here is Octain’s process for conducting a marketing audit complete with a download link to our revenue maximizer scorecard.
- Gather all the relevant information needed for the audit: all current marketing materials, programs and campaign data: anything the client has done for marketing in the last 12-18 months.
- Conduct a Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis.
- Conduct a competitive analysis review of your top 3-5 competitors: Analyze the marketing strategies of key competitors and Identify areas where competitors may have a competitive advantage.
- Review your Ideal Customer Profile and personas. Conduct 3-5 customer interviews and incorporate any marketing data here: segmentation, personas, satisfaction and loyalty related data.
- Perform a market mix analysis to know how well you are doing in the four key sectors of product, price, place promotion as shown here.
- Perform a digital presence assessment to evaluate the company’s online, web and social media presence and assess the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies to identify new opportunities for engagement.
- Bring it all together for analysis and evaluation, looking for what is working, what is not working, and what new opportunities exist for your products or services.
- For your clients, present your key findings in a live group session to get your client’s team on the same page: understanding the results, setting goals and assigning next steps for making changes to their marketing blueprint.
Get started with our revenue maximizer card. Download here.
Or book a call here and get your marketing moving in the right direction.