Marketing Audit

There are certain points in a business life cycle when the time comes to take a step back to conduct a marketing audit to review your position in your market in relation to your business plan, your competitors and other factors that will influence buyer behaviour and your future success.

Where are we now? is an important question to ask – regardless of where you are on your journey! Rarely does a traveller get from point A to point B without checking some form of navigational aid.

These crunch time or ‘check points’ could be right at the beginning – when at business start-up phase where you’ll wish to ensure you set out on the right path – or at a maturing stage when perhaps sales have plateaued, market changes are predicted, or perhaps you want to accelerate growth or enter into new markets.

Simple Marketing Consultancy has helped many business at all stages of their life cycle carry out a marketing audit in order to plan the next phase of growth.

Sometimes these reviews require a really in-depth analysis of every aspect of your business and its relation to the magic marketing mix – the 4 p’s of the product marketing mix – promotion of the right products, in the right place, at the right price – and in services businesses they must be supported by a further 3p’s of the services marketing mix – the physical evidence of your service quality, processes and people that make you great to deal with.

During a marketing audit, we use our experience as chartered marketers to assess and recommend the areas we think are important for you at that particular point. This is sometimes referred to as SWOT analysis. We are not afraid to use our expertise to make assumptions so that you can save money by completing simpler functional audits in order to deliver immediate value and benefits in the effectiveness of your marketing function.

These are the typical areas we will review:

• Your marketing environment: e.g. competitor analysis, buyer behaviour, target markets, technological and legal or political changes
• Your current marketing strategy; A discussion on distribution channels, pricing, and other strategic planning issues
• Any organisational issues which may affect marketing effectiveness such as production development and other management related issues
• Your systems and processes to ensure they are customer centric, support growth and deliver the required management information on which to make informed decisions
• Levels of marketing productivity: what channels, promotional tools are best and how frequently they should be used
• Marketing functions: what skills do you need in your marketing team?

If Simple Marketing Consultancy in Nottingham can help bring clarity to your marketing decision making please get in touch.