How to Conduct a B2B Marketing Audit: Key Questions to Ask Before Building Your Plan
Before you begin your strategic B2B marketing plan, you first need to understand how to do a marketing audit. Many marketing plans become difficult to execute, stray off target, or simply don’t produce results because they haven’t accounted for the current situation.
Don’t worry, this isn’t a re-hash of a SWOT analysis or a dumbed-down Business Model Canvas (both worthy tools). No, I’m assuming most readers are familiar with these from business school. This is about getting practical with some simple, and systematic questions to ask yourself or your marketing team to understand your existing performance, resources, and opportunities.
This article is part of a series providing a B2B marketing planning framework. It’s a guide to help prompt, or remind marketers to ask the right questions and go through the right steps to build a robust, practical, and successful marketing plan. It’s a framework we use to great effect through consulting engagements with clients at Tayona Digital. Later articles explore strategy selection, goal setting, and using a B2B marketing plan template to bring it all together.
What is a B2B Marketing Audit?
Simply put, a B2B Marketing Audit is a review of a company's strategies, activities, and results to identify areas for improvement. Think of it as a health-check. An opportunity to diagnose potential issues, and prescribe better ways of operating.
When should a B2B marketing audit be performed? In our experience, at least annually to coincide with wider business planning. It’s worth also considering revisiting every six months, or even quarterly as part of a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) in larger teams or businesses. Whatever the cadence, it needs to add meaningful value and insight without draining resources. In most smaller teams or businesses, an annual review should be sufficient, with ad-hoc audits if plans or results start to stray off course.
What should a B2B Marketing Audit include?
A B2B Marketing Audit should cover the three main components that marketers are responsible for: Strategy, Brand, and Demand.
Strategy is all about choice. What are the clear decisions that have, or should, be made about how and where you go to market? Auditing the strategy is essentially about understanding if the choice being made create alignment: between resources, capabilities, and the opportunity. For example, which products are being sold to which customers (or markets). How are these products or services being positioned and differentiated with your ideal client profile (ICP) or persona. Is your offer aligned with their needs or desires. What investments and objectives have been established and are these sufficient and achievable.
Brand is about how visible the company and products are with relevant audiences. Are you easy to discover and consistent. Are you distinctive enough to be noticed in a crowded marketplace and convince potential buyers you have something relevant they need. There has been some great research done by Google on the importance of just showing up: even with a stated preferred brand, 30% of buyers will switch to a secondary brand when introduced to them, even when their preferred brand is available. This can rise to 90% if the secondary offer is really strong.
Demand is concerned with all of the activity to create, progress, and convert leads and opportunities for the business. Are there missed opportunities to find more leads through channels not yet activated or executed in a sub-optimal way. Do current processes and systems support the conversion of buyer interest into action without avoidable delay or leakage. Are the right sales and marketing assets in place to increase the rate at which potential opportunities are won.
Wrapped within each of these areas is an understanding of operational efficiency – the effective use of budgets and data, the application of marketing technology (MarTech), and the allocation of people and resources.
What are the key Questions to Ask in Your Marketing Audit
Below is list of questions and potential data sources that form the basis of most marketing audits undertaken at Tayona Digital consulting. You can download a handy one-page overview. They are not exhaustive, because the precise questions you need to ask will depend on both the specific nature of your business, and the answers from previous question. Often, this can feel like pulling on the end of a thread, asking ever deeper questions – why is that happening, why are we seeing that data, why aren’t we seeing the result we expect. Keep asking and don’t stop until you get to the true root cause!
Example questions to start your B2B Marketing Audit
Strategy questions will help build an idea of the product-market fit for your offering, identify new or underserved markets, and highlight if your resources are sufficient and well aligned to the opportunity.
Example Strategy Questions
What is the addressable/serviceable market and how will that change in the future? Can you estimate the potential opportunity and establish areas of growth (or decline). Is the ICP or market easy to identify and reach or do barriers to entry exist now or potentially in the future.
What whitespace opportunity exists in existing clients? For relatively complex solutions or sales to enterprise clients, identify where additional or extended products can be sold into new divisions, sites, or teams.
What is the nature of competition or substitution in the market? The best alternatives for your potential clients might include competitors, alternatives to your category of solution, or even to do nothing. Determine the relative attractiveness of your offering.
How is the sales coverage aligned to opportunity and are there sufficient resources? Does your revenue scale linearly when you add more direct sellers or are certain sales roles more successful in attaining quota than others.
Are key market trends & drivers understood? Can your business articulate how your buyers act and how they are changing over time. What pressures are most pressing for them.
Does the current proposition speak to identifiable client needs? Do gaps exist in your current offering that could be exploited by competitors or rule your out of sales. Would your potential client understand and want your product.
What defensible differentiators exist and what value do they provide? Identity any uniqueness in your offering and ask yourself truthfully, is this better, best, or unique in the market.
Is your pricing easy to understand internally and externally? Where does your pricing pitch you against competitors. Are you premium or low-cost. Can a potential client easily relate the price of your product to the value they would receive and if you use a direct sales force, can they articulate this. It is important to understand the pricing elasticity of your product – what is the impact on demand if you raise or lower your prices.
What existing marketing skills exist or are purchased via 3rd party suppliers? Do you have a regional or functionally based team. What agencies are used for domain expertise and at what cost.
What marketing budget has been assigned and does it support the growth objectives? Typically, assessing marketing spend as a proportion of revenue will indicate likely impact and growth. For example, Gartner studies show businesses spending 3% of revenue of marketing will achieve below average growth. Those investing 6% or more on marketing will achieve double-digit growth (this number is closer to 8% for SaaS businesses).
What KPIs are currently tracked and do they measure the correct things? What data is collected, where is it stored, are there any blind spots or gaps in insight that could be easily remedied.
Brand-based questions will establish how visible you are to your current and potential buyers and identify if the correct artifacts exist to be successful.
Example Brand Questions
What is the level and trend of web traffic versus your competition and how do you perform on SEO/SERP? Are you showing up when potential clients are researching solutions to their needs. Do you have sufficient domain authority.
What is the social follower level and trend on the platforms that matter? Is LinkedIn or Instagram a more appropriate platform. Are you posting regularly and consistently enough to grow your audience.
Do brand guidelines exist to drive consistency? Have you got a documented way of displaying your brand, company, and products. This can include consistent logo usage, typography and color palette. Document templates should exist for common assets (PPT, letterhead, business cards, brochures, etc). For the company and products, boilerplate copy should be up to date, readily available, and used consistently
Do appropriate types of marketing and sales assets exist in the right quality and how do they perform? Can your marketers and sellers access content easily and stay on message. Does a standard corporate presentation exist and is it used. Remember your internal teams will get bored of your content much sooner than your audience. Sweat every asset before creating new ones and stay consistent to stick in your audience’s mind.
Has a message architecture been defined and shared? Having a single source of truth for what you offer and why is essential. Messaging architecture should guide the creation of all externally facing assets and define both the core messages and tone of voice to be used.
Does the website use an appropriate content management system (CMS)? Has this been properly configured with child-themes, and optimized for technical SEO (i.e. appropriate schema in the head code, image text, page load speed, etc).
Have influencers in the market been identified and consistently briefed? What do commentators on your market think, remember, and say about your brand. Is it accurate or does it need updating or reinforcing through consistent briefing by nominated (and media trained) spokespeople.
Demand-based questions go to the heart of how efficiently and effectively your company can create future business.
Example Demand Questions
Have the seven revenue growth levers been assessed and quantified? This is about understanding if all of the following are correctly optimized: generate leads, product distribution channels, referrals, customer retention, cross-sell/up-sell, pricing, and sales process. There is no point generating more leads for a leaky funnel or underpriced offering. Much more effective to invest in sales training or simply raise prices to grow revenue.
Are current routes to market appropriate for your prioritized initiatives? If you’re selling to smaller or mid-sized businesses, do they expect to buy online or through resellers. How much direct sales effort is required for enterprise clients or do they require integrators to help them select and use your products.
Does an integrated campaign and activity plan exist that generates sufficient leads to meet growth objectives? How many leads were created in the past period. What channels did they originate in and what was the quality. An inability to understand this would also suggest a fundamental reporting and attribution gap to fix.
Does the CRM support an efficient sales process, is it used? Having a single source of truth for all deals as they are worked is essentially for reporting and efficiency. The ideal sales process that mirrors the buyer journey should be enforced by technology – not technology defining what the sales process must be.
How are digital advertising channels performing and tracked (Google Search and Display Ads, LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, Content Syndication, etc)? What investments have been made and what is the cost per lead or cost per engaged account. Different channels will perform differently for different businesses.
Do defined lead scoring, qualification, and nurture processes exist? Being able to prioritize leads to work, and having standard ways to assess their quality and progress them will improve the chances of a successful conversion into deals and wins.
Are conversion rates appropriate for the product / industry? If your conversion rates are below industry averages, understand why. Spending more to generate more before understanding if your content, offer, or brand is compelling is wasteful.
What marketing measurement takes place to determine Marketing Return on Investment (MROI)? Can you quantify the overall conversion of your funnel and the cost per lead. From here you can state the MROI that shows how much extra revenue can be achieved with every extra dollar, pound, or euro of marketing investment.
What is the size and health of the contact database? Are your current and prospective client details kept securely and updated regularly.
What activity has taken place to generate leads and are enough leads being generated? Work back from your revenue objectives and current conversion goals to establish the requisite quantity and quality of leads needed. How close is your current marketing engine to these requirements and which channels are under-performing.
How quickly are leads followed up and what is the impact of lead velocity on conversion rates? Many studies show fast lead follow-up increases the chance of successful conversion. Are you the first to respond to your prospective clients and is the experience good enough for them to want to progress further.
What nurture programs exist and how are they performing? If a lead isn’t qualified, it may be because the timing isn’t correct. Don’t waste that investment – make sure leads are correctly categorised and nurtured for future engagements.
How long is the sales cycle and how does that impact the win rate? Are you taking too long to propose solutions or provide pricing or are certain steps failing to complete. As the saying goes: time kills all deals.
How long does a B2B Marketing Audit Take
A good marketing audit will take 3-5 weeks for a mid-sized business. That’s not full-time effort and can be shortened or lengthened depending on available resources.
Often the first step of data and information gathering (which may come from systems, stakeholder interviews, or observing current assets or work practices) can include some delays in getting access. The processes should also be iterative. If early data suggest an issue (or lack of issue) in a certain area, then subsequent questions and analysis can be adapted accordingly.
It’s important not to get stuck in analysis paralysis here. You will rarely find perfect data with sufficiently large sample sizes that will give 100% confidence in your findings. Instead, you should be spotting patterns: Highlight areas of concern. Strengths to be exploited, and weaknesses to be further investigated and addressed.
What to Do With Your Findings: Turning Audit into Action
The purpose of the audit is not to fix everything. It’s to establish what needs to be focused on as a priority. Either because it is totally broken, because it is missing, or because it can be optimised and is important to achieve the stated business goals.
You should also avoid over-indexing and fixating on solving one problem area. Successful B2B marketing is a system of systems. It is interconnected, requiring many components to be working in unison towards the objectives.
Once the audit is complete, you should have a clear picture on what is required. An alignment of strategy, goals, and resource allocations that make sense. From here it is possible to identify or clarify the strategic decisions to be made. What potential strategies could you pursue, and which would have the most chance of successfully achieving your goals. At Tayona Digital, we use this audit framework to feed a structured marketing plan.
Conclusion
An audit is an essential part of the marketing process. It should not be treated as optional as it provides a solid base for a plan that has a higher chance of success. It should also be achievable without a huge investment of time. This guide gives you some starting questions to build a clearer picture of your marketing and business performance. You can also access a B2B marketing plan template that builds directly from this audit framework. If you need further help to structure, conduct, or interpret the results of a marketing audit, contact Tayona Digital for more information.