If you’re thinking of hiring a marketing consultant to support you and your business as you go on a journey of growth and finding new customers you probably have loads of questions about what a marketing consultant actually does and how a marketing strategy can help you.
In this post, I’m talking about how a marketing consultant can support you and your business as you continue to develop your marketing activities and grow through a marketing strategy. Part 1: making sure you do an audit of all our current marketing activities. Read on to find out how to do a marketing audit!
The term strategy can be really off-putting when it comes to marketing, especially for smaller businesses and it can seem like a really scary thing that’s kind of abstract you don’t really get any real value from it. You may be thinking: what does it even do anyway? Simply put, a marketing strategy is a roadmap, or in other words, why you’re doing your marketing, what kind of different elements that might entail and who you’re trying to reach.
The first part of any marketing strategy – or your roadmap if you prefer – is working out where you already are. And this is the part of the marketing strategy that we call the marketing audit.
Doing an audit can sound terrifying but essentially it’s just a marketing consultant or you as a business owner taking a look at your business and your marketing activities then writing down and mapping out what you’re already doing. This involves looking at a couple of different areas, usually focusing on digital marketing but also considering your traditional marketing activities if you’re doing those too.
Within digital marketing, you would start by looking at your website: what is your website currently doing for you, what content do you have on there and what do your analytics look like e.g. how many visitors do you get and what are your most popular pages?
Then you would look at your social media channels: which platforms are you? How many followers do you have? And some of those key metrics to start really building up a good picture of your digital presence.
For traditional marketing it might be looking at how often you do a postal campaign, how many flyers you’re sending out and just how many you’re printing. Or perhaps the locations of your billboards and the messages you’re sharing there.
A marketing audit will also look at the marketing resource you have, both in terms of staff (who is actually doing the marketing in your business?) and the budget (how much are you spending on all of these marketing activities?).
Another key element of the audit part of the process is looking at your messaging, your tone of voice and your brand. In other words, how are you talking about yourself? How are you presenting your business to your customers? What kind of colours do you use? Do you usually write lots of content or is your content more video content?
There are lots of things you can look at through a marketing audit, and this is just a snapshot of some of the main things to think about that you can include in your marketing audit.
The whole point of doing this part of the process right at the beginning of developing a marketing strategy is to get a really clear picture of where your business already is and what marketing activity you’re currently spending time and money on. Once you know that, you can move on to the next part of the strategy but you can’t look at doing your roadmap until you know what your starting point is.
What next?
Once you’ve completed your marketing audit, the next step is to set your marketing objectives. Check out this post to find out how.
To find out how to create the rest of your marketing strategy for your small business, you can watch my video ‘What is a marketing strategy’:
And don’t forget, if you want to see the bigger picture, focus on the things that really matter to your customers and communicate with them effectively to get the results you need, get in touch to arrange a free 30-minute chat.
