2025 Marketing Game Plan: Audit Now, Win Later
Redefine Your Approach
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Or at least at RCM, we think so. With 2024 close to wrapping up, 2025 is right around the corner. That means it’s time to plan for the marketing year ahead and, here at RCM, time to analyze how our Clients marketing performed. Whether you are unsure if you need to make changes to your marketing, your ROI is lacking or you just want to see how your brand is stacking up against your own objectives or the industry standards, we recommend everyone complete a marketing audit in order to kick off 2025 with their best foot forward.
The Importance of Marketing Audits
A marketing audit identifies marketing gaps, allowing you to refine your tactics and help your marketing deliver maximum impact, boost ROI, and drive greater profitability.
We understand the challenges and frustrations that come from market dynamics shifting and old strategies losing their impact. As consumer behaviour shifts, so should your marketing strategy. There are many reasons why these shifts happen in the market. It could be affected by significant events such as an election year or COVID-19, it could be a shift in culture, or it could just be regular consumer behaviour changes. This is why it is important to understand the past, so you can make small adjustments as you go forward into the future.
There are four main benefits you will see from completing a marketing audit:
Delivers actionable insights to improve your marketing effectiveness
Identifies key areas for improvement to boost conversion rates and ROI
Provides a comprehensive report that spotlights key areas for immediate improvement
Lastly, it streamlines your marketing efforts, saving both time and money by knowing what works and what needs to be adjusted
What’s Included?
What does completing a marketing audit look like?
First, we always start with a comprehensive assessment. We analyze marketing materials in depth to determine how each component functions individually and together within a broader marketing strategy.
Secondly, we put together a detailed report. This will outline our findings, providing a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. We’re looking at what’s the story your marketing is telling about your brand and where you need to go moving forward.
Thirdly, we compose our tailored recommendations. Based on our findings, we outline clear steps for improvement to help enhance the impact of the marketing efforts for 30, 60, and 90 days.
Our findings help Clients to adapt to the changes so their marketing efforts stay effective and the tactics remain as dynamic as the markets they navigate.
We really don’t want you to keep trying strategies that are a bit played out without having concrete knowledge of what’s working and what’s not.
Where to start?
The first step when starting a marketing audit for your brand is to evaluate all of your marketing materials. This includes online, offline, events & more. One way to break this down is by using the PESO method. This stands for paid, earned, shared, and owned. This helps to make sure you have looked at all mediums for your brand's advertising and evaluated them through each category. You will want to look at the effectiveness of your messaging, CTAs, conversion rates, & more and compare them against the researched benchmarks you set for your brand. Here’s what could be included:
Paid
Paid search
Paid social
Display ads
Affiliates
Influencer campaigns
Events
What else have you paid for externally to support your marketing?
Earned
Organic SEO
Mentions
Reposts
Press announcements
General PR
Press releases
Shared
Social Media
Q&A
Influencer (that wasn’t paid)
Reviews
Owned
Website
Emails / SMS
App
Mobile-Web
Blog
Case studies
Webinars
Videos
After you have completed evaluating all of your online and offline channels and more, the next stage is to look at what the data is telling you. What efforts met benchmarks and which ones fell flat? Do your analysis and figure out what the story is.
Next, you’ll want to create measurable actions for your brand moving forward. These should be specific and actionable in the immediate term. Now you don’t need to make a lot of crazy changes, these can be minor changes that happen as you test and learn. It is better to adjust as you go. This could be a change such as paid social allocation, the number of offers you have or even something as small as a headline or subject line change.
When deciding what should be tweaked first, at RCM we like to say “get your house in order first”. This means making sure all of your owned assets such as a website or social channels have been set up or adjusted first. This is where prospective customers will end up and hopefully make a purchase, so we need to ensure that it’s reflective of what we want them to experience. Consider reviewing and making changes in 30, 60 and 90 days to optimize effectiveness and maximize ROI.
Let’s do this thing!
We know you’ll want to go into the new year with your best foot forward and a solid plan for success. A marketing audit is the best way to create actionable goals and tactics for your brand that you’ll actually want to keep going into the new year and beyond. The best part? You will be able to evaluate your progress from the start!
Whether you are looking to conduct a marketing audit yourself or could use some support, a marketing audit is a deep dive into both your offline and online channels to reassess your marketing efforts. It redefines your approach and leads to an increased ROI while driving qualified leads.
You can learn more and apply for the Marketing Audit here. And, of course, you can always reach out to us at info@redcatmarketing.ca if you have any questions.