Before You Run Out of Time, Conduct Your Year-end Marketing Audit to Prepare for 2024

Hopefully, your plans for marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics for 2024 are nearing completion. But now, at year-end, it may be a good time to perform a marketing audit of your 2023 marketing efforts to assess how they performed and provide valuable insights for next year.

The findings of your marketing audit should be documented and shared with relevant sales and marketing teams within your organization. Consider preparing an executive summary of the findings for use by upper management. If your 2024 plans have been set in place, it would be a good idea to reconsider or tweak individual marketing programs and campaigns based on the success or failure of your 2023 efforts pointed out by the audit.

Before you run out of time, here are areas you should evaluate to perform a comprehensive year-end marketing audit.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Are marketing and sales on the same page. In 2023, were your sales teams participating in the planning and execution of your marketing programs. Aligning, or converging, sales and marketing efforts in the planning and implementation processes fosters a more efficient and effective business operation. It ensures that the customer journey through the sales and marketing funnel, from awareness to purchase, is seamless and customer-centric, ultimately helping to drive sales.

Marketing Objectives, Strategies, and KPIs

Review the marketing objectives, strategies, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for individual marketing campaigns. Evaluate whether these objectives were achieved and if not, identify reasons for any shortfalls.

KPIs can include increased sales from current customers, sales from new customers, conquest customers acquired, new qualified leads generated, website traffic, and return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns.

Compare the allocated marketing budget for objectives and strategies with the actual expenses. Analyze how the budget was utilized across various marketing channels and campaigns.

Content Marketing

Evaluate the performance of blog posts and videos. Determine which content performed well and resonated with the audience. Assess the engagement metrics, social shares, and comments on blog posts and social media content.

Data and Analytics

Work with sales teams to clean-up customer databases by deleting dormant or closed accounts. Verify primary and secondary contact names, telephone numbers, email address, and physical addresses.

Collect data from various sources, including website analytics, social media insights, email marketing platforms, advertising platforms, and sales records.

Analyze website traffic, user behavior, conversion rates, bounce rates, and other relevant metrics.

Social Media

Identify the most successful social media campaigns by evaluating the growth of social media followers. Assess engagement metrics, such as likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates.

Email Marketing

Review email open, click-through, conversion, and unsubscribe rates. Analyze the effectiveness of email subject lines, content, and calls-to-action. Archive or separate frequently not opened email contacts for follow-up, correction, or elimination.

Digital Advertising

Review the performance of digital paid advertising campaigns. Evaluate the click-through rates, conversion rates, and ad spend. Determine the ROI of each campaign.

Customer Feedback

Gather feedback from customers through surveys or direct communication.

Analyze customer satisfaction levels, preferences, and opinions about your products or services.

Successes and Challenges

Identify the most successful marketing initiatives and the factors that contributed to their success. Identify challenges faced during the year and lessons learned from them.

Want More Marketing Tips and Ideas?

Go to Marketing Convergence Solutions for practical ways to align sales and marketing to help you strategically generate more sales, leads, and customer loyalty.