What is a “Marketing Audit” & What Should You Expect When Getting One?

Summary of Key Points:

• A marketing audit is a comprehensive review of your company's marketing environment, strategies, and activities, acting as a health check for your marketing efforts.
• These audits are vital for ecommerce businesses, which face intense competition and challenges when it comes to target market identification and advertising efficiency.
• Standard audits include evaluations of your marketing strategy, review of channels and tactics, analysis of target audience, branding and messaging assessment, SWOT analysis, and competitor benchmarking.
• However, traditional audits can be rigid and standardized, neglecting the unique characteristics and needs of your business, and often lack a long-term strategic focus.
• RS Creativ's unique approach, the Purple™ process, addresses these limitations by offering a custom, detailed, and strategic audit based on your specific business objectives and needs.

Effective marketing is a core pillar of growing your Shopify store—it differentiates you from competitors in your niche, makes you visible to your target audience, and draws leads into your sales funnel to drive revenue. But how do you know whether your marketing plan is effective? That’s what marketing audits are for.

As a Shopify design studio that’s helped countless eCommerce businesses effectively market themselves, RS Creativ takes a unique approach to marketing audits that provides lasting value for entrepreneurs regardless of whether they choose to partner with us. Below, we walk you through why these audits are useful and what you should expect when getting one.

Marketing Audits At a Glance

A marketing audit is a comprehensive, systematic review of a company's marketing environment, objectives, strategies, and activities. It's like a health check-up for your marketing efforts, aimed at diagnosing areas of strength and weakness, pinpointing opportunities for improvement, and discovering new avenues for growth.

Why Marketing Audits Matter for eCommerce Businesses

In the fast-paced world of eCommerce, a marketing audit isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. Some of the key challenges online businesses face include:

• Massive competition, due to the sheer volume of other businesses in your space
• Challenges determining target markets and ideal customers, since this requires a significant amount of data collection and analysis
• The risk of spending large amounts on ads without improving your conversion rates—running effective ads requires familiarity with numerous different platforms (Meta, Google Ads, etc.) and a systematic approach that can take years to perfect

Given the above, keeping your marketing strategies effective and up-to-date is paramount. This is where marketing audits can offer an invaluable perspective, helping you to understand whether your marketing efforts are actually hitting the mark and driving the desired results.

What Every Marketing Audit Should Include

A typical marketing audit should always include the following:

• An evaluation of your current marketing strategy
• A review of the marketing channels and tactics you’re using
• An analysis of your target audience
• An assessment of your branding and messaging consistency
• Identification of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT)
• Competitor analysis and benchmarking

Having this information can help you plan more effective ways to meet your business goals and identify areas that require improvement in order for you to do so successfully.

The Limitations of Conventional Marketing Audits

Conventional marketing audits, while essential, often come with certain limitations. They can be rigid and standardized, often failing to fully account for the unique characteristics and requirements of a specific business. Traditional audits also tend to focus heavily on quantitative data, sometimes at the expense of the qualitative aspects of marketing that can hold valuable insights. They can also be overly focused on immediate fixes rather than long-term strategy and growth.

Furthermore, the feedback provided is often static, delivered as a one-time report with limited follow-up or ongoing support. This approach can leave businesses with more questions than answers, and a lack of a clear, tailored, and actionable roadmap for their marketing strategy.

Going Beyond Standard Marketing Audits with Purple™

At RS Creativ, we take a unique approach to marketing audits called Purple™. Purple stands for "Practical Unique Roadmap for Planning and Launching Effectively"—unlike a conventional marketing audit that simply provides you with data, it’s a tailored, client-centric process that we develop based on your specific business objectives and needs.

What’s Included

Purple's value lies in its personalized approach to your business. It allows us to understand where you are in your landscape and what you need help with. It includes:

• A thorough analysis of your position in the landscape: This includes looking at your current size and scale, as well as competitors and industry benchmarks.
• A detailed skills assessment: This allows us to identify your organization’s proficiency with current technology and terminology that we might recommend using to pursue your goals.
• Analyzing your team: We do this to identify any gaps that might require our support in terms of manpower and specialist roles.
• A breakdown of your budget and margins: This data lets us know how viable your products are. We’re invested in the success of our clients and choose to partner with businesses that we believe have healthy development potential.

Unlike traditional audits, Purple™ isn't solely about financial metrics—it also takes a holistic view of how your store is performing. It's about your entire business model, from your team's skillset to your ideal customer profile.

The Benefits of Conducting a Purple™ Audit

By giving you a comprehensive understanding of your business and the environment it operates in, Purple™ aims to equip you with actionable insights you can take with you, whether you choose to work with us or not.

Beyond the report with our initial findings, we also provide you with tangible materials like slide decks, presentations, and white papers that you can use to implement the insights we've discovered.

If you do choose to work with us to implement our suggestions, the $5000 cost of Purple™ is returned to you as a downpayment towards the project. And if for any reason our proposed solution doesn't match your goals, we’ll also give your money back.

Even if you’re not looking for someone to work with and just want to know if growing your business is viable, you can take everything you’ve learned from the purple process to your bank and use it to support your financing application. The value of Purple™ doesn't just apply to those who work with us; it also stands alone as a powerful tool to assess your business's viability and secure financing if needed.

Get Marketing Insights that Set You Up for Success

A marketing audit is an essential tool for any eCommerce business looking to optimize their marketing strategy. However, RS Creativ's Purple process goes beyond the standard marketing audit to offer a personalized, comprehensive, and actionable roadmap for success. By choosing Purple™, you're not just getting an audit; you're getting a tailored solution that will drive your business to new heights. To learn more about this process and how it can benefit your business, contact us today.