100 Questions to Ask During a Marketing Audit

When people ask us what our agency does, I usually explain that we are a data-centric and customer-centric marketing agency for small businesses. Our clients vary and industries served vary, and specific projects vary, so sometimes it’s hard to get granular. However, the approach is always the same: we use data to understand what customers and potential customers want, and implement marketing strategies based on that to drive growth and results.

Then I usually start explaining the process of performing a marketing audit: that our team of experts takes a closer look at your small business to wrap our heads around what is happening, where opportunities are, and what we recommend to support growth. That it’s a conversation with the business, about pain points and ideas, about what’s been tried and what hasn’t, about team capacity and skillset. We listen to our clients input, and aim to identify opportunities that bring ease and efficiency in processes. Growth is great, but if your business isn’t scalable it will be short lived or brand damaging, not to mention a headache to manage.

Marketing Audit In a Nutshell

This is our most common service because while most small business owners have an acute understanding of what’s not working they don’t always know what the remedy is. An audit is designed to bridge this gap: dive deep enough into the business to come out with actionable insight. While each audit may be different because each business is different, we generally follow a similar process. Do some competitor research, look at your data and get some context from the business owner. Read most customer facing messaging and customer reviews. Examine your main marketing channels. We might have a few short conversations for clarity and to understand history, and we ultimately present and share back findings that are a custom-fit list of opportunities. You decide if you’d like to insource the solution or outsource the solution depending on your team, priorities, and budget.

Good for: When you have clear pain points or goals, but your action plan is blurry.

Value-Add: Audits deliver a lot of bang for their buck, with quick win ideas as well as long term strategies. Small businesses appreciate having a project that’s exploratory and encourages questioning and that spans multiple channels as it’s a rare service. They also find value in receiving proposals that are realistic and thought through, often disenchanted with one-size fits all solutions that haven’t worked in the past.

Transparency and communication is a solid start to any project. Let’s talk.

100 Questions We Ask During an Audit:

Here I share 100 questions we answer during a Marketing Audit to bring transparency in our approach. Yes, every business is different, and some questions may not be relevant to your business. But the process of asking questions to bring visibility and clarity to your existing marketing initiatives in order to support good decision making and identify growth opportunities is the same. Every business needs a realistic action plan to reach its goals, and one size fits all approaches are usually vague and hard to implement.

1. What’s your online website presence like? Do you have a website? Multiple websites?
2. Who are your main competitors?
3. What problem are you solving for customers?
4. What types of products or services do you offer? Are they clearly explained?
5. Is your branding and key messaging clear?
6. Is your Google Analytics Tracking set up properly?
7. Is your Google Search Console set up properly?
8. Where do your website visitors come from?
9. What channels do customers come from?
10. What are your key landing pages?
11. What path do people take from finding you to making a first transaction?
12. Are there any 404 errors on your site?
13. Are there any broken links on your site?
14. Do you have a welcome offer/pop up on your site?
15. How does your welcome offer compare to your key competitors?
16. Do you clearly state any shipping terms and policies?
17. Are your FAQs set up to address common questions when customers are likely asking questions?
18. What are your best selling items?
19. Do you have a bestsellers category on your website?
20. Do you have a sale category on your website?
21. Do you have an exit intent offer on your website for browsers who are about to leave without purchasing?
22. Are your product descriptions clear, product photos optimized?
23. Is it easy to find your products? How many clicks does it take to start checkout?
24. Is your unique value clear to users of your website?
25. How does your business measure up with your competition?
26. Do you have customer testimonials on your website?
27. Do you have a blog, is it easy to read and well maintained?
28. Are you sharing blog posts via email newsletter, is it easy to sign up for your newsletter?
29. How frequently do you send emails to your list?
30. Are you using the features available to you in your email tool?
31. What’s your list size, how engaged is your list?
32. What’s your open rate, click rate?
33. What email address are you sending emails from? Does it have a logo or profile picture?
34. Are you sending from a dedicated email sending domain, do you have DNS records set up to land in inboxes rather than spam?
35. Are you regularly removing bounces, spam emails, unengaged subscribers with list cleaning methods?
36. If someone replies to an email, where does that message go?
37. Is it easy to contact your customer service team?
38. What does your customer service team spend the most time on, what are their painpoints?
39. Are your email templates mobile optimized?
40. Are your emails designed to point people to your website?
41. Is your branding such that calls to action buttons jump out?
42. What are customers reporting about your products/service? Are their questions being answered?
43. What other marketplaces are you on? What do those listings look like?
44. What kind of content are you posting on social media platforms?
45. Are you using hashtags to get discovered?
46. Are you taking advantage of tagging other accounts to get in front of audiences?
47. What type of content is engaging your audience?
48. Are your social media channels seeing growth?
49. Do you have a Google My Business listing? Bing listing?
50. How does your business appear to those searching for your product or business?
51. Do your social media channels explain what you do?
52. If you’re creating video, are your videos optimized?
53. If you’re using YouTube, are you using tags and pointing people to subscribe and to shop with you?
54. Is your business information up to date?
55. Is it easy to sign up for your email list from social media channels?
56. Is your shop integrated with social media channels? Are you tagging products consistently?
57. What are some of your highest converting posts?
58. Do you have groups and communities online that you are sharing into or managing? How engaged are they?
59. Are you consistently issuing invitations to your followers to purchase from you, sign up for your lists, check out your video, etc?
60. What’s your marketing team like?
61. Where are you spending the most time in your marketing?
62. Is your content strategy grounded in keywords and value your ideal customer is searching for? Are you getting found organically via SEO?
63. Does your website have meta descriptions, alt tags, share images for pages, posts, products?
64. What is your ideal customer’s persona? Are there multiple personas?
65. What channels does your ideal customer engage on, from a demographic and industry perspective?
66. What else do you know about your ideal customer, based on your data?
67. How many first-time customers do you have vs. repeat customers?
68. Who are your VIP customers? What do they want to see from you?
69. Have you ever performed a customer survey, or are you asking about Net Promoter Score or any other customer satisfaction question? How do you know what makes customers happy?
70. Are you inviting customers to repurchase? Are you inviting customers to re-engage if they’re past purchasers?
71. Are you asking your customers to follow you on social media, share with their friends? Would that make sense in your business?
72. Do you have some kind of points / rewards program for repeat customers?
73. Are you asking customers to leave you a review post purchase? Are you educating them on how to use your product/service optimally?
74. What kind of pain points do you have around your existing marketing.
75. What kind of expertise do you already have in your team?
76. Where are the gaps, what are the areas you don’t have capacity to explore but would like to?
77. What have you tried in the past that’s failed? How come?
78. What have you tried in the past that’s worked well? How come?
79. Are you running campaigns, promotions, discounts? Are they resonating?
80. Do you do copywriting in house or outsource? Have you ever had a conversion copywriter work on your marketing initiatives?
81. Are you running giveaways or doing any lead generation?
82. Are there other channels with audiences you could be reaching? What are competitors doing in this space?
83. Do you have a press kit, media kit, or other type of resource to encourage partnerships?
84. How do people contact you on your website? What kind of requests are you getting?
85. Do you have an affiliate program? How’s that working?
86. What do you do when you have press mentions, industry awards? Are these visible on your website, blog, social media, email?
87. What’s your current marketing process and spend?
88. Are you asking customers where they came from, if it’s not apparent from analytics?
89. Can you estimate your ROI?
90. Can you estimate your cost of acquiring a new customer?
91. What’s your average order value? What’s your average customer lifetime value?
92. Do you have opportunities for upselling, either at checkout or by bundling products together to increase your average order value?
93. Are there other revenue streams with opportunity that you’re not currently exploring on your site (subscriptions, digital products)?
94. Are some of your products or services more profitable than others?
95. What does your sales process look like? Do you have a CRM?
96. Do you have necessary compliance messaging like cookie policies and privacy policy on your site that match the type of information you are collecting?
97. Are you regularly delivering value in your communications? What value is that? What does your audience expect to receive from you?
98. Are there certain products that are most common first purchases? Are you giving enough real estate to those in your marketing?
99. Are there products, services that aren’t performing and that you could phase out?
100. Are there marketing channels or content types that aren’t performing that you could phase out?

It’s in understanding the details that we find insight and opportunities, and performing marketing audits that add value to small businesses is something our team takes great pride in. We hope this list of 100 questions helps spark some ideas. See a question missing in your opinion? Let us know in the comments. If you find this a useful resource, please share it! And if you would find value in hiring our team to answer these questions for you, try a marketing audit. Our expert team of marketers is very experienced at finding these answers and presenting insights in a way that will help your business grow. Book a complimentary consultation today and let’s talk.