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B2B Marketing Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide
October 23, 2024
“Our lead funnel has dried up.”
“Our website traffic has gotten stagnant.”
“Our conversions are nowhere near the target.”
“We are following the strategy, but it’s not working.”
Sounds familiar? These scenarios often signal the need for a B2B marketing audit, which can help you identify changes to improve your business growth this year.
Read further to understand the what, why, and how!
A B2B marketing audit serves as a health checkup for your marketing engine, examining everything from the nuances of your SaaS marketing strategy to the quality of your leads and sign-ups.
It aims to identify strengths and weaknesses while ensuring that all elements work in synergy to achieve product-market fit. For SaaS companies, this audit provides a roadmap for optimizing marketing strategy, improving lead generation, and ensuring that resources are used efficiently.
Here are key reasons why a B2B Saas marketing audit is important:
A marketing audit identifies areas of inefficiency and allows you to optimize spending for better results. It helps you assess where your marketing efforts have succeeded and where there are red flags.
Also, a marketing audit helps in spotting the wasted budget allocations, such as unnecessary technology expenses or ineffective campaigns, enabling you to redirect funds to initiatives that deliver measurable results. This leads to improved return on investment over time.
A B2B SaaS marketing audit provides an overview of your sales funnel, identifying gaps and roadblocks in lead generation. By uncovering issues such as misalignment between sales and marketing teams or deficiencies in the customer journey, an audit helps increase the quantity and quality of leads.
For example, if a new customer segment is identified through the marketing audit, targeting them can improve your message-market fit and drive more sales-ready leads.
A B2B marketing audit gives you valuable insights into customer demographics, preferences, and behavior. For example, you may discover that your largest client base is mid-sized companies in the tech sector, but your marketing is focused on startups.
Realigning your messaging to target the right audience, like emphasizing scalability and ROI for mid-sized companies, can boost engagement.
Understanding customer behavior—such as which content they engage with most—helps tailor campaigns that resonate, increasing brand visibility. This enhances brand awareness and establishes your brand as a relevant, trusted leader in your specific industry.
A marketing audit ensures your marketing efforts are aligned with your business goals. Reviewing how well your marketing supports the company's overall strategy helps create consistent messaging and seamless coordination across departments.
It also ensures that your target audience is consistently being addressed, leading to a unified brand and driving success for the entire organization.
Examining key performance metrics helps you identify which channels yield the highest ROI and gauge your product-market fit. With this info, you can allocate resources effectively and optimize your marketing materials, in turn, enhancing campaign performance and streamlining processes for greater efficiency.
You can simply build an internal team or collaborate with any B2B marketing agencies to analyze your data and make decisions accordingly.
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There’s a Chinese saying called, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." The same applies to the B2B marketing audit.
If you've never conducted a marketing audit or if you're uncertain about the effectiveness of your current strategies, the best time to start is immediately.
When done at the end of each year, the audit helps you understand how your marketing strategy has worked over the past twelve months. You can analyze what worked well and where you might have missed the mark. This information can also help you better plan for the upcoming year.
If you are launching a new product or redefining your business goals, conducting a marketing audit beforehand ensures your strategies are aligned with these new objectives. It can also guide significant marketing investments, providing insights into where your resources will have the greatest impact.
If you notice stagnation in growth metrics—such as leads, conversions, or overall revenue—this is a critical moment for an audit. An audit can help pinpoint inefficiencies and uncover opportunities for improvement, allowing you to realign your efforts across different marketing channels.
However, for larger B2B SaaS companies, it may be beneficial to conduct audits every 6-12 months to keep key stakeholders informed and strategies aligned.
Follow these eight steps to conduct your B2B SaaS Marketing Audit:
Before diving into the audit, you need to establish clear goals and objectives. This might include increasing qualified leads and improving brand awareness. Set specific metrics—such as aiming for a 20% increase in qualified leads over the next quarter to track your success.
Define goals and metrics to ensure that your audit aligns with your business objectives and marketing team, especially within the strategy of your B2B marketing.
Collect inputs from stakeholders across departments, including sales, marketing, and product. Analyze key metrics such as website traffic, lead generation rates, and customer acquisition costs from existing marketing data and reports.
For example, knowing that your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is currently $150 will allow you to assess whether your marketing capital is yielding favorable returns. Gather data from various channels, so you can create a robust SaaS marketing funnel that effectively attracts and retains customers.
Examine how marketing expenditures align with overall revenue growth. Are your investments in line with your revenue growth goals?
For example, if your target is a 30% increase in revenue, ensure that your budget allocations across channels (like paid ads, content marketing, or events) are contributing effectively to that growth.
Regularly measuring ROI helps you identify which areas offer the highest returns and where resources may need to be adjusted for better performance.
Evaluate how each stage of your marketing funnel—awareness, interest, consideration, and conversion—is performing. Using analytics tools, track where leads drop off and then identify gaps and which buyer personas convert best at each stage across different marketing channels.
For example, if 60% of leads drop off during the consideration phase, it suggests that your messaging needs to be refined or that additional resources are needed to address potential objections.
In the awareness phase, you should focus on capturing attention through targeted content and outreach. In the consideration phase, it is crucial to ensure that your messaging resonates with your audience and addresses their pain points. Finally, during the decision phase, providing clear calls to action and testimonials can help facilitate conversions.
Understanding the SaaS marketing strategies across these phases will help your marketing team in significantly improving your lead generation efforts.
Examine the following areas:
Is your website effectively capturing leads? Use heatmaps to see where users click and assess bounce rates on key landing pages. Your website should serve as your first lead capture tool and reflect your overall inbound marketing methodology.
Are you producing valuable content that resonates with your audience? Analyze engagement metrics on blogs and whitepapers to see what's working. Ensure your content aligns with your overall lead generation for saas efforts.
Review your search rankings for targeted keywords. Tools like SEMrush can provide insights into organic search performance, which can help you enhance your online presence and visibility.
Evaluate the ROI on paid campaigns. Ensure that pay-per-click (CPC) aligns with your target customer acquisition costs. Keep track of how well your paid advertising strategies are performing.
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To evaluate your social media marketing effectively, assess engagement rates across different platforms. Are your posts generating likes, shares, and comments that reflect your audience's interests?
Consider analyzing metrics such as reach, impressions, and engagement rate percentages to gain insights into which types of content resonate best with your audience.
For example, if you notice that video content receives significantly higher engagement than static posts, you may want to prioritize video in your strategy.
A great example of effective social media marketing is Gong.io's ad campaign, which uses a controversial approach to capture attention as users scroll through their feeds.
This strategy not only draws users in with a compelling hook but also backs it up with original research, making the content both engaging and informative. By creating such intriguing and research-based content, you can significantly enhance your brand’s visibility and encourage deeper interaction with your audience.
Your social media presence can greatly influence your brand’s visibility.
To evaluate your email marketing effectiveness, focus on key metrics like open rates and click-through rates (CTR). Open rates reveal how compelling your subject lines are, while CTR indicates how engaging your content is. If open rates are low, consider A/B testing different subject lines.
Segment your email list to personalize your messages, ensuring they resonate with various audience groups. A well-structured strategy nurtures leads and builds relationships by delivering valuable content, such as industry insights or exclusive offers.
Regularly analyzing these metrics allows you to refine your strategy and drive better engagement and conversions.
The right tools are an absolute necessity for your B2B marketing initiatives since they give a comprehensive picture of your marketing funnel’s performance. Consider whether your current tools enable workflow automation, campaign management, and performance tracking effectively. Start by evaluating your website, CRM, and reporting tools.
Once you have a clear picture of your tech stack for tracking data. This data can significantly optimize your marketing objectives by automating workflows, managing campaigns, and providing insights that enhance lead generation and conversion rates.
When analyzing competitors, go beyond surface-level observations. Identify which marketing strategies are yielding results for them and where they struggle.
For example, a competitor might have a strong social media presence but poor lead nurturing, or they might excel in organic search but fall short of customer engagement. Tools like SimilarWeb can provide data on traffic sources, helping you pinpoint areas where they outperform or underperform.
Use this analysis to not only benchmark your performance but also to uncover gaps that your business can leverage for competitive advantage in B2B growth marketing.
Once your audit is complete, take a step back and thoroughly evaluate the data you've gathered. Start by categorizing your findings into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis). This structured approach will help you organize insights and focus on key areas of improvement.
Once you’ve identified these insights, consider how they fit into the broader market context and your long-term goals.
For example, a strong social media presence could be leveraged for lead generation or a high email open rate might present an opportunity to improve click-throughs by refining your content strategy.
After analyzing your findings, the next step is to create a comprehensive action plan that translates insights into tangible results. This detailed action plan should outline specific steps, timelines, assigned resources, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
This structure not only helps in keeping the team accountable but also provides a clear roadmap for tracking progress.
For example, if traffic is lacking on your website, your action plan may include implementing a new SEO strategy with a timeline for reassessment in the next six months. This plan should detail how to execute your B2B marketing effectively, including strategies to outsource b2b marketing.
To maintain the effectiveness of your B2B marketing audits, establish a consistent monitoring routine and schedule regular audits.
Aim to conduct these assessments at least quarterly, focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as lead conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and engagement metrics across various channels.
If your goal is to increase traffic on your website by 20% in the next quarter, track metrics like organic search performance, bounce rates, and time on page. Use tools like Google Analytics to gain deeper insights into user behavior and refine your tactics based on data-driven decisions.
Once your marketing audit is complete, you can expect a comprehensive report that covers these points:
Here is a B2B Marketing Audit Example:
This ensures that the marketing audit only focuses on strategies that support growth, customer acquisition, and retention. Don't get caught in vanity metrics or irrelevant data that doesn’t connect to your core business and marketing goals, such as engagement for the sake of engagement.
Evaluate how well your data captures meaningful customer interactions and informs decisions. Avoid over-relying on raw numbers like website visits or email open rates without examining the context—like who’s visiting and whether they’re your target accounts.
Review lead quality across channels, ad spending, and the alignment of messaging with buyer pain points. Don’t assume that a high volume of leads equals success. Low-quality leads waste the sales team's time and resources and signal misalignment in your marketing approach.
Ensure your brand message is consistent across multiple channels (social media, email, website). An effective B2B marketing audit identifies gaps in tone, targeting, or user experience between channels. Avoid assuming that all channels are performing equally well. Each one should be optimized for both the target audience and the stage of the buyer's journey it targets.
Conduct a thorough analysis of your competitors in the B2B SaaS space. Focus on understanding their engagement tactics with potential clients, the types of content they produce, and their participation in industry events or forums. Identify what strategies are yielding positive results for them and recognize those that are falling short.
Analyzing competitor strengths and weaknesses will help you uncover valuable insights that may inform your own marketing plans.
Should you hire a full marketing audit agency for your marketing audit, or should you do it yourself? Here are the pros and cons of both for you to make a decision:
Do it yourself or no, you need a comprehensive B2B marketing audit. But why make your life more difficult when you have TripleDart, an agency that specializes in delivering thorough and insightful marketing audits tailored to your unique needs. Our audit process involves a comprehensive check of your systems—marketing operations, and automation, book a call with us today!
Join 70+ successful B2B SaaS companies on the path to achieving T2D3 with our SaaS marketing services.
