Guide to B2B marketing audits (best practices + questions to answer)

Questions to answer for your B2B marketing audit

To make the greatest business impact, business leaders need to know what is and isn’t working in terms of their marketing. A marketing audit is the way to go.

What’s the scope of my marketing audit?

A comprehensive marketing audit is a systematic and objective analysis of your company’s marketing strategy, activities, and performance. The goal is to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats with the primary goal of improving market performance.

How often should you audit your marketing?

You should conduct a marketing audit at least once a year, either at the start or the end of the year, if not every 6 months to optimize your marketing strategy.

If done more often, for example, mid-year within a calendar or fiscal year depending on your specific business, an audit should make your marketing strategy much more efficient. Think of it as A/B testing your entire marketing function. Chances are that some tool and/or process could be added or removed, indirectly or directly resulting in improved marketing effectiveness as a whole.

Note: Whenever there are or will be changes in the strategic direction of your industry or company, you should do a full marketing audit. Whether you’re rebranding, launching an entirely new product or even only an upgraded version, having insights on the state of your marketing, your competitors, and what the landscape is like out there, may help you decide whether you should delay for just a few months or go full steam ahead.

How is a marketing audit done?  

Marketing audits can be done in-house or through an outsourced service. If you don’t have the time or resources to do it in house, a third-party is a good way to go. They will give you the most objective evaluation and recommendations for your marketing strategy and efforts.

Regardless, a marketing audit should be a deep-dive into every corner of your marketing. You should spend the time evaluating each channel and its performance, along with tools, budgets etc.

At PipelineRoad, we've spent time crafting the best possible B2B marketing audits that have been used to help businesses evaluate their marketing efforts. A comprehensive marketing audit is necessary to set your business up for success. That’s why it’s the first step of our go-to-market roadmap.

GTM Roadmap Step 1: Discovery Audit

We’re comprehensive right from the start. We look at your market potential and examine your existing go-to-market strategy to see where you stand. From this initial assessment, we’ll dive into your competitive landscape, identify your online presence and your SEO’s competitiveness, and product marketing and positioning. All of this gives us a good understanding so we can point out your gaps and recommend actions for your opportunities.

What you get: A documented audit with actionable insights you can start implementing immediately.

If you’re interested in doing your own B2B marketing audit, here are our tried and true best practices, including questions you should answer.

Best practices for a comprehensive B2B marketing audit

The best practice is to have your marketing info and data ready. They provide answers to the questions for the best audit.

1. Gather your documents

Start by gathering some initial documents to help you (or a third party) get started. Things you might consider include:

• Your business plan and/or marketing strategy
• Any brand guidelines
• Target market descriptions and current ideal customer profile (ICP)
• Any previously completed marketing audits

2. Access your marketing and sales and performance data

All marketing and sales data should be considered in the audit. This could include some or all of the following:

• Reports or notes on past and current marketing campaigns across digital channels (ABM, social, content, email, etc.)
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics for marketing and sales
• Any funnel metrics, conversion rates, and customer journey analytics
• CRM data in full: leads, prospects, customers
• Sales and marketing handoff documents

3. Gather your digital presence and content info

It helps to evaluate your brand online –to see how you stack up and how your current content is performing and/or resonating with your ICP. Here’s what you should consider:

• Performance reports of social media channels, email campaigns, any paid channels
• Content inventory examples: whitepapers, blogs, e-books, case studies, guides, videos
• Make sure you (or a third party) has access to your company website, blog, analytics, etc. for a more comprehensive audit

4. Consider any market or competitive insights you have

This can help get a good grasp of where you should (or could) be in the market. Insights can be in the form of:

• Market research reports
• Competitive analysis documents
• Industry benchmarks
• Customer feedback

5. Evaluate your marketing tools and platforms

Your marketing tools and platforms should be evaluated to make sure they are being used and are ultimately beneficial and effective towards meeting marketing objectives. This could include but is not limited to the following:

• Your CRM system (Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM etc.)
• SEO tools (SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs, SurferSEO etc.)
• Any project management tools (Trello, Asana, Notion etc.)
• Any other tools used by sales and marketing on a regular basis (Tableau, Outreach.io, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, Sprout Social, ChatGPT etc.)

It’s a good idea to add in notes or a rating to each to make it easier when auditing (ie. how used it is and how useful it is to your marketing efforts). You could also include diagrams showing how different tools may work together / integrate; anything that’s helpful to get an idea of your current tech stack.

6. Consider your budget and resourcing info

Although not completely necessary for an initial audit, it would be nice to consider your budget and overall resources from the start. This helps when you need to take action later on. This could include:

• Marketing budget breakdown and historical allocation analysis (for people, tools, resources etc.)
• Organizational charts (in-house and outsourced)

All of your documentation provided should help us get to know your business by providing answers to this set of questions.

Questions to answer for a comprehensive B2B marketing audit

Your marketing audit will only be as comprehensive as the data you have and the information you provide. Here is a list of questions to answer –either for your internal team or for a third-party in order to get the best understanding of where you’re at, and where you could go.

Note: This is to be used as a guide. Each section of questions is built to get the most clarity and insights to make informed recommendations. These questions were built with the idea you are starting from scratch with an initial audit. Questions might look a little different depending on how often you are performing an audit.

Your business

• Who are you and what do you provide?
• Who are your stakeholders?
• What is your value proposition or unique selling point (USP)? Is it aligned with your current offering?
• What problem are you solving for customers?
• Are your branding and key messaging clear? Is it consistent across channels?
• Who’s your ideal customer profile (ICP)?
• Is your brand voice effective at communicating to our ICP? Or do you need slightly different messaging for our multiple personas?
• Is your brand resonating with your target audience?

Your competitive landscape

• Who are your direct competitors? What are their USPs?
• What market share do they hold?
• What are their pricing strategies?
• How do they market their product/service?
• What customers do they target?
• Are they developing anything new or making any upgrades?
• How do their online reviews look?
• Have they made any strategic moves?
• Are there any emerging competitors to be aware of?

Your product market fit (PMF)

• Do customers recommend your product/service to others?
• What is the growth rate of organic or unpaid customer acquisition?
• Can your customers easily describe what your product does and the value it provides?
• Who is actually using your product and do they match your intended target audience?
• What is the user retention rate over time?
• What is your customer feedback like?
• Are your sales cycles short or in line with your expectations?
• Do you have to spend less on marketing over time to maintain or grow your customer base?

Your current marketing efforts

There are several questions to answer when evaluating your current marketing efforts in detail. Here are some areas to consider:

Note: Each one of these sections should be stacked up against competitors.

SEO, content marketing & social media

• Is there a strategy or plan in place?
• Is there a content calendar?
• What kind of content are you putting out there?
• How does your content quality compare with that of industry leaders and competitors?
• Which types of content are currently the best-performing? With which personas?
• Which types of content are performing the worst? Why?
• What are the most significant gaps in our current content strategy?
• Which non-branded keywords are you showing up for?
• Which non-branded keywords are your competitors showing up for?
• What is impacting your search engine results pages (SERP) rankings?
• Are you updating/posting/releasing content at the right pace and times?
• What are the most effective digital channels and/or platforms for your industry that you might be underutilizing?
• How do your social media engagement rates stack up against the competition?
• Do you need multiple social media channels? Which social media channel would be the most effective?

Website & online presence

• What does our third-party review site presence look like (if any)?
• How does your website's overall user experience (UX) compare to industry standards and competitors?
• Is your website page speed acceptable?
• What do your bounce rates and conversion rates look like?
• What specific areas of our website need improvement for better user engagement?
• Do you have any backlinks? Are they high-quality?

Paid media marketing

• Are you or have you run paid ads?
• What do the conversion paths for organic content vs. paid advertising look like?
• What do your inbound marketing efforts look like?

Outbound marketing

• Do you or have you done any outreach or account-based marketing?
• How effective is your account-based marketing strategy right now?

See top ABM tools here.

Some generic questions to wrap up overall marketing:

• Is your marketing collateral up to date?
• Which metrics should you prioritize to better track our digital marketing performance?
• How can you better align our digital efforts with our target audience's needs and preferences?
• How do your current online marketing efforts align with best practices in B2B marketing?
• Can you identify any discrepancies between your perceived and actual market positioning?
• What’s the split and the quality of the leads generated between your website vs. all other channels?
• What kind of roadblocks are you facing when converting leads?

Your sales & marketing alignment

• Which percentage of leads is coming from marketing? Which percentage is coming from sales?
• What is the current marketing-sales handoff?
• How effective is the feedback loop for sales and marketing efforts?
• Do the sales and marketing teams understand each other’s roles in revenue marketing and have the same expectations on ROI and the timelines?
• Does marketing understand how its efforts contribute to sales metrics: revenue, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs (CAC)?
• Do sales and marketing define the key customer retention metrics, from customer lifetime value (CLV), churn, and reactivation with the same parameters?
• How would KPIs work if sales and marketing are more closely aligned? Would they still each have their own KPIs?

While this doesn’t cover all of the questions you could answer, if you do answer most of these, you should get a good understanding of where you’re at and how you can optimize your overall marketing efforts for better results.

See our complete guide to setting up your sales pipeline here.

Audit & actionable recommendations

You should record all of your answers to the questions in a document. We like to put it in a stylized and organized Google document so that everyone can collaborate and it all looks the same. Of course, there are other ways to do it as well. As long as you’re checking off the above and getting everything together, you should be good to go.

Now, along with an audit and analysis should come actionable recommendations. These are just recommendations based on what you’ve found or answered from the questions above. These actionable recommendations should be put into an overall strategy, but nonetheless, they should give you an idea of what that strategy could look like.

Nonetheless, here is an [example] of what some key findings & recommendations may look like during your audit.

• It is clear that PipelineRoad competitors are split in PLG and SLG tactics. They currently do not seem to be well suited for either of these, which is hurting them.
• PipelineRoad requires a full messaging & positioning deep dive and overhaul, targeting specific industries & carving a space in their category.
• LinkedIn seems to be the primary “tried-and-true” channel. They should consolidate their presence there, and slowly explore secondary channels such as Reddit, Meta, or Tiktok. Capterra does not seem like a good fit based on preliminary research but other Gartner channels may remain open to them provided they land in the right category.
• There is a clarity problem created by the compounded effect of both product marketing, and website structure. They need more defined positioning, better imagery, website overhaul, and more relatable claims in the website.
• They need to focus on Industry/Use-case specific claims, and materials that speak to their specific ICP & personas. This is hard to identify from the current site.
• Competitors are filled with rich resource libraries, and thought leadership / educational content across their online presence –they appear to have an intentional content strategy. PipelineRoad needs to catch up.

You should also break down recommendations per section such as:

• Website
  • Update messaging
  • Consider a mega menu
  • Images need to be better optimized
  • Add in content resources and case studies
• Social proof
  • Incorporate logos and a header to logo section on the website
  • Drive third party review logos and awards
  • Include customer testimonials on the website
• Content
  • Create more niche industry-specific content
  • Focus on a topic cluster strategy to drive SERP rankings
  • Build a resource library & publish weekly content

What you get from PipelineRoad

At PipelineRoad, you can feel confident you're getting something data-driven and informed. After answering all of the questions above, we’ll wrap everything up into a Google slide presentation –so you only see what you need to see. Here's a little glimpse:

A marketing audit for your marketing success

Marketing audits are vital in prioritizing areas of focus, allocating resources, optimizing performance, and improving your efforts to enhance the effectiveness of your marketing. Make sure to gather the right information and answer the right questions in order to make the right decisions for your business.

Need some help? Contact us today. We’d love to help.