Planning Your Marketing

4. Marketing Audit

Your marketing audit pulls together the key information. It gives you a clear understanding of your market, how you fit into it, and how effective your previous marketing has been.

4.1 Analyse each market segment you sell into (see 2 and 3).

4.2 Rank your customers in order of their importance to your business.

• Your top customers are those which account for the most sales and profit - or which will in the future.
• Consider the opportunities to grow customer accounts by selling them additional products in your range.

4.3 Rank which products (or parts of your business) are the most profitable.

• Once you have accounted for their proper share of overhead costs, some activities may turn out to be loss-making.

4.4 Analyse the reasons why customers buy from you, and from your competitors.

4.5 Review every marketing initiative you undertook in the previous period, to see what worked.

• Most marketing can be measured (see 8).