Have you ever wondered why perfectly good marketing strategies work for others but not you? The only way to find the answer is to analyze your marketing and get rid of things that slow you down. 

During our recent project with a CNC machining company, we spent 3 weeks studying the client and their current activities to spot the gaps, potentially saving them thousands of dollars on inefficient outreach, and building a list of suggestions to solve the existing issues. Curious to learn how? 

Intro

Every time a company reaches a certain milestone, a perfectly natural thing is to look for opportunities to grow. Whether it’s adding new features, entering new markets, or testing new audiences, the goal is to be seen more by your buyer. 

But what if, instead of trying entirely new approaches and spending your budget on the unknown, you take a closer look at your current activities? 

Spoiler: It will help you grow ROI and focus on small yet efficient marketing details you might have missed (we’re all human after all). 

If, by now, you’re interested in the right way to put your marketing under a microscope, here’s a brief recap on an audit we did for a CNC machining company. 

Client

A leader in the European market, our client helps companies manufacture details from their drawings. Having worked with top-tier clients, the company was looking for ways to expand and land clients somewhere else. 

And that’s exactly why they reached out to us: setting up a cold outreach campaign to look for sales opportunities in the US. 

Challenge

An established company, in-house marketing processes, and a clear target to work toward. Launching an outreach campaign seemed like an easy task. 

However, once we started collecting all the necessary info for the campaign, we noticed a few things that could be easily fixed but had a significant impact on all the company’s marketing activities. 

Here’s the thing: Predicting the results of cold outreach is tough. But it’s easy to predict that cold outreach won’t yield results when the rest of your marketing has flaws. 

So, why should a company invest money and resources in something bound to fail when it could use the opportunity to fix what’s currently in the way of its success? 

That’s the solution we offered our client before investing in cold outreach. And that’s the direction we went with. 

Step one: Marketing audit 

If you haven’t heard of a marketing audit before, think of it as a deep cleaning of your marketing activities. Rather than just looking at the existing system, we analyze everything you do step by step to find out what might affect your growth and results. 

Since our client spent many years in the market, they already had a CRM, a team of sales reps to handle cold outreach, a database of prospects collected over the years, and experience with marketing activities like SEO and advertisement. 

Our task for the following three weeks was to study the client’s business, deep dive into their sales and marketing, and look at their process within the context of the competitive landscape, comparing the current activities to the trends taking place in the industry. 

Here are the components we included in the audit: 

#1. Market research 

To find the right growth vector for your business, you need to know where your market and industry are headed. The latest updates or trends within the industry, customer behavior dynamics, or economic forecasts for the target market are a must for figuring out your company’s future. 

#2. Competitor analysis 

Even when it’s something you do regularly to learn more about what your competition is doing, it’s easy to start looking in the wrong direction. That’s why we gather a list of service and attention competitors and look at what tactics they use to draw the audience’s attention. 

#3. ICP check-up

A great innovative solution has a chance to fail when you’re trying to hit the wrong target. Our team looked into an existing Ideal Customer Profile, making sure it was valid and included all the necessary information to establish a relationship with a potential customer: behavior patterns, pain points, and priorities. 

#4. Marketing activity analysis 

Your marketing activity goes beyond website analytics and ads. We started with an assessment of a Unique Value Proposition and moved on to analyzing the marketing activities for every stage of the funnel: 

• Website performance
• Social media presence
• Advertisement campaigns
• CRM setup and its management
• Email campaigns and domain strengths
• Presentation or pitch deck
• Messaging scripts and cold-calling templates 
• Sales process 

#5. Roadmap

Based on our analysis, we created a checklist of step-by-step recommendations for the client, from the most important parts that had to be fixed to proceed with a marketing strategy to “nice-to-have” improvements of the process that could benefit the client in the long run. 

Step two: Processing results

After receiving an executive summary of an audit, along with a detailed document with links, examples, and step-by-step explanations, our client immediately realized the value of a proper analysis.

Just take a look at this example: 

Email was a vital part of our client’s sales funnel, as they gathered emails as a part of their cold calling strategy, using them to share important information with the prospects later. 

However, as it turned out, the domains used for the communication had a poor rating and serious DNS flaws. A huge part of their emails landed in the prospect’s spam, resulting in low conversion rates for the client. 

If they decided to use the domains for a cold email campaign, they would lose thousands of dollars on inefficient emails that never reached the customer. 

Now, they have the opportunity to easily fix their domain health and double their open rate. 

Here are some other important blind spots we discovered after an audit: 

• A problem with vague positioning and value proposition for the client: Imagine going to an old established market with a USP that is identical to 60% of your key competitors who are on the market for the last 20 years. 
• Wrong sales funnel design that doesn’t allow for the correct conversion tracking 
• Lack of attribution metrics to know where the customers are coming from 
• Content that wasn’t aligned with the ideal buyer’s needs and values communicated by the team

All these things were waiting around the corner to sink the performance of a well-orchestrated cold outreach campaign. Because marketing doesn’t exist in silos. It’s the right combination of all the activities that matters to the client. 

Naturally, the next question that comes to mind is, “What does a company do with all this information?” 

Step three: Implementation 

Although we are not magic wizards who instantly solve all the challenges for your marketing, we’re certainly not the ones to leave you alone either. Our roadmap includes all different types of recommendations: 

• Things you can fix yourself (e.g., reorganizing your sales team structure to boost performance) 
• Things our agency can help you fix (e.g., helping with email deliverability or content guidelines for your socials) 
• Things we can help delegate to others (e.g., refreshing your website or setting up a new CRM) 

But, most importantly, the roadmap becomes a health indicator for your team. Once you know what needs fixing, you can stop guessing while wasting time and money on marketing tactics that yield zero results and focus on low-hanging fruit instead. 

Today, when we know how to approach a cold outreach strategy the right way, we’re helping our clients build a solid system from scratch, making sure they maximize results in the long run. 

Have we been talking about marketing strategy this whole time?  

The short answer is no. To be more accurate, not at all. 

Unlike marketing strategy, a complex and time-consuming process that overviews every single step of your marketing and requires your full and undivided attention, an audit is your opportunity to stop, reflect, and make sure you’re moving in the right direction. 

You just tell us everything there is about your business, and our marketing team handles the research and recommendations. With a health check result in place, the ball is once again in your court, and we’re here to support you if you decide to get your marketing fixed. 

How do you know you need a marketing audit? 

Whether you’re planning to enter a new market, find gaps in your current strategy, or invest in a new marketing channel, a marketing audit is a fundamental step in boosting your business efficiency and taking charge of your budget. 

If you consider a deep dive into your marketing, we’re here to help you find the flaws and opportunities for growth. 

P.S. Many other B2B marketing tools are our jam as well, but isn’t it better to find out if they’re worth a shot first?