Did your organization recently invest in a new marketing automation (MA) platform, but you don’t know whether it’s set up correctly?
Or maybe you’ve been using the same platform for a while, but you’re not sure whether it’s performing at its peak?
As digital marketing evolves, the need for regular marketing automation audits has become crucial.
These audits are not just routine checkups—they are essential tools to maximize your marketing strategy and ensure your campaigns hit the mark every time.
Our certified MA/CRM experts created this guide to share why conducting regular platform audits is vital for marketing automation success.
We’ll explore how these assessments help identify performance gaps, optimize your marketing efforts, and drive continuous improvement.
Let’s ensure your MA platform continues to be a powerful asset for your organization.
What is a Marketing Automation Audit?
A marketing automation audit is a systematic review of your organization’s marketing functions.
It’s designed to verify that your marketing systems are accurate, relevant, reliable, and aligned with defined processes and best practices.
This comprehensive assessment examines various aspects of your marketing automation platform (MAP), including its performance, configuration, and overall effectiveness.
Key Components of an Audit
When conducting a marketing automation audit, you’ll need to focus on several key components:
- Visual mapping: Create a visual representation of all parts of your MAP.
This chart should be accessible to all stakeholders and help team members follow the flow of automated messages at each step in the program. - Compliance check: Audit all templates, landing pages, emails, text messages, and ads to ensure they comply with your brand guidelines and legal requirements.
- Performance analysis: Test your program annually or quarterly to discover where conversions are lost and which parts need updating.
- Feature assessment: Review new features expected to be added to your software by the vendor.
This helps you understand upcoming functionality changes in your tech platforms. - Data health: Evaluate the quality and accuracy of your customer data within the system.
- Lead scoring: Assess the effectiveness of your lead scoring model and make necessary adjustments.
- Outbound campaigns: Analyze the performance of your automated email campaigns and other outbound marketing efforts.
- Analytics and reporting: Review your analytics setup and ensure you’re tracking the right metrics for your business goals.
- Integrations: Check that your MAP is properly integrated with other tools in your marketing stack, such as your CRM system.
Benefits of Regular Audits
When you start conducting regular audits of your MA platform, here are some of the benefits you can expect:
- Improved efficiency: Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
- Enhanced lead generation: Companies using marketing automation to nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads.
- Better lead quality: Regular audits help improve lead quality, increasing revenue and streamlining processes like lead assignment and follow-up.
- Personalized content delivery: Audits ensure your automation system is delivering the right content to the right people at the right time.
- Data-driven decision-making: Audits provide valuable insights into customer behavior, enabling you to make informed decisions about your marketing strategies.
Optimizing Marketing Strategies Through Audits
When you synchronize your marketing strategies with your company’s goals, you set a clear direction for your business and ensure that every marketing action contributes to your broader objectives.
Start by setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your marketing automation campaigns.
For example:
You might aim to increase online sales by 25% in Q4 through an email marketing campaign.
This goal is specific, measurable, and time-bound, allowing you to track progress effectively.
If you’re aiming for more leads to boost sales, look for ways to improve processes, such as streamlining communication between sales and marketing teams.
Marketing automation can help you design better workflows that nurture leads through the sales funnel using data and analytics.
Improving Lead Scoring and Segmentation
Lead scoring is a method that helps you prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert.
Modern lead scoring turns lead prioritization into an objective process rather than a subjective one.
It becomes an analytical and scientific approach that is easily manageable and cost-effective.
To create an effective lead scoring model, consider both:
- Demographic attributes (such as title and company size)
- User behaviors (like page visits and downloads)
This approach helps standardize the process through which leads are handled and sets clear roles and expectations among sales and marketing teams.
When implementing lead scoring, it’s essential to:
- Define the SDR-ready score: This is the threshold at which a lead is passed from marketing to sales.
Ideally, leads that hit this score should have above a 10% close rate. - Analyze patterns: Identify the types of prospects that are most valuable to you and the behaviors that signal intent to buy.
- Choose relevant behaviors: Focus on actions that genuinely indicate a prospect’s interest in your offerings.
Enhancing Personalization and Targeting
Personalization is a game-changer in marketing automation, significantly improving customer engagement and boosting conversion rates.
By tailoring marketing messages and experiences to individual customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and demographics, you create customized experiences that truly resonate with your audience.
To implement effective personalization strategies:
- Collect and analyze customer data: Gather information about your customers’ preferences, behaviors, and purchase history to serve as the foundation for your personalization efforts.
- Segment your audience: Use the collected data to group your audience based on relevant criteria, allowing you to create personalized content and experiences for each segment.
- Utilize automation tools: Invest in marketing automation software with robust personalization features to streamline the delivery of tailored messages and content.
- Implement dynamic content: Use real-time customization of messages and offers based on individual customer behavior and preferences to deliver timely and relevant communications.
Implementing Audit Findings for Continuous Improvement
After conducting a thorough marketing automation audit, it’s time to put your findings into action. Here’s how:
Creating a Game Plan
To implement your audit findings effectively, start by drafting a marketing action plan.
This plan serves as a blueprint for your marketing success in the coming year and should include:
- Your mission statement
- Your target audience
- Goals for the upcoming year
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success
- Your marketing budget for the coming year
Begin by examining your marketing successes, failures, and pain points from the previous year.
Create a mock marketing calendar based on your previous year’s activities, then adjust it to incorporate new strategies and improvements identified during the audit.
For example, if you noticed that video content performed exceptionally well on your social media accounts, you might decide to include video production as part of your marketing efforts for the coming year.
However, to accommodate this within your budget and time constraints, you may need to limit or cut out another marketing avenue.
Prioritizing Improvements
Focus on areas where you’re losing leads or experiencing inefficiencies.
Analyze your reports to identify any parts of the funnel where leads are dropping off.
If customers are moving through the top of the funnel easily but not converting into sales, you know to focus on middle and bottom-of-funnel tactics.
Measuring the Impact of Changes
To effectively measure the impact of your improvements, you’ll need to monitor key metrics and KPIs.
Some essential metrics to track include:
- Click-through and open rates: These show if your emails are well-crafted and viewed by customers.
- Unsubscribe rates: Your unsubscribe rate should stay under 1%.
- Sales-accepted leads: An increase indicates that marketing automation is making your business more efficient.
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): These should increase if leads are effectively nurtured during marketing automation.
- Cost per customer: This should decrease when marketing automation is used effectively.
- Revenue generated: Monitor changes in average sale price and whether you’re closing more deals.
- Marketing-sourced lead close rates: High close rates demonstrate the value of your marketing efforts to the sales team.
Regular testing and optimization are key to success, so use A/B testing to compare different versions of your emails, landing pages, and other content.
Then, analyze the results and make adjustments accordingly.
Get an MA Audit from MAC's Certified Experts
At MAC, our certified experts in platforms like Marketo, Salesforce, and HubSpot bring top-tier expertise and industry knowledge to every project.
Since 2008, we’ve served all kinds of clients, from startups to global enterprises, with comprehensive services including MAP/CRM audits and full platform implementations.
Over 1,250 clients have trusted us with their MA/CRM needs, and we’re highly rated on G2.
By partnering with MAC, you gain direct access to dedicated experts who will offer personalized insights and solutions for your organization.
Contact us to discuss the initial steps for your platform audit.
