How To Conduct A B2B Marketing Audit

Why Conduct a B2B Marketing Audit?

Purpose and Importance

Conducting a marketing audit for a B2B company is essential for understanding the current state of its marketing function. For those leading a business-to-business organization or considering an acquisition, assessing the marketing capabilities can be challenging. The broad scope of marketing responsibilities, its impact on success, and diverse stakeholder opinions often make it a complex task. CEOs and investors frequently seek our guidance on how to conduct a B2B marketing audit.

An audit provides a quick evaluation of a company’s marketing strengths, weaknesses, and growth opportunities. It doesn’t need to be an exhaustive analysis but rather a high-level assessment similar to a home or car inspection. Using readily available information and specialized tools, you can develop a report that answers key questions:

• Where has the company succeeded in marketing?
• Are there any marketing red flags?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses?
• Where are the growth opportunities, including low-hanging fruits?
• Which channels are yielding above-average returns?
• Is there potential for additional marketing investment? Where would it be most impactful?
• What is the company’s product-market fit status?
• What marketing investments should be made in the next quarter?

Scope of a B2B Marketing Audit

A marketing audit sometimes extends beyond assessing the marketing function to include evaluating the market opportunity. This could involve a Total Addressable Market (TAM) analysis, a detailed review of Product Market Fit, and the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). Depending on the completeness of other due diligence assessments, these areas can be included in the marketing audit as needed.

B2B Marketing Audit Coverage Areas

Team Assessment

• Do you have the right roles in place?
• Is there versatility in the skill set (T-shaped skills)?
• Can the team learn and adapt quickly?
• What tasks are best done in-house versus outsourced?
• How effectively are agencies managed?

Pipeline and Funnel Analysis

• What are the definitions of each lead stage?
• How are year-to-date performances on lead stage targets by quarter versus actual results?
• What is the lead source distribution by tactic (actual vs. expected)?
• How does the average deal size compare from opportunity creation to close?
• What is the time taken for each lead stage: Inquiry to MQL, MQL to Opportunity?
• How are sales stages defined and what are the days per sales stage?
• What is the pipeline coverage for the current and next quarter?
• What is the status of open deals by close date, stage, and customer tier?
• How much is closed (won or lost) on average per quarter versus new pipeline generated?
• How many deals are completed per year?
• What percentage of deals fit our ideal customer profile?
• How are customers tiered?
• What percentage of revenue is ARR versus one-time revenue?
• Where is the most friction and leakage in the funnel?
• What is our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?

Marketing Plan Evaluation

• Is there a summary marketing plan for the year?
• What are the committed costs and activities for the remainder of the year?
• How is the budget allocated by spend type, and how does it compare to benchmark values?
• Do we have a campaign framework?
• Is there an external data source for supporting outbound and ABM campaigns (e.g., ZoomInfo)?

Digital Execution Review

• What is our keyword strategy?
• What are the web traffic reports and trends for the past 12 months, including regional breakdowns?
• What are our highest visited pages and their secondary traffic flow? What are the conversion rates on those pages?
• Do we have a content calendar?
• Are we running social campaigns, and is there a specific cadence?
• What is our Google quality score and other advertising KPIs?

Product Market Fit Assessment

• What is the proven value proposition and for whom?
• What category do we serve, and what problem do we solve?

Go-to-Market Strategy

• What is the opportunity size?
• What is our ability to execute?
• How are priorities set?
• What is our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and personas?
• What are the TAM, SAM, and SOM, and where can we find them?

Martech Stack Analysis

• How are analytics and data quality managed?
• Do we have an A/B testing discipline?
• What insights are we gaining from data?

When and Why to Conduct a Marketing Audit

There are two primary reasons to conduct a marketing audit:

1. Pre-Investment Diligence: This helps inform a go/no-go decision or appropriate business valuation. While financial metrics drive most decisions, a marketing audit can provide insights into online presence, brand visibility, competitive positioning, and digital reputation. However, extensive data requests can cause deal fatigue and risk, so audits that don’t impact decision-making are best done post-close.
2. Post-Investment Prioritization: This helps prioritize focus areas, resource allocation, and identify low-hanging fruit when managing the marketing function of a company.

Pre-Investment Marketing Audit

Conducting a marketing audit before an investment transaction helps inform the go/no-go decision or determine the appropriate valuation. While financial metrics primarily drive these decisions, a marketing audit can highlight online presence, brand visibility, competitive positioning, and digital reputation. However, extensive data requests can cause deal fatigue and risk, so it’s best to conduct audits that don’t impact decision-making post-close.

Post-Investment Marketing Audit

When reviewing the Marketing function of a business that you own, you can go deeper, with access to the people, processes and documentation that allow a thorough review. The remainder of this article is meant to help you do just that.

Example Marketing Audit Questionnaire

The following questions are grouped by function in your B2B SaaS Company. These are optimized by our team doing many audits, and have led to great insights and uncovered opportunities and risks that otherwise would have been missed.

10 Diligence Questions for the Leadership Team

In due diligence interviews, you often have ~30 minutes to understand the state of this team’s marketing capabilities. You have to figure out if the product marketing function has been based on an actual positioning and product management strategy.

These questions are designed to help you turn over the most important marketing stones.

• What is it that we do best? What do we do better vs. the competition? What can only we do?
• What are the pains of our clients? What are their fears and dreams? What are our clients trying to do? Who are they trying to become?
• Would you say we have reached Product Market Fit? In what parts of the market? Where do customers pay and stay, and tell others about us? What is the maturity of our product category in the Geoffrey Moore “crossing the chasm” model?
• What do our clients look like? Where can we find them? What does an Ideal Client Profile look like?
• How are product strategy, pricing, and positioning aligned with the marketing execution?
• Which of our current products (or services) are most aligned to market and customer requirements? How did this happen? Is it a repeatable process?
• What is Marketing doing well? How would you assess the team’s strengths? What about Sales and Customer Success?
• What can Marketing do better? What do you need that you’re not getting?
• If you could get one thing from the Marketing team right now, what would be your highest priority?
• How can you (or your team) help with Marketing?

11 Marketing Audit Questions for Product Management

• What is it that we do best? What do we do better vs. the competition? What can only we do?
• What are the pains of our clients? What are their fears and dreams? What are our clients trying to do? Who are they trying to become?
• Would you say we have reached Product Market Fit? In what parts of the market? Where do customers pay and stay, and tell others about us? What is the maturity of our product category in the Geoffrey Moore “crossing the chasm” model?
• What do our clients look like? Where can we find them? What does an Ideal Client Profile look like?
• How is product strategy, pricing and positioning aligned with the marketing execution?
• Can you share the Product Roadmap? How does this get shared with Customers? Do customers provide input? How?
• What market research do we have that we use to inform strategy and product planning?
• How can we combine marketing and product to do “growth hacking”? For example integrate adoption, referral or loyalty triggers into the product usage experience.
• If you could get one thing from the marketing team right now, what would be your highest priority?
• What’s our product for? Who’s it for?
• Real SaaS? Multi-tenant? Shared core? Custom vs. configurable. Professional services needed? Scalable?

9 Marketing Due Diligence Questions for Your Sales Team

• How many people are in the sales organization? What are their roles? (Account Executive, BDR/SDR, Account Management)?
• How does your team balance new business vs. up-sell? How is the revenue split between these?
• How many new opportunities does your team qualify per week? Who qualifies the leads that turn into these opportunities that you “accept”? How do you qualify opportunities? What do you look for? What are the criteria? (e.g. BANT)
• What does an Ideal Customer Profile look like? Describe the perfect attributes of a dream account. What are your ‘dream accounts’ to win?
• How many leads do you get weekly, and how many turn into opportunities? How fast do we typically connect with a lead after they “knocked on our door”? How many opportunities come from marketing generated leads vs. your sales team finding opportunities themselves, and how many are coming as inbound calls or referrals from partners direct to the sales team?
• How often do you have a sales meeting with a pipeline review? How do you create your forecast for the month or quarter? Can you share the sales meeting materials that you use ? (Pipeline report, CRM view)
• What is marketing doing well? What can marketing do better? What do you need that you’re not getting?
• What would make you very proud of the Marketing team 4-6 months from now? What would success look like?
• If you could get one thing from the Marketing team right now, what would be your highest priority?

10 Marketing Audit Questions for Your Marketing Team

• What’s on your marketing dashboard? How often do you review it? What do you do with the insights?
• Describe the marketing team and roles. Do you use a quarterly objective or goal setting system like OKRs? How do you cover Writing and PR, Branding and design, Web, Social and Automation, Sales- and Event support, Product marketing, positioning and research, Channel marketing and Content marketing?
• Do we have a marketing plan for the quarter? And for the year? What’s going well and according to plan, and where can we do better?
• Can you share our positioning/messaging strategy (document/hierarchy/framework), most important collateral (sales materials, videos, webpages), and brand style guide?
• What’s your marketing budget? How do you prioritize resources vs. the company strategic goals? What’s the cost-per-lead given to the sales team? Do we know what our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is?

Customer Segmentation and Pricing

• How many customers do we have? Are they segmented in cohorts of ideal customers vs. non-ideal? Tenure? Revenue size or product usage? What’s our churn? What is our Average Revenue Per Unit (ARPU, Unit can be customer, device, user or any other denominator)? How is our pricing aligned with our customer segmentation?
• How do we drive demand? Where do our leads come from? (Owned/Organic/Direct, Earned/Social/Referral, Paid, Events)? How many leads do we get per week, and how many of those become “Marketing Qualified Leads” that we pass on to our Sales (BDR/SDR) team for qualification? How many MQLs convert to Opportunities that the sales team manages?
• What does an Ideal Customer Profile look like? How are we finding more of these? What are their fears and dreams that our messaging connects with?
• Can you share our content calendar and the current content performance? What content or pages are driving the most leads?
• What are our automated campaigns? Do we nurture prospects/customers? Do we have up-sell or referral campaigns? What tools do we have in our Marketing Technology stack to support email, social, analytics, testing and audience engagement?

Customer Success and Support

10 Audit Questions for Customer Success and Support Team

• What’s our logo churn per month? What’s the revenue churn of these clients and how does this compare to the company revenue numbers?
• How many people are in the customer success and support organization? What are their roles? (Technical Support, Customer Success Manager, Training and On-boarding, Account Management)?
• How does your team balance customer service vs. up-sell? How is the capacity split between these?
• How many new clients does your team onboard per week? How many up-sells?
• What does an Ideal Customer Profile look like? Describe the perfect attributes of a dream account. What are your ‘dream accounts’ to service?
• What accounts are the hardest to onboard and support? Describe what they look like. Are these profitable for us?
• How often do you have a commercial check-in meeting with sales to discuss new customer pipeline and issues with existing clients?
• Are you using technology and content to scale your team without having to add people? How are you working with marketing on that?
• What is marketing doing well? What can marketing do better? What do you need that you’re not getting?
• If you could get one thing from the marketing team right now, what would be your highest priority?

Agencies and Contractors

10 Marketing Audit Questions for Agencies and Contractors

• Can you share your Statement of Work? What are your key deliverables this month? What are they for the engagement?
• How do you report on progress of the work? What are the weekly KPIs?
• How is the engagement currently going vs. the original agreement and expectations?
• How do you think our marketing is doing? What’s going well, and what do you think we can do better?
• How can you help us even better vs. what you are already doing?
• How are you measuring the value you bring to us?
• What would a great engagement look like? What would have to happen beyond or agreed upon commitments?
• Is anything blocking you from doing a great engagement? Any blockers or dependencies that we control?
• How many customers are you servicing? How many customers are serviced by the same people supporting us?
• Where do we rank on your ideal customer list/profile? Are we a profitable customer for you?

Customers and Partners

Diligence Questions for Customers and Partners

One of the quickest ways to confirm or “test” a company’s product value proposition and customer journey assumptions is to speak directly with a company’s happy and unhappy customers. This interview guide is full of questions our CMOs ask customers and partners in our full-service engagements.

Example of B2B Marketing Audit Documents to Review

Marketing materials that can be helpful to review to complete the marketing audit:

• Messaging document
• Prospect pitch deck
• Analyst pitch deck
• Ideal customer profile and key buyer personas
• Top content assets (white papers, infographics, etc.)
• Main collateral pieces (brochure, data sheets, etc.)
• Mapped existing content by stage and persona. Any priority that needs to be filled?
• Intel material for top competitors and how it’s being used
• Any win/loss analysis? A summary of findings?

What to Expect from a Marketing Audit Report?

A marketing function report card generated by an audit should typically cover the following areas:

• What’s working and what isn’t?
• Go-to-Market strategy strength (are the right pieces in place? Is there a clear vertical focus?)
• Team (are the right marketing skills being filled by the right people?)
• Content (what content exists? What should be created? Are there SMEs on the team to leverage for content?)
• Website (Is traffic being created? Is it likely converting? Is there anything that needs fixing?)
• Martech stack (what technology is being used? Will it scale with the company?)
• SEO (trajectory, strengths, gaps)
• Paid Search (What is being spent? Is money being spent effectively? Is there a dependence on pay-to-play?)
• What are the quick wins & low-hanging fruit. The weaknesses and potential blind spots?
• What’s the marketing team capacity recommendation?

How to Get a Free Digital B2B Marketing Audit?

There are many sites like neilpatel.com where you can get a free audit of your website, often including your company’s organic and paid search results to help you understand some of the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities of its inbound reputation. Below are some sample reports based on our website mxdmarketing.com. We are happy to show you how to get your performance to grow like that.

Domain Overview

Is the company’s general online presence growing or shrinking over time? Is organic domain authority tracking upwards or downwards over time? A good B2B website audit includes many aspects found in a tool like SEMrush:

Organic Traffic Over Time

Increased organic traffic over time is a good leading indicator that a company’s online brand and website is getting stronger. But, alone it doesn’t tell us much. We also need to understand how much traffic results from relevant intent-based keyword and branded search terms.

Branded Keyword Volume and Search Volume Over Time

An increase in search interest over time for branded keywords can indicate positive brand awareness in a particular market segment. This will go hand-in-hand with a content audit for your company.

High Intent (HI) Keyword Rankings

These signal buying intent. Ranking for HI keywords means your company’s content and website appear when people are in the “Consideration” and “Decision” stages of the funnel. These are the most important keywords a company’s website can rank for – as long as they align with the company’s value proposition and industry category.

Competitive Positioning Map

This shows us an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of a competitive domains’ presence in organic search results. Data visualizations are based on domains’ organic traffic and the number of keywords they rank for in Google’s top 100 organic search results.