A marketing audit enables you to review your company's strengths and weaknesses, priorities and market segments, internal make up and personality as a basis for developing a successful marketing strategy for the future.

The best way to conduct a marketing audit is to ask all your key employees to complete an independent review along the following lines:

• Profile of the company
  What is your understanding of the nature of the company, its situation, and its mission?
• Personal profile
  What is your role in the company and why do you like working here?
• Trends that affect the company
  What is happening in the business environment that can affect the company?
• The customer base
  Who is the company serving and how? What do our customers want?
• Trends that affect the customers
  What will our customers want in the future and how might this differ from what they want right now?
• Competition
  What is the competition and what are they doing to meet customers' needs?
• Customer service
  What is good customer service and how can we improve it?
• Key customers
  Typically, a large proportion of our income comes from a relatively small number of customers. How did we acquire them, how profitable are they, and what are we doing to retain them?
• Current marketing activities
  What customers are we currently targeting and how?
• Recruiting and training
  What kind of people does the company need to meet the challenges of tomorrow?
• E-commerce
  How should we plan to develop our marketing to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the net?
• And finally...
  If there were one thing you would do differently in marketing, what would it be?

Once the separate reviews are completed you can collate the returns and try to understand what implications they have for your future marketing strategy. If our experience with clients is anything to go by you will be pleasantly surprised by the insights of your employees, and the pointers they provide for your future direction.