Question

Discuss how a service firm can make use of marketing audit as an evaluation and control technique. (25 marks)

Answer 1

Here is how a service firm can use a marketing audit for evaluation & control technique:

• It helps a service firm to identify & review the current status of the company's marketing activities.
• It also helps to reduce the costs and by measuring the activity that is working it helps to understand the overall return on investment & hence the marketing audit becomes a crucial aspect of the entire process.
• It will help a service firm understand the path where it is heading towards from the marketing perspective.
• It provides a benchmark for checking future marketing activity & also gives feedback and recommendation to increase the efficiency and performance of service firm marketing activities.
• It will help understand the various business strategies & can inform management and leadership about consumer insights & reach business objectives.

The key elements of marketing audits involve - SWOT analysis, customer & prospect research, competition analysis, review of current marketing initiative & its impact, external factor analysis using techniques like Pestel analysis.

These elements of marketing audit can help in evaluation & control techniques:

• The SWOT aspect helps to analyse the strengths and weakness of the entire marketing activities, helps understand what customer like and dislike, what the overall business & marketing is good at.
• Market research helps understand the customers and prospects to know where to buy from & why people should buy. It helps to understand the customers like & dislike about the services.
• The marketing audit helps in the service development process, improves customer experience & better branding campaigns.
• Another key aspect of a marketing audit is competitor analysis which helps to compare services & how other services are featuring as companies to yours.

Marketing audits help a service firm to know the value of services & helps remind about the goals and purpose. It helps to optimise marketing efforts to get better results and helps to improve.

It helps to understand what problems need to removed & brings prioritisation and focus towards certain actions and objectives of marketing the services. It helps to excite the team and bring professional opinion on how to energise and look at future marketing activities for the services.

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