Michela Pace, Marketing Operations Manager at GameOn
As a marketer, getting a new client on board is an exciting time. Chances are, you have visions for where the company can go and ideas of how to get it there, and the natural temptation is to want to hit the ground running. However, one thing I have learned during my time working with GameOn’s CMO Fractional team is that the fastest route to success often starts with hitting the pause button and taking stock of where everyone is at.
The idea of an audit might sound a little bit daunting to some. A close examination of where a company stands in terms of its branding, positioning, and content output might sound a little excessive, but it provides everyone with something incredibly useful: a strategy.
Planning Your Course
Experience tells us that it is impossible to plan a course if you do not know where you are starting from. By completing a thorough marketing audit, you can avoid false starts and rethinks and, crucially, prevent yourself from burning through marketing funds and resources. It puts everyone on the same page and allows you to start building a plan together.
Importantly, a marketing audit shouldn’t only be considered when things aren’t working. Even when performance is strong, it’s easy to overlook what you don’t know. Without reviewing the wider landscape, businesses can unknowingly leave opportunity on the table, missing chances to optimise, extend, or capitalise on emerging channels and market shifts.
Fresh eyes can also play a crucial role in all of this. An external user might notice missed opportunities or spot underutilised marketing channels. They might also use tools that you were unaware of, or that you hadn’t considered the advantages of. They may also introduce new platforms, techniques, or tools that your team hasn’t explored yet, helping to sharpen strategy and maximise marketing performance in an increasingly competitive landscape.
In our experience, audits can also uncover low-hanging fruit and straightforward opportunities that businesses have overlooked for long periods. This is rarely due to a lack of capability or expertise, but more often because internal teams are operating at full capacity, leaving little time to step back, review performance, optimise existing activity, or explore and extend into new channels.
Watching the Competition
Audits also give companies a time to stop and take a closer look at their competitors. While you might be monitoring them through news updates or their website, an audit gives you the opportunity to take a closer look at how they operate and identify gaps in the market you might not have otherwise spotted.
In iGaming, this can be particularly useful, as companies regularly adjust their strategies to adapt to new markets or regulatory changes. This gives you a chance to compare your moves to theirs and see whether you are ahead or behind the competition. As an agency, we can also provide you with actionable insights and help identify where competitors are missing the mark.
On that note, it can also provide a way of shining a light on your internal perceptions. Sometimes, as companies progress quickly, they can lose sight of where they actually are within a market. Internal views and external realities can sometimes differ, and completing an audit allows everyone to understand exactly where the company is and where to move forward.
Building a Blueprint
Marketing audits are an extremely valuable move. They enable companies to assess their current marketing and build evidence-based strategies that drive progress.
By never auditing your marketing, you risk falling behind the competition. When roadmaps are built around evidence and processes, you are not being led by false internal sentiment or guesswork; you are being guided by data and statistics, which, in a hyper-competitive environment, can be a huge difference-maker.
As part of GameOn’s CMO Fractional service, we offer market audits for all our marketing clients, providing competitor analysis and practical, actionable insights to help build a blueprint for success. This approach has consistently helped us deliver meaningful, measurable results that truly matter to our clients.
