Having a solid digital marketing strategy does not guarantee long-term success. If you want to grow your business and consistently reach your goals, you must ensure that your online strategie specialist will always work. The ever-evolving trends in the market mean that you have to be up to date and be on top of your game all the time.
You can only do this if you evaluate your strategy and determine what works and needs improvement. To do this, you need to conduct a thorough digital marketing audit. This important step will help you plan for a better future, ensuring that you are hitting your targets, whether it’s reaching the right audience or increasing your sales and revenue.
What Constitutes a Digital Marketing Audit?
Before we delve deep into the ins and outs of a digital marketing audit, let’s first define the term. What does a marketing audit encompass? How it is done?
In a nutshell, a digital marketing audit refers to a review of your strategy to see which platforms are working, how your website is performing, and which parts need improvements. This audit will help you know where to put your money and ensure you get the return on investment you desire.
There are many reasons you need to conduct a digital marketing audit, including the following:
- Generate quality leads.
- Hit your quarterly or annual goals.
- Build a new website.
- Launch a new campaign.
- Know your audience better.
- Keep up with your competitors.
Conducting a digital marketing audit helps you create an efficient game plan before you go to the field. This process allows you to determine what works and what does not through testing various elements of your digital marketing tactics.
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How Do You Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit?
When conducting an audit of your digital marketing strategy, you need to start somewhere. It’s not only about the numbers either. You also need to look at other aspects, including the content across all your channels. Here are the steps of conducting your audit:
Identify Your Key Marketing Channels
The various platforms that you can harness for your marketing strategy can be a tad overwhelming, but you must choose the right channels. Identify the ones working for you and make a list. This can include the following:
- Website
- SEO
- Email campaign automation
You can also look at it another way. What marketing campaigns are you running? You might have Google ad campaigns, Facebook ad campaigns, and LinkedIn ad campaigns. You might also be running email campaigns.
Identifying these channels and campaigns will help you narrow down your work and focus on what matters.
Outline Your Marketing Goals
Before your start the audit process layout your marketing goals first. What are you trying to achieve with your marketing strategy? It does not have to be confined to one objective.
For example, you want to achieve a certain revenue at the end of the year. Then your goals will consist of building your online presence and engaging prospects, increasing your website traffic, generating quality leads, and boosting your conversion strategy.
You need to make sure your goals are measurable so you can better gauge how they are performing. The objectives need reviewing too. They will guide how the next steps of the audit process.
Analyze the Products or Services on Offer
You cannot proceed with the audit properly without first taking a look at the products or services you offer. You must make sure to know what profitable products to sell and make sure they are aligned with your strategies. You might need to change your existing offerings to satisfy customers’ evolving needs and expectations.
The current market condition might not be conducive to the services you are providing. It’s also possible that you’re missing out on opportunities to offer a new product or service ahead of your competitors.
Appoint the Best Person for the Job
Of course, the audit cannot push through if you don’t have the right person for the job. The process may be done by different people. The marketing team members are the best people to conduct the audit. They handle the marketing side of things and better understand the overall strategy.
If the internal team can’t take on the additional tasks, you can always opt for a convenient option: outsourcing the marketing audit.
Get to Know Your Target Customers
Your customers make up a good part of your marketing strategy. When doing the audit, you need to consider your ideal customers. It’s essential in gauging their online behaviors, giving you ample insights into how they use the online channels and interact with your brand.
If you know your customers well, you’ll have a fair idea of how they spend their time online. Say your ideal customers are mostly composed of working professionals; they must be more active after working hours or during their break at work.
Take a Look at Your Competitors
Conducting a competitive analysis is a vital part of every digital marketing audit process. You don’t only need to know how your strategy is faring. You also need to look at your competitors and what they’re doing to succeed.
Are they on the same channels you are in? What tactics do they employ for their marketing strategy? They might be running Google Display ads, which give them relevant website traffic. They may be generating leads through Facebook ads or running effective email campaigns.
Knowing how they’re doing things can give you the right inspiration to develop or refine your current strategy.
Run a Comprehensive Audit on Various Channels
This brings us to the crucial step in the process. You will need to run comprehensive audits on your key marketing channels. You can consult the list you have done before.
Run a Website Audit
The best place to start your marketing audit is on your platform. You need to ensure that the information is up to date and correct. You may want to look at your contact page and see if your phone number, email address, and other details are showing up correctly. On your service or product pages, check if the offers are still available and if you need to add anything new.
Do you have pop-up pages that can capture leads? Is your website easy to navigate? Are the important links working? These questions will help you get started.
Run an SEO Audit
Part of the over-arching website audit is to look at your SEO strategy. This will require you to look at both the content and technical aspects.
There are many tools that you can use to conduct an SEO audit. Some of them are free. These tools often crawl the site and identify your pages. They will then list all the on-page issues that they can find and present the findings to you.
For example, they will look at the content and identify broken links. They can let you know whether you need to add meta descriptions and title tags. Most importantly, a good SEO tool can help you determine the keywords you’re employing and search engine ranking results.
You also need to ensure that your website is running at optimal speed. Nothing can hurt your SEO strategy more than the high bounce rate due to speed issues.
Run a Social Media Audit
Social media is a huge part of every marketing strategy. You will want to examine how your social pages are performing and identify room for improvement. Pay attention to your followers, page or profile visits, and engagement rates. Are you having more and more followers but finding that your posts are not gaining traction?
You can identify the best-performing posts and analyze what makes them work. It might be a particular phrase that resonates with your target audience or the accompanying creatives.
If you’re running Facebook or Instagram ads, look at the key metrics relevant to your goals. Do you have enough leads for a certain period of time? Are your traffic ads working? You might need to pay attention to your ad copy and creativity. You may also consider tweaking your audiences, ensuring that you target the right people.
Analyze Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Once you’re done with the audit, you will have a significant amount of data in your hand. Analyze them and identify what worked well, what you can do better, and how you can incorporate your new insights into your current marketing strategy.
It won’t hurt to keep in mind that there are things you can control and can’t control. Knowing what factors are beyond your control can help you adapt accordingly and meet those changes.
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Wrapping It Up
Employing a successful marketing strategy can only ever be possible with commitment and consistency. You need to make sure that your strategy is adaptable to changes by conducting a comprehensive audit. This will help you avoid wasting time, money, and effort on strategies that don’t work.
A good audit will help you refine your marketing tactics and lay the ground for a business that grows and thrives.