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A strong internet presence is important to your business’ health, wealth, and durability. In today’s digital world, businesses that do not have a planned and designed online presence may as well not exist at all – and there is a good possibility they will not work for the foreseeable future. As it is said, merely having an online presence is insufficient if it is not structured to attract your target audience and search engines.
But this raises an important question – How can you evaluate which internet marketing efforts are successful and which are not? Guesswork won’t be much effective as it is unlikely to provide you with an accurate picture of the health of your marketing effort. However, a complete digital marketing audit will provide you with one.
Therefore, this blog has been written to demonstrate how to conduct a digital marketing audit. Let us understand how to conduct one in the following sequence –
- What is a Digital Marketing Audit?
- Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Audit?
- How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit?
What is Digital Marketing Audit?
A digital marketing audit is a business report (often a presentation) that summarizes all of an organization’s marketing operations and efforts on digital marketing channels. It is primarily concerned with execution and results rather than strategy or plans. A digital marketing audit gathers critical data to assist in defining or evaluating a digital marketing strategy. It can help uncover new channel prospects or provide insight into rival activity and success.
You may be wondering, “What is the point of evaluating my own business if I am already aware of our digital marketing strategy?” While you may be aware of what your firm produces, chances are you are unaware of what you are, or are not, receiving in return. By evaluating the components of your digital marketing efforts separately, you can ascertain the campaign’s strengths and flaws. Having this concrete data at your fingertips is a crucial piece of the puzzle you will need to simplify your operations, increase conversions, and create more intelligent objectives.
When we talk about ‘smarter objectives,’ we don’t simply mean clever ones; we also imply goals that are –
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound
Without initially recognizing these objectives, it is impossible to assess whether or not your digital marketing audit was effective.
Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Audit?
Without a digital marketing audit, you are effectively blind. Setting attainable and realistic KPIs requires a thorough grasp of your digital channel’s success data. This is true for all types of activity, including owned, paid, and earned. Once these performance indicators have been created, they may be compared historically and against competitors to discover trends. Knowing this information enables you to make data-driven decisions about your future steps.
A digital marketing audit is frequently performed as a prelude to ‘getting things done.’ Whether you are looking to construct a new website, launch a new marketing channel, or enhance what you are already publishing, a digital audit can help you establish a business case based on data insights.
A digital marketing audit serves three purposes for a digital agency and its client –
- It thoroughly addresses the critical question on the performance of digital marketing strategy
- Locates optimization possibilities within the data and prioritizes them according to their potential and effort.
- Establishes and agrees on a modular work plan to boost performance
A client would want to perform a digital marketing audit for various reasons, including –
- Timing, whether it is the beginning of the fiscal year or quarter, fresh budgets, pre-and post-campaign
- Structural changes that include new management, new personnel, and reorganization of teams/divisions
- Performance that provides for changes in critical performance indicators
- Relationships that evaluates an agency, or beginning work with a new agency
How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit?
A detective mindset is an optimal mindset for performing a digital marketing audit. The audit must be comprehensive and investigative. You will continuously gather data, proof, and examples illustrating the organization’s digital footprint as part of the audit.
The audit should include –
- All digital marketing channels on which the business has a presence
- Content performance
- Paid performance
- Owned assets performance
- Competition performance
- Channel-specific trends
- Opportunities for optimization
When performing a digital marketing audit, keep the following points in mind –
- Time: Conducting an audit will take many hours. The majority of agencies allow two weeks for turnaround. If you choose to divide the job among many individuals (for example, by channel), you all must agree on the approach you will use and the vocabulary and emphasis.
- Scope: You will need to agree with your customer on the content of the audit. A typical marketing audit duration is 3 months. You may choose to base your audit dates on the calendar or fiscal year. This approach establishes a future trigger for doing the audit again.
- Account Access: To conduct a thorough audit of all digital channels, you will need to provide logins or access to owned profiles and accounts. This might be challenging to organize (particularly early in the partnership or if the client does not have complete access).
- Tools: This article will discuss the finest tools for conducting an audit of each digital marketing channel. They are not required, but they will save you several hours of manual effort, significantly decrease the possibility of errors, and assist in automating the presentation of data and insights.
Following are the steps for conducting digital marketing audits –
#1 Establish Your Objectives And Key Performance Metrics
To begin, select the metrics on which you wish to focus your efforts. Google Analytics alone is capable of tracking over 150+ metrics. As a result, it is critical to focus on the metrics you wish to track. Additionally, you may be employing a variety of different analytics tools. If you attempt to quantify everything, you will become confused. To avoid drowning in data, reduce your measurements to a manageable number.
Consider this –
- If I had to choose one measure to gauge the health of my firm, which one would I choose?
- Which one statistic identifies my business’s health or disease quickly?
- Which three KPIs are the most important for each of my marketing channels?
- What are my objectives for the quarter, the year, or the channel?
After noting your objectives and measurements, the next step comes.
#2 Collect Performance Statistics
You must gather data across all of your channels, but you might wonder where the numbers come from. You get the data from –
- Performance of Website: Keep track of your bounce rates, dwell periods, page load times, opt-in and click-through rates, and leads generated. Additionally, rate the user experience on your site.
- Performance of Email Campaigns: Keep track of open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates for emails. Are your emails segmented, or are they one-size-fits-all?
- Performance On Social Media: Collect likes, shares, and click-through rates for social media. Are you utilizing paid social to its full potential? Are you dividing your attention by being present everywhere or by being present only where your audience is?
Now is the time to compare your results to your goals and key performance metrics. How are you getting along? Assess your performance in comparison to industry norms. Are you satisfied with your success, or do you believe you need to tighten your marketing belt? In any event, pay attention to the message sent by your statistics since numbers do not lie.
#3 Determine The Effectiveness Of Your Content Marketing Campaign
According to research, just 41% of B2B companies have a defined content marketing plan. You must examine your plan and double-check the following –
- Keywords – Are you focusing on the correct ones?
- Type of Content– Which content genres are most effective for brand recognition, lead generation, and link building?
- Buyer Journey Content Alignment – Do you produce content for distinct stages of the customer experience?
- Distribution – How effective are your content distribution channels?
- SEO – Make a list of your bounce rates, dwell time, page load times, opt-in, and click-through rates. How many leads become purchasing customers. Are your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies up to date? Are there any broken, spammy, or irrelevant links?
- Prospect-to-lead-to-customer Conversion – How can you decrease the drop-off rate when a prospect becomes a lead and a lead becomes a customer?
- Post-Purchase – How can you improve your funnel so that consumers buy more and spend more time with your brand, i.e., how can you enhance Lifetime Customer Value?
- Social Media – Are you receiving value from social media, free or paid?
With regards to your content, the critical issue is – Is it connected with your objectives?
#4 Analyze The Competitive Environment
Because your firm operates inside a particular setting, you must also consider your competitive environment. Not only do competitors comprise businesses targeting the same market as you are, but they also include external factors that may harm or benefit your brand.
Analyzing includes the following –
- Competitor Tactics – What strategies are effective for them? Are you able to replicate and modify them to your advantage?
- Gaps in the competitive landscape – Is there space your rivals are not filling that you can exploit?
- Tools Used By Rivals – What tools do your competitors use?
- Cultural Factors – Are there any good or bad cultural trends that you can utilize or counteract?
- Legal shifts – Has a change in the law harmed your business? How can you best navigate it?
You do not have complete control over these outside influences. However, you can manage or maximize them.
#5 Conduct A Review Of Your Messaging And Positioning
Finally, the majority of marketers concentrate on the characteristics and benefits of their products.
They do not devote sufficient attention to message and placement. Messaging is how you convey value to your prospects. Positioning is the process of building a favorable image of your brand in customers’ minds for them to pick you over your competitors.
Occasionally, you might have excellent items but fail to sell them due to lousy messages and placement. You must check for two things when it comes to messaging –
- Customer-Focus
Is the direction of your communication inside or outward? Messaging should convey the value of your product to your customers. And it must be tailored to their specific requirements to strike a chord with them.
- Consistency
Is your messaging consistent across platforms? Prospects and consumers that are more familiar with your brand are more inclined to purchase. According to LucidPress, inconsistent branding creates discord and uncertainty in the way people view your company.
Conclusion
Conducting a digital marketing audit sounds like a lot of effort, and it is. However, it is worthwhile. It just boils down to three considerations –
- Identifying and closing strategy gaps.
- Discarding what is ineffective and embracing what is effective.
- Creating new ideas and capitalizing on your talents.
Optimize for expansion and increase your return on investment with a timely marketing audit.
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