If you have heard of digital marketing and know how effective it is, one key component of digital marketing is a digital marketing audit. A digital audit is a detailed dive of a company’s digital marketing strategy and implementation. Why consider a comprehensive digital marketing audit, you might ask? One of the key reasons is to get a strong idea about the strengths and weaknesses of your business’s current digital marketing strategy and tactics and identify possible recommendations for reaching target business goals.
Why Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit
A digital marketing audit gauges the overall results of your marketing efforts when it comes to digital marketing channels. It takes a very close look at different types of metrics and data to evaluate the performance of your digital marketing strategies. Conducting a digital marketing audit will allow you to understand what works and what doesn’t work that well when it comes to the different digital marketing strategies and techniques you used to reach, engage, and promote to your target audience.
A comprehensive audit consists of every aspect of your online digital marketing efforts from SEO, social media marketing to email marketing and more. A digital marketing audit will give you a clear picture on what you can do to improve and tweak your digital marketing efforts to achieve your business goals. A detailed digital marketing audit will allow you to adjust and improve your digital marketing to reach your target audience and achieve your KPIs. Additionally, it will help benchmark the digital activities of your business compared to your competitors.
With an in-depth digital marketing audit, you can tailor a digital marketing plan that meets your expectations in terms of budget and goals. It will give you a detailed idea on how you can elevate your audience engagement, get more leads and stand out from the competitors of your niche.
Benefits of Auditing Your Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing audit is an important step for any business that is focused on scaling up. It offers a birds eye view of the effectiveness and impact of your digital presence and will give you an idea about if or if not your efforts are fruitful or somewhat of a waste of time.
With a digital marketing audit in hand, you will be able to make data driven decisions to help enhance your digital marketing efforts. A well crafted digital marketing audit will evaluate your online presence and help you identify gaps and opportunities to become a leading name in your industry or area of expertise.
Conducting a digital marketing audit will help you to refine your digital strategy and mold it into something powerful that will take your sales to the next level.
Without a digital marketing audit, you won’t be able to accurately pinpoint where and how to refine your digital strategy and how to put your digital marketing budget to best use. Without a proper plan that is backed by data, even campaigns with a lot of potential will not yield the results they could. If you don’t pay attention to it, you will repeat your mistake. That’s what a digital audit does, it saves you time, money and effort and stops you from making costly mistakes.
If you want to make the best use of your digital marketing budget, data plays a key role in helping you do just that! With data, you will be able to figure out what can be improved in terms of your digital marketing strategy and also help you identify what makes digital marketing efforts have a positive impact and great ROI. TFM, we are digital marketing agency and will be your last calling for your business marketing campaign. We have accomplished more than 100 of successful digital marketing audits for our clients
How Often Do You Need to Perform a Marketing Audit?
A digital marketing audit is best scheduled as regularly as possible for you to gain the most accurate understanding if or if not your marketing efforts are yielding the best results possible. If you want a rough average frequency, you might want to take steps to perform a digital marketing audit every quarter or every new year.
Not only does a digital marketing audit help you to get a clear picture of the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts, it will also help you to develop a cohesive digital strategy across all your online channels.
A digital marketing audit will also help you keep up with the current digital marketing trends, mostly in social media marketing and SEO services. If you have recently changed your digital marketing KPIs or business goals, you can use a digital audit to get an idea if you are aligned with them. If you haven’t been keeping an eye on your conversion rates and search engine rankings, a marketing audit will help you gain an idea about the lay of the land of your digital presence.
How to do a Digital Marketing Audit?
If you have read so far, you might be wondering, how to perform a digital marketing audit that takes into account both the internal and external factors when it comes to the digital presence of your business. It will also help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your digital marketing strategy and techniques. Here are some steps to take when conducting a digital marketing audit.
Analyze Your Competition
While competition might be viewed as a challenge, analyzing your competitors will help you identify hidden opportunities you might have otherwise missed. Take time to conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis for your direct and indirect competitors.
Research the different strategies your competitors might be using and and get a clear idea about what steps they take towards enhancing the UX or user experience of their website, content, emails, social content and areas where you might be able to outdo them.
Try to gain an idea of the website traffic, search rankings and top content using tools like SEMrush. Doing these things will help you gain valuable insights and help you apply some of your learnings into your digital marketing efforts.
Take a Closer Look at Your Online Presence
If you want to know more about how to grow your online presence, then you must understand where you stand at present. If you are a marketer you might lose track of how customers perceive the brand. While you look at it in terms of getting more leads, engagement and sales, your target audience might be looking for a solution to solve some specific problem in their life. This makes it more important than ever to take a step back to view your brand’s presence in a more objective light if you plan to scale your online business.
Pay Attention to Metrics
One important thing some marketers tend to glance over sometimes happens to be metrics. What with busy content creation, scheduling and publishing, it is easy to get caught up in the creative aspect of marketing and not pay as much attention to the numbers or metrics. But this can stagnate your potential to grow a brand. Analyzing metrics allows you to gain a clear understanding about how you might want to spend your marketing budget and efforts.
There are plenty of tools available to do just this like Google Search Console, SEMrush and Google Analytics to take a closer look at data including organic (unpaid) and paid traffic, click through rates, keyword rankings and more. Analytics will allow you to gain deeper insights into what might be right and what might not for your brand. It will let you figure out what to put your effort into when creating a digital marketing strategy.
Have a Clear Understanding of Your Goals
Once you have a clear picture of your business environment both internal and external, you might want to consider setting goals. It is important to define what you wish to achieve in terms of goals and how you plan to crush those goals.
Try to understand short term and long term goals, with a clear understanding and specific and achievable KPIs to help keep you on the right track.
If you, for instance, want to grow your social accounts, then describe your goals as: aim to grow Facebook by 15% in three months, or increase web traffic 20%. It is important to review and alter these targets as you keep growing and reaching your goals.
What are some Channels to Keep in Mind in a Digital Marketing Audit?
Performing a digital marketing audit, you might need to analyze each channel in detail. Every digital channel is unique, and needs different tools and techniques to be analyzed. Here are some areas you might want to take a closer look at:
Website
A website is an important component of your digital marketing strategy. It plays an important role in the overall digital presence allowing you to have complete control of your digital real estate. A website needs to be attractive and engaging as well as have excellent user experience.
Some of the basic steps you can take is to ensure that your site is secure, loads fast and is free of errors. One other key aspect is to look into your website analytics such as traffic, conversion rates and more. These metrics will help you understand more about the performance of your website.
You also need to closely review your site’s code and check your hosting platform and the settings of your website. You might want to ensure that the backend of your website is running as it should.
You might want to take steps to keep your website simple and ensure that your website attracts the right target audience. Some of the key things to look out for in terms of your website and its content include, powerful Call – to – Actions (CTA), Trending Visuals, meaningful messaging, solid stature and accessibility to name some.
Website speed is also a key aspect that has a direct impact on user experience and Google rankings. A digital marketing audit will let you test the loading time of your web pages which will elevate the user experience of your website.
Page load times are not only important in terms of user experience but also have a direct impact on Google SERP rankings. When conducting a digital marketing audit, you might want to test the loading time of the most important pages to ensure that they meet and possibly exceed the expected standards.
You might want to take a closer look at the top pages and try to find ways to cut down on every bit of a second that it takes. Some most common mistakes include that your content being too wide for the screen, an unconfigured viewport and illegible text to name some of these issues.
Social Media
An effective social media marketing is based on clear goals that are aimed at growing your brand within a certain time period. You might want to analyze your web traffic, visitor type, engagement, brand awareness and leads.
It is important to identify if your socials are driving traffic to your website, what type of audience are you attracting to your social profiles. You can focus on improving your profile in terms of cover photos, profile bios and links.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising includes PPC or pay-per-click campaigns such as Meta Ads (Facebook and instagram) and Google ads. To check your campaigns try to get an idea about impressions, cost, clicks, CTP (click through rate) and CPC (cost per click).
Email Marketing
Email has been around for quite some time, and email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy with good ROI. A digital marketing audit can cover email marketing which dives into email campaigns, such as email designs, content and metrics.
These are some of the key reasons you might want to conduct a digital marketing audit for your online channels. Digital marketing is evolving at a breakneck speed and consistent and frequent marketing audits will help your business stay on top of things.
