Simply put, a digital marketing audit inspects all the strategies, practices, and outcomes of what a business has been doing to set up and boost its online presence. It is crucial to conduct a digital marketing audit every so often as it highlights the loopholes in a strategy since you can reasonably expect there to be a few.
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you probably dread an audit. However, without a digital marketing audit, businesses won’t be able to address the essential questions in refining a strategy and ensuring that they are investing their time, money, and efforts in the right direction. So, here’s a guide on how to run a digital marketing audit.
How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit in 6 Steps
Whether you’re in a B2B or B2C, the idea of having no restrictions on the marketing efforts made by your brand can be scary. Moreover, exposure to your company’s warts isn’t the best thing. Hence, like most business owners, you’re tempted to keep going without looking back at how things currently stand.
Unfortunately, doing this can cause a drastic setback to your company, and you can lose all the valuable resources you once invested in your company forever. This is precisely why it’s crucial to conduct a digital marketing audit eventually. It lets you take a break and evaluate your progress or lack thereof.
A digital marketing audit allows you to identify your brand’s strengths, growth opportunities, weaknesses, and challenges. You can correct these measures, ultimately increasing the chances of success, minimizing the chances of failure, and bringing your business back on track.
So, if the thought of “how to audit my company’s digital marketing?” has struck your mind after reading this, here are 6 steps to tell you how to do it.
1. Determine Your Key Metrics and Goals
The first step is to determine the key metrics you want to measure. For instance, you can start by asking questions such as:
- Which one metric instantly depicts the health/sickness of your business?
- What are your goals per quarter, per year, or per channel?
- What are your top 3 metrics for each of your marketing channels?
Once you’ve identified your key metrics and objectives, it’s time to gather data.
2. Gather Performance Data
This step requires gathering every bit of data from all your marketing channels. Here are the different mediums you can get your stats:
● Website performance
This gives you insights into page load times, bounce rates, opt-in rates, dwell time, and click-through rates. You must also rank your website’s user experience (UX) and monitor how many leads convert into buying customers.
● Social media performance
This will give you insights into your social media shares, likes, and click-through rates.
● Email performance
This will give you insights into your click-through rates, emails, unsubscribe rates, and record open rates.
Once you’ve gathered performance data, it is time to compare your outcomes with your key metrics and objectives and weigh your company against industry-wide standards. Do you need to do better, or are you satisfied with your progress? Whatever the case, pay attention to the data, as numbers do not lie.
3. Evaluate Your Content Marketing Strategy’s Effectiveness
Regardless of the growth of inbound marketing, only 41% of B2B companies have a properly documented content marketing strategy. With a digital marketing audit, you can revisit your strategy and check the key elements such as:
- Content types
- Keywords
- SEO
- Content buyer journey match
- Links
- Social media
- Post-purchase
- Distribution
- Prospect-to-lead-to-customer journey
You can obtain your desired results only when your content is powerful enough and synchronized with your goals. You will perform well if your content is highly synchronized with your goals and vice versa.
4. Assess the Competitive Environment
As your business exists in a specific context, it’s vital to weigh your competitive environment. Rivals don’t just consist of companies targeting the same marketing. Instead, it includes the surrounding conditions that can either help or hamper your brand. These include:
- Competitor tools
- Competitor tactics
- Competitor gaps
- Legal shifts
- Cultural considerations
Even though you do not have any control over these external factors, you can try using them to your advantage.
5. Inspect Your Brand Positioning and Messaging
Most marketers focus on the benefits and core features of their product offerings instead of positioning and messaging.
The positioning creates a positive image of your brand in the customers’ minds, so they choose you over your rivals while messaging helps communicate value to potential customers.
Hence, even if you offer stellar products but fail, it may be due to poor positioning and messaging.
6. Establish Guidelines and Weigh Your Team Workflows
Finally, a digital marketing audit helps you assess how efficiently you and your teamwork are doing in terms of time and cost. The more money and time you save by assessing your workflows, the more amount of money can be invested later in additional digital strategies.
Still, it’s crucial to establish team guidelines that fall in line with your marketing objectives and streamline your processes to identify potential areas.
Wrapping Up
Suffice to say, when you run a comprehensive digital marketing audit, it helps to identify and correct any potential obstructions and lays the foundation for more wide-ranging digital marketing activities.
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