A digital marketing audit can be a useful tool for businesses that want to grow. If your business has trouble marketing to the right customers, you should evaluate your marketing plan and understand the digital marketing audit definition.
For a business, a digital marketing audit can provide insight into what works and what doesn’t. Its purpose is to help the owner or marketer come up with a better plan for the future. That way, the business can increase sales and revenue.
A successful digital marketing audit is crucial to growing your company.
You’ll want to start by looking at your current digital marketing strategy and marketing goals. Then, you will need to conduct a micro and macro environment audit. That way, you can understand internal and external factors and how they will affect your new digital marketing strategy.
After you analyze your existing strategy, you can make changes for the future. That way, your company can grow.
Before you conduct a digital marketing audit, you should consider how you can make it a success and more useful for you and your team. Ideally, you would perform a full-scale audit to check out every aspect of your marketing.
You can also use a systematic examination process to make sure you don’t miss anything. A systems audit can also come in handy. That way, you’ll know if how you’re working on marketing tasks is good.
Once you have one successful audit, you can use that process for regular marketing audits. Then, you will be able to stay on top of growing your company.
Before you conduct a marketing strategy audit, you should know what it involves. Having an in-depth understanding of how a marketing audit works means you can make it more successful.
You can use that information to craft a new marketing plan that meets your company goals and objectives. So consider the following steps to help improve your marketing.
First, you need to figure out what your digital marketing audit will involve. Maybe you want to improve your marketing communication. Or perhaps you want to focus on things such as:
Knowing what you’ll audit can help narrow your focus. You can log those details in your marketing control system for easy access. That way, everyone on your team will know what is happening with the audit.
Making these decisions now can help you craft a marketing strategy later. And you won’t have to waste time analyzing other aspects of your company.
You can perform a self-audit on your business. However, outsourcing the task can save you a lot of time and minimize any bias you may have. An outsider audit won’t have the same risks of making your marketing systems look better than they are.
Instead, a third party can conduct a good marketing productivity audit. They can look at internal and external factors that may be affecting you and your company.
Plus, you’ll have time to focus on other areas of your organization. When the third party finishes the audit, you can review the results and go from there.
Next, you need to consider your marketing goals. Then, you will know what to look for during and after the audit, such as marketing performance.
You’ll be able to tell if your primary marketing activities are producing the results you want. If not, you can address those marketing strategies and make a change.
And by knowing your marketing budget, you can make sure any changes you make will be affordable. That way, your company will remain profitable.
Competitive analysis can be a vital part of digital marketing audits. Not only will you look at your current marketing environment, but you can compare it to that of your competition. Then, you’ll be able to see if other companies are more successful at content amplification.
If so, you can take inspiration from those marketing systems. You can also conduct a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Using those elements can help you come up with a strategy that will help your company grow and surpass the competition. Then, you can maintain your success.
You should also consider your ideal customer as part of an effective digital marketing audit. Consider where your target audience spends their time. While a lot of people spend time online, you may find offline marketing is just as useful.
Maybe you can have more industry influence with traditional marketing methods. Knowing this can help you decide where to place your biggest marketing investment.
And you’ll be able to build a more positive customer perception. If you find people don’t like your company, you can change something to improve your reputation. That can then help you get more sales.
Next, you should list out everything your business sells. Think about all of your products and services and how your marketing team currently promotes them.
Maybe you have been spending more of your digital marketing efforts on one offer. But that strategy hasn’t led to the sales that you desire. Consider how this relates to your marketing mix, which includes price, product, promotion, and place.
You can use that information to swap out marketing strategies. However, you should also understand the various marketing functions outside of sales. That way, you can get sales later on.
Another essential part of auditing your marketing plans is to track marketing assets. This can include things like marketing collateral and brand materials.
You should identify areas where you can find these things and how they’re affecting your marketing results. Then, you can compare a few marketing plans to determine how they might work for you.
Use the analytics tools on your website and social media to get some numbers. Then, add them all to a spreadsheet to compare the data.
After you track that data, you should use it to review your marketing and business goals. Figure out if the marketing strategy you’re using is working well.
You should be able to figure out how well your marketing strategy is helping you reach your objectives. If you’re on track, you’ll have peace of mind that you’re doing what works best. You can keep the same strategy for the time being.
On the other hand, you’ll know you need to change something. Then, you can do some trial and error to figure out what you need to change.
One of the most important aspects of your digital marketing audit should be a social media audit. This will help you understand how well your company is performing on social media, and how to improve your social media performance.
You can use this information to improve your results. Additionally, it’ll show you where you need to focus more attention. A social media audit should include things like an overview of your social media accounts, an evaluation of your content, and a review of your engagement metrics.
Your social media marketing audit should also look at your audience insights to get a better idea of who’s following you. Additionally, consider doing competitor research. That’ll help you see how well they’re performing compared to you.
In order to have a successful digital marketing audit, you should also run a comprehensive SEO audit. This will help you understand how well your website is performing in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The SEO audit will make it easier to improve your on-page SEO to improve your overall positioning on search engines.
You’ll be able to see what keywords your site is ranking for and how much traffic those keywords are driving. Additionally, you’ll find out how your website is performing on desktop and mobile devices.
You should also look into your site’s backlink profile to see who’s linking to you. Additionally, use a tool like MozBar to check the Domain Authority and Page Authority of your pages.
Then, you can compare that data against your competitors. That’ll help you understand how well you’re doing and where you need to make improvements.
You can’t just focus on the numbers when you’re conducting a digital marketing audit. You also need to look at your content. This is one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy.
A content marketing audit will help you understand how well your current content is performing. It’ll also show you where you need to improve your content marketing strategy.
The audit should include an evaluation of your current content, as well as a review of your target audience engagement metrics. You should also look at your content distribution channels to see where you’re promoting your content.
Then, you can use that data to improve your results. Additionally, the audit will help you identify areas where you need to focus more attention.
You should also consider doing a competitor analysis to see how well they’re performing compared to you. That’ll help you understand where you need to make improvements.
Conducting a digital marketing audit is an important way to ensure that your marketing strategy is on track and helps you reach your business goals.
The final part of your digital marketing audit should be a comprehensive website audit. This will help you understand how well your website is performing and identify areas where you need to make improvements.
The website audit should include an evaluation of your website’s design, content, and SEO. You should also look at your website’s traffic and engagement metrics.
Then, you can use that data to improve your results. Additionally, the audit will help you identify areas where you need to focus more attention.
You should also consider doing a competitor analysis to see how well they’re performing compared to you. That’ll help you understand where you need to make improvements.
Conducting a digital marketing audit is an important way to ensure that your website is on track and helps you reach your business goals.
Use the tracking and analysis to identify areas of your marketing that are doing well. Consider if you have successful existing content. Make sure it follows brand guidelines, and if so, save that content to use again later.
Great marketing plans don’t need to involve creating new content from scratch. If one of your posts from a few months ago did well, you can use it again. Perhaps you swap out the photo but use the same text or caption.
Or you use the same photo but with a different caption so that it seems fresh but doesn’t require extra work. Being able to reuse content can save you a lot of time and frustration, plus you may get similar results on the new post
As part of your audit, you should include a macro environment audit. This will cover your external environment in addition to covering internal factors. Like a task audit, macro-environment audits can include things like economic factors or platform algorithms.
Unfortunately, you can’t control those things, but they still affect your marketing. Because of that, you should know what those factors are and how they affect your business.
That way, you can adapt to meet those changing factors. And you’ll be able to stay ahead of changes so that your marketing stays consistent.
After you finish the audit process, you need to create a marketing strategy to use going forward. Take a look at your digital marketing audit report to view the results. Go through all of the data that you find or that the auditor you hire finds.
Use that information to decide what marketing methods are best for you. Maybe you find that certain social media channels get better results than others.
Or you find that search engine optimization (SEO) helps you get a lot of traffic. Either way, you want to focus your efforts on the best strategies for your company.
Now that you have your new marketing plan, start to implement the easier changes. At this point, you might want to focus on cost-effectiveness. So perhaps you start with smaller marketing campaigns.
Or maybe you fix issues causing site penalties. That way, your site can start to show up in more search results. When you start small, you can slowly get bigger, and you may see results a little sooner.
Starting small is easy for a lot of businesses. You won’t have to risk time and money on new strategies that might not work much better than your existing methods.
If you have the time and money after your digital marketing audit, you might decide to go straight into making bigger changes. Perhaps you decide to search for brand mentions that don’t link back to you, and you contact the content owners to ask for a link.
Or maybe you pitch your brand to get press coverage. You might also choose to work on your organic rankings. Consider all the factors involved in your audit to decide which is most worth your time now. Then, you can add other things later.
If you have a large team, you may be able to start making a lot of changes at once. But you don’t want to overwhelm yourself or your employees.
Doing one digital marketing audit can be good, but you should think about when you’ll do digital marketing audits in the future. As your business marketing environment changes, so should your strategy.
And the best way to do that is to conduct a new audit. Then, you can make sure your sales force is getting the best leads so that they can convert those leads into paying customers.
You should work audits into your schedule regularly. However, you might also want to conduct an audit if you aren’t getting any results from your current strategies.
After and between audits, you should test out different marketing methods. Consider what’s not working for your business to decide what to try. Then, you can focus on things that will help you achieve your marketing objectives.
For example, maybe you decide to test out a new social network. Or perhaps you change the time or frequency of sending emails to your subscribers.
Whatever it is, you need to have a plan so that you can track the results to use in your next audit. Then, you can repeat the process of auditing and making changes.
*Closure
If you want to join thousands of business owners who use successful marketing methods, you need to conduct a digital marketing audit. Then, you can craft a marketing plan that will work for your company now.
This way, you won’t have to worry about wasting time or money on strategies that won’t work well for your organization.
