What is a Digital Marketing Audit?
A digital marketing audit is a comprehensive examination of your brand’s online presence. It provides a 360-degree view of your brand, enriched with data-driven insights that can be harnessed to refine your marketing strategy. Think of it as holding a Royal Flush in poker—it’s a game-changer, and you don’t have to rely on luck to achieve it; you can initiate one right now.
A well-executed audit allows you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, fine-tune campaigns, and uncover gaps and opportunities for your team to capitalize on. It’s like taking off a blindfold and aiming your darts at the target with precision.
How to Run a Comprehensive Online Marketing Audit
Now, let’s break down the essential steps to perform a digital marketing audit:
Review Your Website
Your website is the cornerstone of your digital presence. It’s the one online asset you have complete control over. Here are key steps for a website audit:
Evaluate your website design: Just as a physical store window should catch the eye of passers-by, your website design should captivate online visitors. Elements to consider include clear call-to-actions, a modern design, a clear structure, easy navigation, and website accessibility.
Check your website speed: Page load times matter for user experience and search engine rankings. Optimize by compressing files, reducing unused JavaScript, and implementing lazy loading.
Ensure mobile-friendliness: With a significant portion of traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s crucial that your website provides an excellent mobile experience. Use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Audit Your SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is pivotal for organic traffic. An SEO audit includes on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO:
On-Page SEO: Optimize content, headings, internal links, images with alt text, and more.
Off-Page SEO: Assess backlinks’ quantity and quality, your website’s Domain Authority, and compare with competitors.
Technical SEO: Ensure proper robot.txt settings, review URL structure, implement breadcrumbs, use structured data, secure your site with SSL, and check mobile-friendliness.
Perform a Content Marketing Audit
Content marketing involves creating valuable content to engage and attract customers. During a content marketing audit:
Identify top-performing content by analysing metrics like visitors, conversion rate, opt-in rate, traffic sources, returning visitors, and visit duration.
Align content with the customer journey stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Loyalty.
Remove, consolidate, or update pages as needed, and use insights to create a content calendar.
Run a Social Media Marketing Audit
A social media audit evaluates your social media profiles:
Ensure profile accuracy and brand consistency.
Analyse follower growth, engagement rates, and post types’ performance.
Explore new and emerging platforms and conduct competitive benchmark audits.
Evaluate Paid Advertising Effectiveness
Review your paid advertising campaigns:
Assess campaign budgets and goals regularly.
Analyse performance metrics like reach, cost, clicks, click-through rate, actions, cost per action, and conversion rate.
Review and optimize your ad creatives, headlines, target audience, keywords, display URLs, and call-to-action.
Audit Your Brand’s Online Reputation
Online reputation matters. Audit platforms with reviews about your business:
Respond to negative reviews authentically and aim to resolve issues.
Perform an Email Marketing Audit
Lastly, analyze your email marketing efforts:
Review email performance metrics like delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, audience size, subscription rate, list growth rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Ensure email designs are mobile-friendly, include unsubscribe buttons, have clear formatting, and use enticing subject lines.
In conclusion, a digital marketing audit isn’t just another strategy—it’s a powerful tool to optimize your online presence. By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights to refine your marketing efforts, track your progress, and make data-driven decisions that drive growth and success in the digital landscape.