What is a Digital Marketing Audit (and Should I Perform One)?
Regular digital marketing audits allow online businesses to determine which initiatives are working well and which need rethinking. In essence, they are the equivalent of performing a full diagnostic on a vehicle or an occasional medical check-up on a person.
Without it, you have no idea whether your efforts are being well invested and giving your business an acceptable return.
Regardless of business size or type, conducting regular digital marketing audits remains crucial. Contrary to popular belief, auditing is not simply about finding fault with your business and making life more difficult. It’s about paving the way for positive change and ensuring you get the best ROI on your marketing spend.
But which business areas, activities, and operations should you focus on during your audit? Can you comfortably handle it in-house, or would outsourcing to an experienced third party be better?
Areas to Analyse During a Digital Marketing Audit
While the extent to which you focus on them is up to you to decide, each of the following should be included in your digital marketing audit:
Your Objectives: Ask yourself if you have any clear and defined objectives for your business. What exactly does ‘success’ mean to you? When was the last time you established objectives based on measurable KPIs? Is there something specific you are aiming for, or are you just drifting by with no particular destination in mind?
Setting goals is the first step toward achieving greatness as a business, which is impossible without defined objectives to which your entire team is committed.
Your Current Digital Strategy: Likewise, it pays to periodically question the extent to which (if at all) you operate based on a defined marketing plan. Far too many businesses make things up as they go along with no specific digital strategy. With the odd exception, this is almost always a recipe for wasted time, money, and effort.
Periodic digital marketing audits allow you to review your digital strategy with a fine-tooth comb to determine what’s working and what needs rethought.
Your Branding Strategy: An effective branding strategy is nothing without consistency. Each asset you own needs to flawlessly and harmoniously reflect your brand—your website, paid ads, social media profiles, emails, blog posts, and so on. Even the slightest lack of consistency can lead to fragmentation that’s highly off-putting for new and existing customers.
While conducting your digital marketing audit, look for anything that could be considered a branding inconsistency.
Social Media: Paying particularly close attention to social media is essential, as millions of purchase decisions are made every hour of every day. Your social media accounts allow you to showcase your personality and build meaningful customer relationships beyond the hard sell.
Every effort should be made to establish and maintain good customer relationships on social media, using whichever platforms your primary target audience is most active on.
SEO: Last up, the constantly shifting nature of the SEO landscape calls for an equally dynamic search marketing strategy. Strategic SEO forms the core of an effective digital marketing campaign, allowing small and large businesses to steal the spotlight from their competitors. Key SEO factors that should be considered in the digital marketing audit include page speed, crawlability, mobile-friendliness, backlinks, internal links, high-authority outbound links, the number of indexed pages, meta descriptions, and more.
However, with Google now using more than 200 individual ranking signals to assign SERP positions, it cannot be easy to take the lead without the involvement of an experienced SEO agency.