You may be wondering what your digital marketing audit should include. We’ve talked about the importance of metrics and understanding your client base when building your digital marketing strategy. Let’s say you took our word for it. You built those personas. You put thought and intention into your digital marketing strategy. You were diligent in posting across an array of online platforms and reaching prospective and existing clients…
Now what!?
Now it’s time for a marketing audit.
What is a Digital Marketing Audit?
A digital marketing audit is a thorough investigation of all your online marketing efforts. It’s an in-depth dive into the results of your strategies. Having a good lens over the data your content produces allows you to define and evaluate your future strategies, highlight waxing or waning interest in the different platforms you use, and it can even highlight new opportunities.
After all, what good is all the effort and initiative placed into your strategies if you don’t look at the results with a proper audit? It’s basically like planning and hosting a huge party but never turning on the lights to see if your guests are enjoying themselves.
You get it, and you’re ready to turn on the lights. Let’s look at what data you should include in your audit and see how a data-driven approach to digital marketing will benefit you now and in the future.
When should you perform a Digital Marketing Audit?
It’s important to perform a digital marketing audit when you assess strategies and identify opportunities for growth, improvement, and change. We recommend performing a digital marketing audit at the beginning of each year as you go into strategy marketing planning for the next year.
You should also request a full digital marketing audit anytime you are making a significant change to your strategy and/or hiring on a new consultant. Having strong data from an audit can help you assess whether new strategies are working and if your newest hire is helping you achieve the results you want.
What channels should you look at when performing a digital marketing audit?
A digital marketing audit can be as comprehensive or high-level as you want it to be, but we believe it’s important that your digital marketing audit at a minimum include an audit of the following:
- Content Marketing & Website
- Social Media Accounts
- Email Marketing Campaigns
We break each of these down in greater detail below.
How to Perform a Social Media Audit
One of the primary places most consultants start when performing a digital marketing audit is on social. Social media is one of the most popular ways to build an audience due to its low-cost investment.
To properly perform a social media audit, you’ll want set a timeframe to review data – using the range of one of your recent campaigns is an excellent parameter that will allow you to look at the following elements as they exclusively relate to your strategy. Here are a few of the data points we like to look at:
- Size of your audience, aka follower count / audience size
- Total content views, aka impressions
- How many times your audience followed your post to your website or intended landing page, aka clicks
- The collective amount of audience reactions—your likes, shares, comments, etc. across all platforms, aka interactions / engagements
- Total interactions with your content in relation to the folks who saw your content, aka engagement rate
Reviewing this data regularly can help you assess what content your audience is most likely to engage with and how to get your audience’s attention when marketing your services.
Knowing how to read your social media audit will help you not only understand how to attract the right types of prospective clients, but also how to assess whether your content and strategy is working. It’s important to note that you’re not the only organization with access to social media – your competitors are also vying for your audience’s attention and knowing how to perform an audit will help you understand how to keep your target audience’s attention longer.
In addition to performing a social media audit of your own socials, you should also assess the socials of your competitors. A strong and robust digital marketing audit of your competitors will tell you how they’re doing and how they’re stacking up in success compared to your initiatives.
This data dive can seem overwhelming, but there are loads of analytics tools on the market, and your favorite digital marketing gurus are willing and able to perform complex and comprehensive audits.
An audit of your email marketing initiatives, like social media, can cover quite a bit of ground. An email marketing audit can encompass several areas, but there are a few key metrics that will give you a look at performance.
- How many recipients opened your email, aka open rate
- How many recipients did not receive your email at all, aka bounce rate
- What percent of recipients clicked the links in your email to end up on your desired landing page, aka click through rate (CTR)
- Percentage of recipients who removed their email from your list of future emails, aka unsubscribe rate
Analyzing all of this data may feel a bit overwhelming, but once you have a better grasp of the data, you’ll start to be able to see a story in it. For example, a low open rate may indicate that your subject lines need work and a low click-through-rate may indicate that your email buttons or call to actions are unclear or confusing. Analyzing this data together en masse can tell you a lot about not only your email marketing strategies, but also how well you’re nurturing your audience through the stages of the buyer’s journey.
Once you get a look at these numbers, you’ll never do another email campaign the same again. The insight provided by a good email audit will make you reexamine everything from how you segment email lists, how many graphics you include in your emails, whether you use emojis in your subject lines, and even the structure of your paragraphs (pro tip: readers need white space).
It’s very important to remember that your email campaign tool might be causing you more grief than good. A rich understanding of how your existing email campaigns are performing might lead you to consider using a new email platform to solve technical limitations that could be holding you back from reaching your recipients.
Your favorite digital marketing gurus have strong opinions on email service providers. Let us know if you want the insider scoop on our faves.
Content Marketing & Website
Last, but most definitely not least, is your website and content. Remember: they call it a homepage for a reason – this is your home, where people get their first impression of you, and the strength (or weakness) of your website and the content within it can be the difference in popping up on search engines or being buried by competitors who have a better grasp of their website’s strengths and deficiencies.
Remember, set a timeline parameter and take a look at the following:
- How does your audience find you? Specifically, what channels are they using to find you? Examples include email, social, organic searches, referrals
- Which pages have the highest amount of traffic (views, unique visitors, etc.)
- When visitors arrive in your website, where do they spend the bulk of their time?
- Which pages perform the worst by producing the highest bounce rate?
- Are viewers returning and if so, to which pages?
- Is your content optimized for search engines and accessible?
- Do you have an internal linking strategy to link content to related content?
- Do you have goals setup in Google Analytics to tell you when you receive sign-ups to your email list and when your audience books a consultation or downloads a white paper?
Once you have these answers, you’ll need to form a hypothesis about reasons for success or areas of improvement. For instance, if you just launched a brand-new industry page only to find nobody is visiting it, then you may need to re-evaluate your strategy. Don’t fall victim to “The Field of Dreams” dilemma. Remember – just because you built it, doesn’t mean they will come. Your audience discovers your content because you make it easy to find – you optimize it for search engines, share is on social media, promote it via email, and repurpose it everywhere.
Remember, the answer isn’t necessarily MORE traffic, but more INTENTIONAL traffic. It’s easy to fixate on raising numbers, but those numbers represent people, and we want those people to be the right people and for them to find engaging, useful, and valuable information that helps move them through the buyer’s journey. Your ideal audience comes to your website because they have a problem and your website and content’s job is to help them not only understand there is a solution, but that the best solution is your service.
This is a lot to break down, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re pressed for time and need to delegate the data capture, we’re here to help. We can help you with a comprehensive digital marketing audit to help assess where your marketing is and how to get you to your goals.
