There are several different types of marketing audits. Each focuses on specific elements of the marketing process to solve a unique problem. The following three examples show how you can use a marketing audit to improve your business.
The most common type of marketing audit is the marketing strategy audit. This audit examines the current marketing strategy and whether it meets its objectives. Marketing strategy audits are typically used to identify opportunities for improvement.
A typical example of a marketing strategy audit is an annual analysis performed in the marketing department. These audits are best for keeping a company’s marketing plan effective and on track.
Internal environment marketing audits examine every factor in a company’s marketing department. The organization, function and how the system works are thoroughly reviewed. It goes back to stepping back from strategy to see a broader view of the department. These audits are intended to identify problems and opportunities for growth by restructuring or replacing ineffective staff and software.
For example, if a company has recently undergone a merger or acquisition, a marketing audit of the internal environment may be useful. This audit will help leadership assess the staff, systems, and functions of the former marketing front of the marketing department. These audits are the best for identifying potential problems within the company itself.
How is a digital marketing audit done?
A digital marketing audit is a business document (usually a presentation) that outlines all marketing activities and efforts an organization undertakes across digital marketing channels. It mainly details execution and results rather than describing strategy or plans. A digital marketing audit contains key information to help define or evaluate a digital marketing strategy. You can identify opportunities such as new channels or reveal information about the activities and performance of the competition.
Without a digital marketing audit, you are basically in the dark. It’s hard to set achievable and realistic KPIs without having a good understanding of your performance metrics across each digital channel. This is relevant in all owned, paid and earned activity. Once you’ve established these performance metrics, you can compare them historically and competitively to identify trends. Knowing this information will allow you to take a data-driven approach to what you do next.
A digital marketing audit is usually the one before “getting things done”. Whether you want to build a new website, activate a new marketing channel, or optimize what you’re posting – a digital audit can describe the business case supported with Data Insight.
“In the absence of an audit, companies typically don’t ask themselves these pointed questions that are crucial to refining a strategy and ensuring their efforts and dollars are being spent in the right direction.”
– Michael Georgiou, Imaginavation
For a digital agency, the purpose of a digital marketing audit is to accomplish three things with your client:
- Find optimization opportunities in data and rank them based on potential and effort
How to do a digital marketing audit?
Marketers need to dive deep into website performance data and have a solid understanding of how this performance is measuring against their KPIs. There are several free tools available to help you do this efficiently:
- Google Analytics – to gain key insights into how your website receives traffic, how customers engage with your content, and to measure ROI.
If you need alternative SEO tools for your website audit, you can find the best ones in the digital agency network.
By improving the technical underpinnings of your site the right way, you have a much better chance of being found, crawled, indexed, and ranked by a search engine. The technical SEO audit of your website should focus primarily on the crawlability and unproductiveness of your web pages.
Crawling the web is a costly process for Google, so it’s important to make your website as easy and efficient to crawl as possible. This will help your content get collected regularly and help discover new content quickly.
Maintaining control over which pages on your site can be indexed is also key. It’s important to make sure that all the pages you want users to be able to access are indexable, but you also need to make sure that you only index content that is valuable to users and won’t confuse search engines when choosing which pages to rank for.
Then there is also the question of the quality of user experience your website provides. Google, and are known ranking factors. Therefore, taking steps to improve these aspects of the user experience will be rewarded with a higher ranking.
How to do an audit on social networks?
A social media audit gives you a comprehensive view of how social media is working (or not) working for your business. An audit is the process of reviewing certain metrics to assess your current social media strategy. These metrics include information on demographics, engagement, locations, campaign performance, and more.
A social media audit can include impressions, comments, likes, shares, and other interactions, as well as which posts are getting the most engagement and which audience is making the most engagement. This data provides you with information you can use to make social media more effective for your business.
As you begin your social media audit, remember that you don’t have to start from scratch. Use templates or examples to get started. Be prepared to collect a lot of information and do some in-depth analysis. Below we will cover the steps involved in a social media audit.
List all the social media profiles your business currently has, even the ones you’ve never posted or haven’t been active recently. For each platform, record your username or handle URL, and the number of followers or subscribers, engagement metrics, or any other KPIs that may be relevant to each channel.
Social media platforms usually have built-in analytics features that will provide a lot of useful information. For each platform, record engagement metrics, demographics, top posts, plus your impressions and reach. This data can show what the strengths and weaknesses of each platform are for your business.
What is a digital marketing audit?
When you’re looking for the right way to jumpstart your business into digital marketing, or feel like your digital marketing strategy needs a breath of fresh air, it’s probably time for a digital marketing audit. When executed correctly, a digital marketing audit can provide you with the answers to what you could be doing to improve your ongoing strategy.
But what is a digital marketing audit? A digital marketing audit is simply a thorough investigation of all of your digital marketing efforts. The performance of all your practices, strategies, ads and posts is evaluated, giving you an understanding of where digital gaps and gaps exist.
Once you decide it’s time to audit your digital marketing efforts, you need to make sure you have a firm idea of where you want to go. What are your goals for your website? Who do you want to reach with your ads, social networks or blog posts? Who is your audience and how do you want them to respond to your digital marketing?
When was the last time you worked on search engine optimization? In fact, how long have you had your website? Does it act like you want it to? Is it optimized for mobile devices? These are just some of the questions that the audit will seek to answer. Once you have concrete and direct answers to all these questions, you can start with evaluations.
No matter what digital marketing tactics your company uses to reach your audience, there is a correct way to audit them and evaluate their results.
How is a marketing audit carried out?
As simple as it may seem, a digital marketing audit is a constant and complete work process that will allow you to see the power and effectiveness of your business model.
The efficient development of a digital marketing audit will help you demonstrate that the activity and its projections are truly sustainable.
Before trying to address concerns or specific areas for improvement in marketing control, it is best to start by narrowing down the marketing strategy.
Focusing on improvements to be implemented or making them practical will be worthless if your overall marketing plan is off-target or moving your organization in the wrong direction.
“To set yourself up for success, you have to call it.” It’s something most experts agree on. Because as you have read many times, “what is not measurable does not exist”.
Measuring your efforts in detail requires that you clearly define the criteria for success. This is exactly what the first phase of a marketing audit should occupy:
Understand the state of current affairs. The value of all future efforts will be assessed against this baseline.
The questions to ask at this stage of the audit may seem simple, but “the devil is in the detail.” Careful consideration can reveal the truth about your business or marketing strategy that may have been hidden before.