How to Perform a Digital Marketing Audit

When a business does not feel the desired results after implementing various digital marketing tools, or the achievements are not satisfactory, the brand usually wants to identify the cause of the issue as quickly as possible. This can be done through one effective and time-tested action — a competent marketing audit. The process enables a business to quickly understand which of the implemented solutions are working and where time and money have been wasted.

What Is a Digital Marketing Audit?

When it comes to a digital marketing audit, the primary focus is on evaluating absolutely all active online channels that have been used. This web-based process provides an opportunity to document, assess, clearly understand, and realize the value of launched advertising campaigns and online activities. It also helps determine how effective the campaigns are for a particular business, which tactical considerations should still be incorporated into the SEO strategy, which paid advertising is indispensable, and so on.

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Audit

Using a comprehensive audit in practice, regardless of the business niche, is first and foremost a relevant opportunity to obtain an exhaustive assessment of the brand’s performance in the field of digital marketing. The process is necessary to meticulously verify how professionally and effectively individual strategies for online promotion have been created. It is also capable of showing which campaigns should be removed, updated, corrected, engaged, or eliminated.

– Poor marketing results

If the launched business campaigns ultimately failed to generate a certain amount of organic traffic, qualified leads, or online sales that the brand expected to achieve, then this can only be corrected through the implementation of a comprehensive audit.

– Unclear or inconsistent strategy

If a brand lacks a clear, structured, and personalized digital marketing strategy, then this can already be considered a failure. To avoid such an outcome, it is better to build the most logical “chain” of competent actions that will contribute to the improvement of the plan.

– Outdated or misaligned content

When business content is unable to deliver value to the audience, does not meet customer expectations, and fails to attract people in any way, it decreases overall engagement. To prevent this situation, it is essential to conduct a high-quality audit that will help identify which content urgently needs to be updated.

– Missed trends and ineffective tracking

When a brand, for some personal reasons, does not adopt innovations or utilize key tracking metrics, the business loses its competitive advantage. And only a professional audit will facilitate the complete adaptation of the brand to those trends that currently exist and thrive in the market.

How to Perform a Digital Marketing Audit

This service is primarily essential for obtaining the most accurate assessment of the effectiveness of the SEO tactics being used to promote the business, for evaluating the strategic plan for working within popular social media platforms, and for ensuring full alignment of all marketing and advertising campaigns with the individual plan and the pre-established business goals.

– Analyze competitors

If a business clearly understands the strong and weak points of its competitors, it can respond on time by making adjustments to its marketing plan for promotion and discovering cooler, newer, more interesting, and economically advantageous opportunities for thriving in the online space.

– Review digital presence

As soon as a brand evaluates its website, the social media platforms it uses, and other online channels for interacting with potential customers, it immediately understands which channels are effective and which are less so. The audit helps to quickly determine the best ways for the business to engage with its target audience in the digital environment.

– Evaluate performance metrics

It is extremely important to regularly monitor the data related to the inflow of organic traffic, user interactions with the brand’s website or social media pages, as well as to double-check conversion rates and ROI. By analyzing these indicators, the business can determine what is working and which metrics (and corresponding tactics) need improvement.

– Define goals

Only pre-established, clearly structured, and, of course, measurable business goals can elevate a brand to a new, higher level. For this reason, businesses must place a strong emphasis on organizing high-quality digital marketing efforts.

– Create an action plan

Thanks to conducting a comprehensive audit, brands can develop a step-by-step strategic action plan where specific tasks and deadlines for their completion are clearly defined. This is necessary to achieve absolutely all business goals as quickly as possible.

Core Areas to Audit

Utilizing such an essential service as a comprehensive digital marketing audit is a timely opportunity for a business to gain insight into the success of its project. The fact is, this service simultaneously covers several key areas, which helps to quickly understand how well or poorly the developed personalized online strategies are functioning.

Website & SEO

Internal and external optimization of a business website is of utmost importance. These SEO solutions help determine how competently the semantic core is structured, how well each web page is organized, and the quality of the backlink profile. A technical audit will reveal how fast the web resource performs and whether it is properly optimized for mobile gadgets and devices.

Paid Media (SEM)

Thanks to a comprehensive audit, it becomes clear which advertising campaign is working, how effectively it attracts the target audience, and how well the call-to-action is crafted (to purchase, subscribe, place an order, etc.).

Social Media

When auditing activity on popular social platforms, a business can assess how effective its strategy and launched campaigns are, as well as how engaged users are — how many comments, reviews, likes, or other targeted actions people are performing, and so on.

Content

A professional content audit allows businesses to identify duplication, lack of profitability, and lack of uniqueness, which makes it possible to remove such content. As a result, the business can develop new content, competent and professional, structured and valuable, unique, and so on, to add to the website.

Email Marketing

The use of an audit service enables businesses to completely reassess their email marketing strategies and pay more attention to a multitude of small details. This includes metrics such as email open rates, click-through rates, and, of course, how targeted (relevant) the content of the emails is for the brand’s specific audience.

Characteristics of a Strong Audit

An audit can be considered fully successful only if it meets certain important features and characteristics. Each of the individual “attributes” must contribute to a thorough and deeply insightful evaluation of business strategies.

Comprehensive and systematic

A well-executed audit is capable of covering absolutely every nuance and aspect of marketing efforts, from the strategic action plan to the content created from scratch or delivered as a turnkey solution for the business, advertising campaigns, and analytics. The key point is that it is carried out according to an expert, clear, structured methodology influenced by numerous factors.

Objective and actionable

The full-scale analysis of informational data is, above all, about being unprecedented and impartial in the process. This means that when audit services are performed, they are executed by specific guidelines to produce objective results that can later be applied in practice.

Data-driven

Absolutely all informational data obtained through professional auditing services is about conclusions, observations, and facts that are already backed by data (indicators and metrics, analytics, research). In other words, during the analysis process, no “fantastical guesses” or assumptions are ever taken into account.

Final Thoughts on Running a Successful Audit

Expert marketers who understand digital tactics and know how to conduct an audit for a business, regardless of its niche, have always used, continue to use, and will keep using such a service as data analysis. The point is that a competent audit makes it possible to assess how well a web resource performs, how excellent the content is (its relevance, value, uniqueness), and how effectively web technologies have been integrated into the business strategy for online promotion. An audit is also about a comprehensive SWOT analysis, about “tolerant” investment spending within a business project, about ensuring alignment between goals and KPIs, and about improving communication with potential clients. Brands simply cannot afford to neglect this service.