Digital Marketing Audit
You audit everything in your business. From taxes to in-house performance, you are constantly auditing, assessing, and looking for room for improvement. While it might seem like a tedious task, conducting an audit is critical to ensure the success of your marketing campaigns.
You audit everything in your business. From taxes to in-house performance, you are constantly auditing, assessing, and looking for room for improvement. When is the last time you conducted a digital marketing audit?
If you are like most companies, you might have never completed one. While it might seem like a tedious task, conducting an audit is critical to ensure the success of your marketing campaigns.
What is a Digital Marketing Audit?
Digital marketing audits review every aspect of your campaign, including:
- The design and content of your website.
- Your existing SEO, keyword usage, and how it is distributed on pages and blogs.
- How your social media pages are performing.
- Examining your overall content, including blogs, website pages, social media posts, and video content.
- Why are Digital Marketing Audits So Important?
- Marketing audits are not often discussed as a positive thing. However, when you do not have the time to check your own business, you may want to hire another company to do the audit and analysis for you.
An audit gives you the chance to examine what is working, what is not working, and what requires fine-tuning so that you get the ROI you have been looking for.
Some benefits to doing a digital audit include:
- Gaining Insight: With your examination, you can see what is working in your existing strategy, and what you need to improve.
- Identifying New Data: You cannot assess the performance of a campaign if you do not pull the metrics and then compare them with your tactics.
- Determining the Uniformity of Your Message: The entire purpose of digital marketing is to establish your brand and make it recognizable to the public. You cannot do that if you do not occasionally audit to make sure all digital marketing outlets are similar enough to one another.
- Saving Time and Money: Most importantly, a digital audit helps you save time on tasks that are not working, and the audit itself costs a fraction of the cost of implementing a new strategy.
- The Components of a Successful Digital Marketing Audit
- Preparation is essential for a successful digital marketing audit. You need to assess the proper areas, pull the right metrics, and ensure that everything correlates with your marketing goals.
1. SEO Audit
The SEO audit lets you examine the on-page and off-page keyword usage, how keywords are ranking, which keywords are bringing in organic traffic, and items that might harm your strategy. For example, broken links or 404 redirects could hurt your search engine rank; therefore, they must be corrected.
You must also assess the value of linkbacks and make sure the ones you are utilizing work. Any Google updates that come forward must be assessed and then you must ensure your website is in line with those latest algorithm updates.
2. SEM and Paid Advertisement Audits
Advertisements are what help you attract new customers. However, they are also popular ways to drain your marketing budget. To ensure your advertising budget is being spent efficiently, check the keywords of your PPC campaigns, update banner designs, and ensure all campaigns are mobile responsive.
3. Content Marketing Audits
Content is king in today's marketing industry; therefore, you must continually reassess your content strategy. These audits are not just about SEO, but also to ensure your content is fresh, relevant, and still attractive to your target consumer.
Also, an audit is an ideal opportunity to see if you are leaving ideal customer segments out. You can look for new opportunities to create attractive content, such as eBooks, infographics, or more videos.
4. Social Media Audits
Social media is what builds your brand reputation and makes you attractive to potential customers. During the audit phase, you check the profiles you have launched, address how many followers and interactions you have received, examine your hashtag strategy (and the success of it), and revisit how frequently you post.
Bottom Line: Digital Marketing Audits Strengthen Your Existing Marketing
While you may have invested in marketing, now is the time to make sure that money is going toward something of value. By conducting a digital marketing audit, you can create a future strategy that makes an impact and utilizes every dollar of your marketing budget appropriately.
Naturally, it is best to hire a third party to conduct your audit. A third party can better scrutinize the metrics, assess the strategies, and critique where necessary.