Digital Marketing Audit - Guide to Conduct a Full Digital Marketing Audit

A digital marketing audit is your secret weapon to unlock the full potential of your online advertising. By carefully examining your marketing strategies, platforms, and performance, it provides a comprehensive overview of your campaign's effectiveness. Are your marketing channels hitting the mark? Is your website operating at peak efficiency? Where can you improve and invest your marketing budget? These are just a few of the valuable insights a digital marketing audit can provide, helping you fine-tune your strategies to drive conversions and build your brand.

Data doesn't lie, and a digital marketing audit can help you uncover the truth about your advertising efforts. It's like shining a spotlight on your business to expose the gaps, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth. By analyzing the data obtained from a digital marketing audit, you can refine your strategies to achieve your business goals. Think of it as a roadmap to success, helping you navigate the twists and turns of the digital landscape and emerge victorious.

If you're serious about succeeding in the competitive digital landscape, you need a digital marketing audit that delivers the goods. Say goodbye to generic, auto-generated reports and hello to a customized, comprehensive analysis of your online portfolio. A genuine audit provides deep insights into your best- and worst-performing marketing resources, tailored to your industry, history, and objectives. With it, you can fine-tune your strategies and achieve your business goals - whether that's boosting conversions or establishing your brand image.

Why conduct a digital marketing audit?

While digital marketing strategies are immensely advantageous when applied intelligently, they need to be modified regularly to adapt to the evolving algorithm updates and trends. A drop in the web traffic directed to your website, your target audience is disengaged and a decline in sales growth are just some of the examples that indicate the need for a digital marketing strategy audit. A digital marketing audit report expounds on the operational insights, giving you the ability to design and implement the changes required to bridge the gaps in order to achieve the desired results.

Here are some telltale signs that you need a digital marketing audit:

Your leads are about as high quality as a broken pencil
You didn't hit your quarterly or yearly business objectives
You need another website
You want to launch new campaigns but don't know where to start
You need more information about the target audience
Your competitors are making moves and leaving you in the dust

How to conduct a digital marketing audit?

Are you ready to take your digital marketing game to the next level? Conducting a full audit is the key to unlocking the potential of your online advertising campaign. And thanks to the availability of free digital marketing audit templates, the process has never been easier. But don't be fooled - a successful audit requires a meticulous and comprehensive approach. Here's what you need to know to conduct a top-notch digital marketing audit:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing the quality and quantity of traffic directed to your website through organic search engine results and is one of the core components of any digital marketing framework.

An effective SEO strategy is dependent on the success of various factors like on-page and off-page website optimization, keyword optimization, user experience, overall responsiveness, page speed, security, etc along with prompt adaptation to the latest search engine algorithm updates. Implemented wisely, it can be the key to building your brand image, boosting business growth, and fostering a strong online reputation. That being said, SEO is more than a few simple tasks and commands. It is an intricate, detailed process that can make running an SEO audit for your website not only time-consuming but also cumbersome.

To simplify this process, a number of digital marketing audit tools like Ahrefs, Woorank, Moz Pro Solutions, SEMrush, Google Search Central, and Hubspot’s Website Grader offer detailed reports with actionable insights. Making use of these tools allows you to analyze your website performance, review your SEO strategy and adjust your marketing plans efficiently.

Content Marketing Audit

Another important component of any digital marketing framework is undoubtedly content creation and content marketing. A strategic approach towards creating and distributing high-value content relevant to your target group on a consistent basis can be instrumental in driving profitable consumer action towards your business.

An essential part of creating a successful content strategy, conducting a website content audit will help you gain detailed insights regarding the overall performance of your content whether it is website content, blog posts, or even simple product descriptions. Upon analyzing this audit data, you obtain a comprehensive record of various aspects like page visits, page value, bounce rate, and average time on the page! These statistics make it possible to evaluate the actual quality of your content, identify the gaps in your content strategy, understand what needs to be optimized for the search engines, and updated to enhance your user experience. Moreover, these analytics can also help you generate new, refined content ideas for your customer base and assist in planning your future campaigns.

Some of the well-known tools that can help you measure and quantify your content marketing efforts are Screaming Frog, Buzzsumo, and Google Analytics.

Social Media Marketing Audit

Next, conducting an audit of your social media marketing efforts is an absolute must. With over 4.89 billion active users across various social media platforms all over the world, social media has transformed how customers perceive, connect and interact with a brand or business online.

Conducting a social media audit will help you understand your audience better, review the outcome of your current efforts and assist you in making informed decisions for the success of your future campaigns across all social media channels. A brief overview of what you must include as a part of your audit checklist would be your presence on the right platforms, profile optimization, engagement metrics, follower growth, hashtag marketing insights, and individual campaign performance. This data contributes significantly to interpreting the nuances of a social media marketing strategy and what makes it tick! You can perform an audit on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, although a regular review can prove to be tremendously beneficial in keeping up with the latest trends and viral propaganda.

As such, every social media platform will provide you with statistics and insights to track your performance. Additionally, some of the other tools you can use to monitor your performance as well as manage your social media profiles smoothly are Buffer, Sprout Social, and Oktopost.

Email Marketing Audit

Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy and plays a key role in boosting brand awareness, building customer relationships, and maximizing conversions. Successful email marketing campaigns are a result of various factors like personalized subject lines, relevant mail copies coupled with appealing visuals, strong Call-To-Actions (CTAs), and optimal sending times.

Analyzing the performance of your email marketing campaigns through metrics like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribes, and conversions will help you understand what works best for your business. Industry-leading tools like Hubspot Email Marketing, MailChimp, and Drip will help you grow your business by augmenting your email marketing efforts.

Paid Advertising Audit

Lastly, measuring your paid advertising efforts is of paramount importance. Paid advertising, executed strategically, can help you create awareness, broadcast your message, generate leads and drive conversions almost instantaneously. On the other hand, if not done right, it can lead to a substantial loss of resources, monetary and otherwise.

To yield the desired results from your paid advertising campaigns, apart from having a strong ad copy and design, it is important to have the following factors in check - targeted keywords and demographics, relevant time slots, clear CTAs, and optimized landing pages. Some of the tools that can help you audit and enhance the performance of your PPC campaigns are Google Ads Performance Grader by Wordstream, Adespresso by Hootsuite, Adalysis, and Optmyzr.

Now let’s have a deep look into the different aspects of a digital marketing audit:

Quantitative Examination of Your Online Portfolio

This is the traditional focal point of a typical marketing audit. Your digital strategy is holistically reviewed through the perspective of metrics to understand what’s been working so far and what hasn’t. It would include most or all of these things -

Data from Google Analytics
PPC campaign reports
Social media analytics
Data of SEO rankings
CRM reports and information
Funnel data of eCommerce purchase

Subjective Assessment of Your Online Portfolio

This aspect of the audit includes a critical insight into your virtual landscape. These are the most important elements of a subjective assessment:

Web UX and design
CTAs on your site
Brand compatibility across channels
Brand awareness across channels
Social media content
Effectiveness of email messaging and design
Usability and accessibility of lead generation form
eCommerce experience and information

Website Crawl

There are plenty of services available online capable of crawling your website and offering feedback related to technical issues. This data is important; you should know when your site has low site performance, duplicate content, broken links, and missing metadata. However, explanation and reporting are pointless unless there is context.

Make sure that your marketing audit also includes the prioritization of issues identified in a crawl report, in addition to setting a short timeline for rectifying them.

Competitive Assessment

It's quite common for a marketing agency to contrast your marketing endeavors with those of your competitors. There are numerous observations that a competitive assessment uncovers, including elements that can provide you with competitive advantages in the long run.

Channel-by-Channel Breakdown

A digital marketing audit usually performs a complete breakdown of marketing efforts for every channel. This provides a deeper insight into your overall marketing efforts. These are typically the channels included in a digital marketing audit:

PR/media coverage
Paid social ad campaigns
Organic search
Social media organic traffic
Conventional digital ads
Email marketing
Reputation management
Content marketing
Website

Channel-Specific Strategies

Your digital strategy ought to be upheld by these particular strategic proposals for your essential digital marketing platforms. These may include suggestions like

Searcher intents or keywords for targeting using an organic search plan
Content medium suggestions
Suggestions for types of content
Targeting suggestions for paid promotions
A detailed plan for website improvement
Addition of suitable call-to-actions
A solid plan for email correspondence
Channels that require more or less attention
Suggestions for brand messaging
Extra software require for achieving your proposed digital plan

Strategy & Recommendations

Your audit should provide suggestions according to the discoveries made. This is a major one, and any organization paid to conduct a digital marketing audit ought to incorporate it, however, it is not always guaranteed.

To put it plainly, your auditing agency should provide you with some idea of the subsequent steps that you can take to expand on the positive components of your digital portfolio, and work to further develop what isn't serving your business. The best kind of marketing audit will give you an actual framework for utilizing the digital avenue to develop your business.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

In addition to a strategy for improvement, your audit can also incorporate multiple key performance indicators that you ought to track closely for understanding how effective your digital strategy is. It may even incorporate realistic target objectives for the KPIs mentioned, in light of the loopholes and room for improvement recognized by the digital marketing audit. KPIs will differ from one business to another, since a digital metric that is important to one company may be of little value to another.

Digital Accessibility

A digital marketing audit should ideally cover the resolution of challenges faced by disabled people while visiting and navigating through your website. This is particularly significant for organizations in numerous industries where it is required by law to be digitally accessible.

Web accessibility can likewise work on your SEO by increasing organic web traffic to your web pages. This happens on the grounds that composing your code for digital accessibility increases the search visibility of your website and also makes it voice-search friendly, thereby ramping up your search engine rankings for your targeted keywords.

Conclusion

Digital marketing audits are the secret weapon for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing. These audits provide crucial insights into the progress and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies, enabling you to fine-tune your approach and achieve even greater success.

At Parkyd Digital, our team of digital audit experts in Toronto is on hand to help you take your business to the next level. With over a decade of experience in the industry and a deep understanding of the digital marketing landscape, we offer tailored marketing solutions that deliver impressive results and boost your ROI.

Don't leave your digital marketing success to chance - partner with Parkyd Digital and enjoy the benefits of a fully optimized marketing strategy today!