The real value of doing a full digital marketing audit

If the goal of any audit process within your business is to achieve growth and improvement, then there’s all the more reason to take a good look at your digital marketing.

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“I’m wasting money”

So, you know the importance of having a strong digital brand and reaching your target market online.

But… you don’t know a lot about SEO, website coding, Google advertising and retargeting. But you know they exist, and you’re paying someone to take charge of all of this… anticipating warm leads straight to your inbox and lots of phone calls from prospective clients.

It’s been months and you’ve spent a large chunk of your marketing budget… and all you have to show for it is a beautiful website… that doesn’t act like the hardworking employee it really should.

You finally feel like you’re wasting hard-earned money, and you’re unsure where to turn to next.

It might be time for a full digital marketing audit.

While there are many how-to guidelines available that tell you how to conduct a digital marketing audit, engaging professionals might be your guaranteed route to turning your situation around.

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Why should I audit everything?

Let’s take a good look at exactly what digital marketing is… and what yours entails. Your digital marketing is the sum of all your online endeavours to maintain your business’s visibility, brand strength and growth.

This can include important digital elements such as your website, content marketing, SEO structure, social media, database marketing and Google ads.

To continue to grow your brand online, you need to do an effective digital marketing audit that is strategic and focuses on all the elements in your digital marketing mix.

The goal of an audit is to pinpoint exactly which of your marketing initiatives are serving you, and which aren’t. This might mean more than just rounding up all the data and crunching some numbers.

Dealing with and understanding the intricacies of analytics and reporting require a certain level of expertise. While we can teach ourselves a basic understanding of digital marketing and analytics, there are deeper levels of complexity that require experienced interpretation.

While frequent mini-audits of your digital marketing efforts are imperative to protect your return on investment and sustain your brand growth, less frequent in-depth audits done by professionals will most likely uncover areas that require a high level of strategic intervention… which will be absolutely worth it.

What should I audit?

Of course, the size and scope of your digital marketing will determine the extent of your audit. But, in general, our experience has taught us that placing emphasis on the following is extremely important:

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Your website (in its entirety)

Logging into Google Analytics and looking at your website traffic first is a great place to start your website audit.

Break it down into digestible areas such as monthly traffic peaks, number of visitors, organic traffic, goal conversions, bounce rate, session time and most viewed pages.

Identify your website’s highest traffic sources and how they are changing over time. Look even deeper by segmenting traffic by source, device, country etc. to start drawing a meaningful map of typical user journeys throughout your website.

Work on identifying reasons for certain behaviours and brainstorm with a colleague about how to do things better.

For example, a spike in website traffic but a decrease in conversion rate may indicate that your website is attracting the wrong people, or that your service offering is not articulated correctly. This may be a great starting point to optimise your content for better market reach.

It’s also essential to assess the success of your website design, the quality of your content (and whether you’re speaking effectively to your target audience) and the overall user journey. While a digital marketing expert follows certain steps to assess these areas, it might also be useful to ask individuals who fall within your target market to let you know what their impressions are of your website. If it’s the first time that they lay eyes on your website… even better.

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Your brand

We all know this – the stronger your digital brand, the more successful your business will be.

Taking a good look at your brand’s current position in the market compared to your competitors is a great way to determine the effectiveness of your brand.

Talking to your clients and your target audience is a good way of learning how your brand is perceived. Use casual conversations, digital surveys or targeted feedback to achieve this.

Output from Google Analytics will also give you strong insights into how your brand is doing in the digital sphere.

With so many tools available, gauging your brand strength is all in a day’s work.

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Your SEO (content and technical)

In this day and age, if you have a digital presence, you’ll know that SEO is an important aspect of your digital marketing… or you’ve at least heard of it and given it a moment’s thought.

In short – SEO entails all practices that make sure your website is optimised for search, causing your website to rank on search engines so your target market can easily find you.

Central to your SEO lies engaging, compelling content. Increasing the quality of your content is your best bet to increasing organic traffic to your website.

A useful starting point to optimising your digital content is to look at all the existing content on your website. Make sure you find all the pages on your website, and categorise them into a sensible structure.

An on-page SEO audit is the process of looking at elements such as word count, title tags, heading tags… and identifying areas that need improvement.

Looking at your website loading speed can help you rank better on Google, and getting a plugin to check for broken links can help you fix this problem easily.

A comprehensive keywords audit may also be necessary to help you get found for the right search terms online. Google and user behaviour change constantly, so staying on top of your keywords and adjusting them frequently will ensure you always reach your target audience.

An SEO audit may require the expertise of a professional – someone with in-depth knowledge of not only search engine behaviour, but also your business goals and marketing objectives.

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Social media

Regardless of the industry, your target audience is most likely on some sort of social media platform. Your social pages are great opportunities to represent your brand. If you’re posting too often or too little, or posting messages that are not on-brand, you can lose potential customers.

Auditing your social media pages for visual impact, brand consistency, engagement, post frequency and overall content quality is useful to achieve a solid social media strategy that will offer a return on investment.

There’s so much more to social media marketing than meets the eye. If done right, you can turn your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and other pages into rockets that catapult your digital brand to new heights.

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Pay per click (PPC)

It’s important to evaluate each digital marketing channel you are using on its own to understand their individual purpose in your overall marketing strategy.

Frequent audits on all your digital marketing activities allow you to ensure you’re not wasting resources but rather allocating them to the best areas.

When it comes to PPC, look at your digital marketing audit as a golden opportunity to refine your marketing plan.

Make sure you understand the number of leads you’re producing through each campaign, plus what your conversion rates are.

Pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses within your PPC strategy can help you refine and optimise your marketing budget.

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Be strategic (we can’t stress this enough)

Quite often, it’s best for business owners to step aside and trust a professional to take hold of their brand, marketing and content.

As someone who’s been invested in the guts of their business from the start, it can be difficult to lift your head out of the details to reach a helicopter view… to see the strategic picture.

At Brilliant Digital, we are big picture thinkers. We know that starting in the details, moving through the structures and rising to the top level is part of the process of a successful digital marketing audit.

From there, we create a strategic roadmap on improving your digital marketing efforts to achieve better brand consistency, get qualified leads and grow your top line.

Contact us to learn more about the three digital marketing and website audit solutions we offer.

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