“We are doing everything right. We don’t understand why we aren’t seeing a ROI despite heavily investing in digital marketing.”

This is a statement that’s too familiar for many businesses trying to establish an online presence, especially those that handle their digital marketing in-house. The website is up and running, social media platforms are active and regularly updated, and pay-per-click campaigns are set up. But the end results are still wanting.

Considering how dynamic digital marketing is, ticking off marketing boxes is no longer enough. As a business owner, you’ll benefit from a holistic view of your marketing strategy and efforts. That’s where a digital marketing audit comes into play.

Learn why a digital marketing audit is important, the components of a digital marketing audit, and how to do it.

What is a Digital Marketing Audit?

A digital marketing audit is a review and analysis of your digital marketing strategies, practices, and outcomes. It’s simply an inspection of what you’re doing to establish and improve your brand’s online presence, what’s working for you and what’s not.

The purpose of a digital marketing audit to get the bigger picture of your digital marketing efforts and see if your digital marketing strategy aligns with your overall business goals. 

Components of a Digital Marketing Audit

Every digital marketing auditor will only offer something that aligns with their area of expertise. For example, a social media marketing professional will only focus their audit on social media marketing. But a comprehensive digital marketing audit should include the following core components:

• Competitive Analysis: This focuses on your brand’s digital efforts compared to your competitors. It helps you to identify areas you can leverage to gain an edge over your industry peers online. 
• Qualitative Analysis: This looks at your current digital marketing efforts against industry standards and best practices. Qualitative analysis examines your web design and user experience, brand positioning and messaging, calls to action (CTAs), and content marketing among others. 
• Quantitative Analysis: Quantitative analysis looks at your most-used digital marketing platforms and analytics to recommend what’s working and what needs improvement. It includes looking at social media metrics, Google Analytics, PPC ad reports and other key data.
• Marketing Channel Breakdown: It looks at individual digital marketing platforms, the tools being used on them, and how they can help to achieve marketing goals. Marketing channel breakdown also includes multi-channel tactics such as keyword strategy and content type for the primary digital channels. 
• Internal Digital Assets Governance and Access Audit: Internal governance audit helps to identify opportunities for managing your brand’s digital assets and presence. It also looks at the access and usage of your digital assets such as tech stack to streamline communication, campaign management, and efficiency. 

The audit should also look at the website’s performance, accessibility for persons with disabilities, key performance indicators (KPIs), and your long-term digital marketing strategy. Lastly, it should highlight priority recommendations on the immediate steps you should take to improve your digital marketing efforts.

Five Reasons Why You Need a Digital Marketing Audit

So, why do you need a digital marketing audit?

Routine digital marketing audits help to identify marketing initiatives that are serving your purpose  and which ones should take a different approach. Without a digital marketing audit, it would be difficult to tell where you stand and which direction you need to take to improve your digital marketing ROI.

Some of the benefits of conducting a digital marketing audit include:

1. Identify your strengths and weaknesses

Everyone has their strengths and weakness. For you to improve your brand’s online marketshare, it’s important to understand what you’re doing right as well as what needs improvement. No matter how successful your marketing campaigns are, there’s always room for improvement. 

A digital marketing audit will enable to modify your plans of action for better results. It provides invaluable insights into your digital marketing performance while also enabling you to benchmark against industry standards.

2. Uncover hidden prospects

A digital marketing audit will not only help you identify your strengths and weaknesses but also untapped growth opportunities. It’s an opportunity to bring new ideas and prospects to the surface. An audit can point you to a new direction that will revolutionize your digital marketing strategy. Additionally, it can provide you with the perfect roadmap for optimizing what you already have in place.

3. Launch something new

An audit could also give you clarity on new ways to expand or launch a new product or service into the market. If you’re unsure how to go about launching something new, a digital marketing audit could help you out. You’ll make an informed decision rather than simply relying on your gut feeling. It reduces the risk and gives you the confidence to explore new marketing avenues.

4. Reignite your team’s enthusiasm

A digital marketing audit takes you back to the basics, finetunes your marketing approach, and enables you to achieve better results at optimal costs. This is definitely bound to give your team a lift and reignite their morale. Additionally, it refreshes roles, enhances transparency, and reduces stress as your processes get streamlined. 

Who doesn’t want to be part of a successful team with clear objectives and goals anyway?

5. Save resources

Lastly, it saves you time and money. By streamlining and optimizing your marketing strategy, a digital marketing audit helps you to eliminate wasteful processes. Your team will also be able to focus on rewarding tasks. In the end, you’ll have a digital marketing strategy that’s perfectly aligned to your overall business goals.

How To Do a Digital Marketing Audit

A digital marketing audit can be triggered by five different factors. They include:

• Timing: The start of a financial year when you’re planning and budgeting for marketing activities. 
• Performance Reviews: When you’re examining the status of a particular marketing campaign or your overall digital marketing strategy. 
• Business Strategy Changes: You might also need a digital marketing audit when the overall business strategy changes in response to market changes or external triggers. 
• Structural Changes: When you’re rebranding or introducing new products and offerings into the market.
• Relationship Changes: When you’re making changes to your marketing approach, for example, bringing on board a digital marketing agency to help with your marketing strategies.

When conducting a digital marketing audit, it’s almost impossible to analyze everything at once. It’s better to break the audit down by the different functions of digital marketing. The four most common functions of digital marketing are web design, social media marketing, SEO, and PPC advertising. This helps you to pinpoint how you can improve each of the individual functions.

1. Website Audit

Your website is a very crucial component of your digital marketing strategy. It’s where all your digital marketing leads end up and where you educate them and try to convert them into paying customers. 

You should pay attention to your traffic, which pages they visit most, and your bounce rates among other key metrics. Some of the questions to investigate during a website audit include:

• Do you have a responsive web design?
• What’s your website’s load time?
• Is your website visually pleasing?
• How is your website navigation? 

You should work on improving and optimizing any areas that has a negative answer to the audit questions.

2. Social Media Marketing

Unlike a website audit, social media audit can be quite tricky. It’s easy to get caught up in the wrong metrics. For example, some businesses focus on vanity metrics such as follower count instead of paying attention to important metrics like social media reach and click-through rates (CTR). 

One of the main goals of social media marketing is to grow brand visibility and draw people to your website. So you audit should focus on investigating on how it’s achieving that goal. If you have low reach, it means that people have a hard time finding your brand on social media. Or they are not inspired enough to interact with it.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When performing SEO audit, the first place you should look are the results you’re driving organically. A tool like Google Analytics can help you with this as you’re just looking at the traffic you drive to your website. If you see high amounts of incoming traffic from search engines, that’s good. It means that your SEO strategy is working. If not, your SEO strategy needs improvement. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does your website have security certificates? Do you use HTTPS?
• Is your website mobile-friendly?
• Are the images compressed and given alt tags?
• Do you include relevant keywords in your web content? 
• Has your content earned any backlinks from reputable websites?

4. Pay-Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising serves two purposes- to get people to click on your ads and then make a purchase. So when performing a PPC audit, you should pay attention to the click-through and conversion rates. If you ads aren’t getting clicked on at all, then the problem may be with the ads setup. But if your ads are driving clicks with no conversions, the issue may be the landing page. 

Ask yourself whether your landing page matches the user intent, has an effective CTA, and if the CTA is simple and visually appealing. 

You should also audit your content marketing strategy and brand consistency. Once done with the individual marketing functions, you should look at your overall digital marketing strategy and whether it aligns with the individual functions. Is there a disconnect? What can be made better? Does your technology stack help you in achieving your marketing goals or do you need an upgrade?

Let Us Help

A website audit isn’t something you only do when things are going south. It’s a proactive measure that will enable you to improve your digital marketing efforts in 2023.

If you don’t have the time or knowledge to perform a comprehensive digital marketing audit, Salt Marketing can help you. We have a team of experts who are experienced in the different areas of digital marketing to audit your marketing. We’ll help you to optimize your digital marketing strategy for 2023.Talk to an expert.