We all work hard to get our marketing on point. Companies publish blog posts, put time and effort into their social media channels and send monthly newsletters out to their customers. And then there’s SEO, offline marketing and online ads to get people into the sales funnel. All of these efforts should eventually lead to conversion, but how do we know if we’re on the right track?
It’s important to keep track of your ROIs, to evaluate how you’re doing and where your efforts are taking you. A digital audit is a perfect way to keep track of your own progress, to address the pain points and to acknowledge where there is room for improvement.
What is a digital audit
When conducting a digital audit you’re evaluating your position within the market, across all your marketing channels. That way, you can figure out what you’re doing right or wrong and take the necessary actions. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the channels that will be taken under the loop in such a digital audit, and what you have to look out for.
Website
First of all, your main point of traffic will be coming to your website. It’s important that everything functions well, both the back-end as well as the user experience when people are browsing through your pages. How does the site look like? Does it have a modern feeling? Is the website easy to navigate? Does it contain the main information and pages such as contact, about etc? Then we’ll look a bit further into the way your website is running, and most importantly your SEO efforts. Is the code running smoothly in the background? Are the meta descriptions and alt-tags in place? No dodgy backlinks or black-hat SEO tricks?
Google Analytics is a powerful tool to understand your website and its visitors. It will tell you what pages are most popular, and where your visitors leave your website. Figures as bounce rates, returning visitors or time spent on a page will give you a clear idea of what’s working. Thereby, you can check your acquisition numbers to see what channels sent the most traffic to your website.
A great tool to figure out what’s working or not is Hotjar. While you have access to heat maps in Google Analytics, Hotjar actually goes a step further and records the user sessions on your website. You can then go through the recordings and analyse common behaviour. This will save you heaps of money for a UX designer who probably would do something similar but would charge you a fortune.
Chances are high that your company has a Facebook profile and it’s key to understand its impact and to know how it’s performing. First of all, we can look at the content – see what strategy (or the lack thereof) is in place and how it’s performing with your followers. Secondly, we can check out what type of content (video, posts, pictures or links) seems to work well for you. We will also look at your followers, their demographics, when they’re online and what they interact with most. We map out engagement rates, growth rates and best post/page reach, and put this in a benchmark report to see where you’re at exactly compared to your competitors. Here at 4DP, we are working with a tool called Fanpage Karma. That’s more on the enterprise price scale though. If you want to save money, simply use your Facebook insights.
Content Strategy
If your company has a blog, that’s great news! But how is it structured and taken care of? We will closely look at the type of articles you have been publishing over the past months and have a look at the number of visitors per post. The look and feel are not be neglected here since it contributes to your brand image, and it will often decide how long your visitors will stay on your page. Is there a featured image? Do you make use of text structuring methods such as subtitles, bullet points, quotes and images? Are there alt tags and links present?
A great starting point to get your content strategy right is to develop a topic cluster and then develop subtopics from there. We recommend you keep your topic clusters focused. 6-8 topics will be enough. This is not a brainstorming document but a focused cluster of themes and long tail keyword content resources you need to build to become a thought leader in a chosen field. Sounds complicated? It’s not really. Just be laser focused when it comes to your content. Quality over quantity – always!
Email Marketing
Another important channel to evaluate is your email marketing. Do you send out newsletters and how often? Do you have an email platform such as MailChimp, Hubspot or Drip? Are there easy ways for your subscribers to opt-in? How is your subscriber list managed, is there any segmentation? Do you use personalisation in your emails? Is there any automation in place for welcome emails, onboarding processes or customer retentions?
Our CEO Sonja Ceri always says: Email marketing is the marketers’ secret weapon! People think Email marketing is not cool enough in the age of social media. Let them think so. Fact is that our clients see the highest conversion coming from email. Think about that.
Facebook Ads and Adwords
You might be spending a lot of money on ads, but are they really giving you the right results? By looking into your ad campaigns, ad groups, ad sets and keyword sets we can quickly evaluate your click-through-rates, average positions, and best-performing ads. We will take a close look at your targeting, both location-based as interest-based and see where there’s room for improvement.
Omnichannel marketing
Last but not least, we’re going to look at how everything connects. You might be using the various channels, but are they all contributing to your brand story? Are they all delivering the same message? With people getting overwhelmed by so much information on the internet these days, it’s important to make sure your brand stands out and that people recognise you. Having the same core message across all your channels will help identify your brand as a unified, trustworthy and strong business.
After the evaluation comes the strategy
After we looked at the performance of all the pages, we will create a new plan of attack based on the results of the audits. We will create a social media strategy that actually takes into consideration the hours that your clients are online and we will update those landing pages with the highest bounce rates.
We will map out your ad strategy with clear business goals such as brand awareness or conversions in mind. We create a full-package marketing strategy, one with your business in mind. We will address all the channels that will be beneficial for your brand, and all of those will support each other. That way, you can get the results you were aiming for. Sounds like something you want to talk to us about?
Make sure you send us an old-fashioned email with your ideas and we will be right back at ya!
If you want to have a play yourself, check our free resources for great templates to get you started!