Why and How You Should Do a Digital Marketing Audit

You might be happy with your current digital marketing. But are you sure you couldn’t be doing better? Are all your marketing dollars being well-spent? Or are some of them being wasted that might be better spent in a different area? Is your marketing ahead of the current trend, or is it in danger of becoming obsolete?

These are the questions a marketing audit can answer. Even if you are currently happy with your marketing, it’s a good idea to conduct a marketing audit. Being too complacent can lead to future troubles.

Why Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit

A marketing audit is essentially a close look at how your advertising dollars are being spent and the results you get from them. The goal is to make sure you’re really getting a good value from your advertising dollars. You might think that the question answers itself if business is good. But there are several potential concerns that might be hiding in a marketing campaign that is successful overall.

First, it’s possible that not all of your advertising dollars are pulling their weight. It might be that a few of your ad dollars are getting all the results, while much of it is wasted. You could see better results by investing more in the successful parts of the campaign and abandoning those that aren’t bringing in returns. For example, it’s possible that your PPC campaigns are turning a profit, but your organic SEO marketing is having no effect. Or vice versa.

A marketing audit might also reveal that your current marketing campaign is running out of steam. It’s not delivering the impressions, clicks, and conversions it used to. Business isn’t reflecting the decline yet, but it’s time to adjust your strategy before your bottom line suffers.
Finally, your marketing audit might reveal some surprise successes that can be crafted into a future marketing strategy.

How to Conduct an Digital Marketing Audit

You can hire someone to do it for you. Some companies might do this for free, in the hopes of winning your marketing business. But you will get a more honest appraisal if you pay someone to do it.

Or you can conduct your own digital marketing audit like this:

Identify your goals: You can’t judge the success of your digital marketing if you don’t know what it’s trying to accomplish. Are you just trying to increase awareness of your brand? Improve sales at brick-and-mortar locations? Improve online sales? Generate leads? Improve brand identity and loyalty?

Identify your audience: Who are you trying to reach? Take the time to identify your target audience, those who are most likely to be your ideal buyers. This doesn’t always have to take the shape of detailed buyer personas, but you should know generally who you’re trying to reach.

Identify the competition: Who is competing for your buyers’ dollars, time, and/or attention? Many of your marketing metrics are going to be relative to your competition, so if you don’t know who they are, you won’t be able to make any actionable conclusions.

Get data on your content: Check the performance of all your online content. You’ll want to know things like ranking for key searches, page visits, click-through rates, time on page, conversion rates, and more. Do this for your general webpages, PPC landing pages, social media posts, and other types of content. Try to collect as much of this data as possible for competitors.

Analyze your data: Put your data together to try see how well you’re achieving your goals. Also try to find out which parts of your digital marketing efforts are having the biggest impact.

Develop a plan: Take your conclusions and turn them into an actionable plan. Even if it’s just planning a more comprehensive future audit, make a plan to put your insights into action.

Active, Effective Digital Marketing

At VEA Technologies, we are dedicated to providing our clients with digital marketing that is effective now and in the future. That’s why we are committed to performing regular marketing audits for our clients as part of our regular strategy reviews. We talk about the results of these audits with our clients and discuss potential changes so their marketing remains consistently fresh.

If you are looking for a dynamic digital marketing firm, let VEA Technologies take over your marketing. Please contact us today to get started.