You’ve realized the importance of enhancing your marketing strategy and are looking into a digital marketing audit. This discussion will break down what you can expect to gain out of a marketing consultation, and takeaways to build upon.
Whether you’re looking to grow your sales department, enhance your marketing practices, or gain a technical deep dive into your business, an audit provides a different perspective that you might not otherwise come across as you’re entrenched in day-to-day operations.
If you’re looking at a digital marketing audit, the first aspect the marketing consultant will audit is your website. Your website is the foundation of your overall marketing strategy and therefore will be priority.
The main aspects that the audit will dive into include but aren’t limited to:
- Page speed
The longer your page takes to load, the more likely your audience is to drop off before they even consume any of your content. You’ll be able to identify if your page is loading in the recommended 3 seconds or less, and have actionable steps for how to improve the overall load time.
- Organic traffic
Which search terms and keywords are organically driving traffic to your website, and where is there room for improvement? Identifying which terms users are finding your organization with is revealing because it tells you if you’re communicating your message and value-add as effectively as possible.
What terms are your direct competitors gaining traffic from, and how can your organization take some of that traffic away from them? Your competitors may be generating more traffic and communicating the exact value-add that your organization provides, it’s helpful to understand competitor insight in order to better address your audience.
The best part about leveraging a digital marketing consultant is that you’re not required to pay for any of the tools that these audits require, but are still able to receive all of the insight as they’ll have the tools for you (no small detail when these tools can range upward of $400/month!).
Overall Content Audit
As we approach the end of 2020, the digital era will only continue to grow as trends such as working remotely are taking shape. Creating high quality content that captures your audiences’ attention will be more crucial going forward.
The main forms of content creation include but aren’t limited to:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Case Studies
- eBooks
- User-generated content
- Checklists
- Memes
- Testimonials/Reviews
- Whitepapers
- How-to Guides/Academies
- Influencers/Paid Ad Content
By analyzing your overall content and content creation strategy, you’ll receive recommendations as to what can be done to improve/expand upon what you already have, and generate new content moving forward.
One of the biggest aspects that a marketing consultant will help you with is implementing an A/B testing practice to help you better understand what your audience is responding best to.
By testing multiple variants of the content you’re producing, you’ll be able to analyze what your audience finds the most valuable rather than just what you initially perceived that they would find the most valuable; Distinguishing between the two is critical.
Overall you’ll receive a content strategy that lays out how to produce quality content and remain consistent with your overall approach in order to be successful.
Digital Advertising Audit
There are two options depending on whether or not you’re running digital advertisements.
- If you’re running digital advertisements, you’ll receive an audit that helps you improve and better target your digital ads.
- If you’re not running digital ads, you’ll receive insights on ads that your competitors are running to better understand the traffic that they’re generating from the ads, as well as what the ads look like and are targeting overall.
Some of the top channels that digital advertisements are run on include:
- YouTube
Where your advertising dollars generate the greatest ROI depends on your industry and niche. As an example, Instagram is better known for B2C (business-to-consumer), while LinkedIn might be a better platform for B2B (business-to-business).
The main goal is generating the greatest return on investment for each dollar that you’re spending on digital advertisements; Even though spending money on a digital marketing audit may be the last thing you want to do after paying for ads, a consultant will help you maximize ROI and can be well worth the investment.
Technical Marketing Tool Audit
Last but certainly not least comes the technical audit that breaks down what technology you’re using to drive marketing, and how to further improve it.
“We shape our tools, and then afterward our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan
Marketers will argue that your digital marketing strategy is only as good as the tools you’re deploying them with, but the same can be said for more in business than just a marketing department.
The tools you use are meant to complement your organizational skills and help you grow; By understanding if you’re using the right tools, or if there are better options can be beneficial in best deploying your marketing resources.
A technical audit will seek to understand:
- Which CRM (customer relationship management) tool you use
- What CMS (content management system) your website runs on
- What email marketing software and workflows are set up
- Integration between all of, or as most of above as possible
Your marketing technology should work together rather than in silos that need to be manually executed on. By leveraging technology that communicates with one another, you’ll be able to enhance marketing automation and provide a better experience to not just your customers, but your organization as a whole.
Final Report
Don’t be overwhelmed with all of the audits that we went over in this discussion. An effective digital marketing consultant will provide you with unified reporting that ties everything together.
Ultimately, you’ll review everything in a report that breaks down what has performed well, where your gaps/improvement areas are, and list the aspects in order of priority to generate the greatest business results.
Just as your technical tools are being audited, your marketing consultant will have the right tools in place to provide you with enhanced data visualizations to drive execution.
Schedule your free digital marketing audit and start taking control of your overall marketing strategy.
Gary McConnell Co-founded Rubicom Digital in 2019 with a goal of providing digital marketing consulting services in the B2B space.
Gary continues to serve as the Marketing Director of a Data Center-focused IT Provider, VirtuIT Systems.