When creating a digital marketing strategy for your company, you absolutely must perform a digital marketing audit. Regardless of whether you are in B2B or B2C, the idea of a frank examination of your company’s marketing initiatives is unsettling. It’s unpleasant to have to confront your company’s flaws. So you’re tempted to push on without stopping to assess the situation.

However, doing so will ruin your business. All the priceless resources you’ve put into your business will be lost forever, and stakeholders and investors will be furious with you.

Therefore, you want to do a digital marketing audit as soon as possible. It gives you the chance to pause briefly and gauge your progress or lack thereof. You determine the advantages, disadvantages, difficulties, and potential for growth of your brand. After that, you adjust your route and keep your company on track. You raise the likelihood of success while decreasing the likelihood of failure.

This article will walk you through the process of conducting a marketing audit.

• What is a Digital Marketing Audit
• How do you do a Digital Marketing Audit?
• What Should be Included in a Digital Marketing Audit?
• How do you do a Marketing Audit?
• What are the Elements of Marketing Audit?

What is a Digital Marketing Audit

A digital marketing audit is analyzing and reviewing every action and strategy that a business has taken to enhance its online presence in order to make inferences from the outcomes.

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A number of questions, including What is the business model?, How to attract leads and customers?, What are your more or less effective channels?, and How are the marketing tactics implemented integrated? will be addressed during this process.

They will be helpful due to doing frequent web marketing audits because:

• They will allow to obtain an objective vision on the results of the business and the marketing strategies to detect possible opportunities for improvement.
• They will favor the fact of making better marketing decisions and, in addition, setting priorities in an appropriate way.
• They will enable the fact of improving the presence of the brand on the internet and directing it towards those channels that give better results.
• They will improve the company’s results by identifying possible problems and opportunities, in addition to aligning digital actions with the business model.

A sound audit makes recommendations for a strategy to improve the performance of the business.

The following four situations call for doing a marketing audit:

You want to launch a new business

A marketing audit is essential when starting a new business. It enables you to assess your strengths and weaknesses. You receive information on how to set up your company to take advantage of current opportunities. By using your resources wisely, you lower the chance that you’ll lose your investment.

You want to introduce a new product

It’s best to test your marketing strategies and market first before releasing a new product to boost your chances of success. You’ll choose the most appropriate platforms and messaging for the new product.

You’ve bought an existing business

When a business changes hands, it’s the ideal time to evaluate marketing efforts. Utilize the audit’s findings as the brand’s new owner to expand upon its prior triumphs and close any performance gaps. Or you might think that the only viable course of action is a complete rebrand.

You’re stuck, or things aren’t working

Admitting that is acceptable. Your company might hit a wall. Not everything goes as planned. When your marketing campaign is lagging, it’s time to review your tactics. You’ll learn how to cut the knots and set your business free to thrive.

Whatever the circumstances, it’s obvious that a marketing audit belongs in your strategic marketing workflow.

How do you do a Digital Marketing Audit?

All facets of digital marketing, including content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and on-site optimization, must be examined for this audit.

Auditing Content And Content Marketing

There is a reason you put in a lot of work to make material that people want to share, but where are you going with it? Knowing what you want this material to accomplish for the company is just as crucial as not having any irrational expectations for it.

Which of your pieces has performed the best, and which have been entirely ignored? Which articles have garnered the most social media engagement? Which ones have received the most shares? You want to expand on them and make use of them to increase your influence.

In a similar vein, remove any old or subpar content you may have on your blog. Edit all of the outdated stuff and add new links if you want to maintain it for ranking reasons.

Auditing social media performance

Clear goals regarding where the social media strategy will take a brand many months from now are essential, but over time, these goals can become hazy, if not outright unrealistic.

In three months, I want a million subscribers. conceivable but unlikely A lot of my content is intended to become viral. Again, conceivable but unlikely It takes skill to develop the correct social media goals, and different industries may have different key performance indicators.

However, in general, firms must confirm:

• Has the traffic from your social media page(s) to the website risen? If yes, by how much. And, if no, your social efforts are clearly not paying off.
• What are you generating more of in terms of traffic — repeat visitors or new visitors? It should ideally be a mix of two.
• How long are people staying on the website?
• Is your presence on social generating engagement?
• Has the brand awareness increased?
• How many leads have you generated through social media?

Auditing SEO

The results should show that you have been performing in-depth SEO work for some time.

A good SEO plan shouldn’t in any way result in a drop in the website’s search ranks, but rather a significant increase. For business owners, this is not something that is immediately visible. Don’t just assume that if you continue to perform SEO as usual, you will move up the Google rankings.

Google adjusts its search algorithm frequently, and occasionally these updates cause unprepared firms to lose ground in the ranks. Following the Hummingbird upgrade, many people were unable to discover for several months whether or not their websites had been penalized.

What Should be Included in a Digital Marketing Audit?

It’s crucial to note that practically every auditor will provide a unique service in line with their particular areas of competence. Your audit will probably have a social focus if you work with a person who specializes in social media. Your workflows and campaigns may be reviewed by a digital audit if you collaborate with an agency that specializes in marketing automation.

However, a thorough digital marketing audit should often include some variation of these elements:

Quantitative Analysis

Experts may access the most popular digital platforms and data through a quantitative analysis of your digital portfolio, which enables them to make recommendations about what is or is not performing. Through the prism of metrics, auditors examine activities on platforms like Google Analytics, PPC ad reports, social media metrics, historical SEO ranking data, CRM data and reports, and e-commerce purchase data.

Qualitative Analysis

Auditors skilled in important facets of digital marketing will evaluate the effectiveness of current initiatives in light of industry norms and best practices. A qualitative analysis examines factors such as website design and user experience (UX), calls to action, brand consistency and messaging, social media content, email content and messaging, lead generation forms and accessibility, and information and experience related to e-commerce.

Marketing Channel Breakdown

A marketing channel breakdown is a condensed view of each of your digital platforms. This provides a clear, comprehensive view of the tools being used, their function, and the best ways to use them to accomplish objectives.

Competitive Analysis

A competition analysis should be a component of a digital marketing audit. Depending on the level, a quick competitive study is a comparison of a company’s digital activities with those of competitors that have been identified by the industry. A competitor study can provide opportunities for a business to stand out from the competition and expand its market share.

Priority Recommendations

Priority suggestions emphasize the quick actions that should be taken by an organization to build on the good and fix any issues found during the digital marketing audit.

Multi-Channel Tactics

You should offer tactical suggestions for an organization’s main digital platforms in your audit. A keyword strategy, content medium strategy, content type recommendations, calls to action, where to increase or decrease focus, messaging suggestions, and software recommendations are a few examples of these techniques.

Long Term Strategy

A thorough long-term strategy can be created as a foundation for constructing an organization’s digital marketing strategy based on audit findings. To develop a forward-thinking strategy that directs digital marketing activities over the long run, a long-term strategy should take a comprehensive look at the market and the company.

Two-year Timeline

A high-level strategy plan that identifies the most important areas for investment for a firm over the course of the next two years. A strategic schedule that is in accordance with organization goals is a terrific addition to a digital marketing audit, whether it be for a website makeover or lead generation campaign.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

To verify the efficacy of ongoing or long-term strategies, certain digital marketing audits will include the identification of critical performance metrics that organizations should be aware of and monitoring. For each KPI, an auditor may in some situations also offer reasonable target targets.

Website Audit

A website audit is a digital crawl of the primary website and landing pages of an organization to identify potential growth areas. Website audits can encompass a variety of tasks, such as finding broken links, reporting on SEO performance, making suggestions for speed optimization, determining keyword ranking and backlinks, and much more.

Accessibility Audit

Their ability to communicate with people who are impacted by a range of disabilities is a growing issue of concern for many organizations. An accessibility audit evaluates the usability of your digital marketing initiatives and offers suggestions for lowering obstacles to accessibility for individuals with impairments. This is significant for businesses when adhering to federal regulations regarding digital accessibility compliance.

Internal Governance Audit

The internal governance audit, while not a crucial part of many digital marketing audits, aids in connecting areas of potential among individuals in charge of overseeing an organization’s online presence. The Auditor will examine internal digital marketing processes through interviews and observations and provide recommendations on how to enhance the organizational structure, team member abilities, job positions, project management, and quality assurance procedures.

Internal Use of Digital Assets Audit

Allowing an auditor to analyze and offer comments on the internal software used by an organization adds a lot of value to any audit of digital marketing. In order to maintain efficiency throughout an organization’s internal processes, this audit examines how technology is used for communication, project management, team management, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and other tools.

How do you do a Marketing Audit?

A marketing audit is a methodical, unbiased examination of the marketing function inside an organization to determine whether marketing systems are accurate, pertinent, trustworthy, and in line with established procedures and best practices. In order to improve marketing outcomes or operational consistency, marketers can use this review to assess whether marketing strategies, methods, systems, or processes need to be changed.

A typical misunderstanding is that a marketing audit is equivalent to or comparable to a planning procedure. Not at all. Though it may even serve as a catalyst for marketing planning, it should inform plans.

An effective marketing audit will identify both the areas that are working well and those that need improvement. In the end, a marketing audit helps marketers to base decisions on factual information rather than intuition. Because the marketing audit is methodical and objective, we refer to it as systematic.

Based on relative importance, a marketing audit’s breadth and depth can change. It may be so comprehensive as to include the complete marketing function. As an alternative, it might be a more narrowly focused audit of a single area, like a content audit or an SEO audit.

The marketing audit process aids your business in analyzing and assessing its B2B marketing strategy, initiatives, objectives, and outcomes. Even though it takes time, the outcomes can be instructive and may:

• Focus your communication of a consistent message to the right customers
• Reveal new, unknown or neglected markets
• Help fine-tune current strategies and plans to help increase market share

Here are the eight steps for conducting a marketing audit to capture the information a marketer needs about their company and how they do business.

1. Assemble an Overview Of Your Company

The details to include are:

• Company location
• Date established
• Sales history
• Number of employees
• Key personnel
• Chronology of company events like mergers, acquisitions and divestitures
• An estimation of the current awareness level of the company
• An estimate of the perception of your company among your buying influencers

2. Describe Your Market Goals and Objectives

They can be concepts like:

• Increase company visibility
• Increase audience size
• Differentiate from the competition
• Increase or maintain market share 
• Generate qualified sales leads or
• Increase usage within existing customers

List your goals and objectives as being;

• Long-term, with 6 – 8 goals listed in priority order to be accomplished in the next two years
• Short-term, with a 1 – 2 goals to be accomplished in the next 12 months

3. Describe Your Current Customers

Include information like:

• Job titles or functions, industry or SIC codes, geographic location, company size and other demographic, ethnic or behavioural descriptions
• Size of your current customer audience.

4. Describe Customers You’d Like to Target

Include the same type of information used in 3 but also include:

• If your target customers are outside of your usual industry, geography or size of current customers
• Any internal or external factors that have changed in your business or industry causing you to target a particular group
• A behaviour that needs to be present for re-targeting to occur
• The size of your target customer audience

5. Describe Your Product or Service

Describe these in terms of their purpose, features, benefits, pricing, sizing and distribution methods. Also include:

• Strength or weakness as compared to the competition 
• Any economic, legal, social, technical, seasonal or governmental factors that affect the product/service 
• What the current awareness level is as well as the perception of your product/service 
• Sales or market share history and any changes over time

6. Describe Your Past Business or Marketing Encounters

Describe what has:

• Helped grow your business as well as what has not helped grow your business 
• Not been tried but might have helped 
• Your competition has been doing to grow their business.

7. Identify Three to Six Competitors

Include the company name and location.  Describe their products/services in terms of their:  

• Features
• Benefits
• Pricing
• Sizing
• Distribution methods
• Sales or market share history
• Your competition’s strategy for the near future

8. Begin to Outline a Communication Plan

Begin to list current and future media sources, if costs are fixed annual costs and what funds are available for new efforts for:

• Advertising routes such as broadcast, print, out-of-home and online advertising
• Promotional vehicles like website, collateral, direct marketing, interactive and online marketing
• Media relation routes such as media contacts, public relations and articles
• Event vehicles like trade shows, special events, seminars and webinars
• Analytic vehicles like databases, market research and tracking systems
• List any promotional medium considered to be the most effective to date.

Once this information is written down on paper, you can refer back to it as your roadmap to achieving your marketing goals and objects for the coming year. And as new ideas pop up, this document can help remind you of the big picture. Minor adjustments can be made along the way as changes are bound to occur in sales, customer retention and product development throughout the year.

What are the Elements of Marketing Audit?

Marketing audits allow marketers to obtain a greater understanding of the marketing environment, identify root causes, and develop more effective business objectives-related tactics.

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Marketing audits employ actual data and facts to determine which marketing initiatives are functioning well and which poorly. They evaluate the effectiveness with which the company utilizes its resources to boost performance.

So what qualities make up marketing audits? A marketing audit often has four essential components:

“Periodic” indicates that the marketing audit should be carried out frequently, not just in times of need for the business. To prevent any overlook that compromises the productivity of the business, do this. Companies can better satisfy market needs by adjusting and adapting their marketing tactics as a result of routine audits.

“Comprehensive” implies that an audit should be exhaustive and cover every aspect of marketing. It is the antithesis of a functional marketing audit, which examines just one aspect of marketing (for example, product development, sales, marketing tactics, etc.). A functional audit is less effective than a comprehensive audit at locating the problem’s source.

The term “systematic” describes how an audit is conducted in a “systematic and structured” manner. To find areas for improvement, a marketing audit should evaluate the marketing environment, goals, and tactics.

Since they are “independent,” marketing audits ought to be impartial. The audits should be conducted by an unbiased professional or organization. When reviewing marketing performance internally, the marketing specialist should be open and objective.

Elements of a marketing audit can include:

A SWOT analysis: This is an analysis of marketing strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. Understanding what you are good at or lacking and what gaps and opportunities you can fill or capitalize on to attract more customers is essential.

Market research: A marketing audit should also include market research to collect opinions about the marketing campaign. This research will allow the company to understand the motivation behind customers’ actions.

Competitive analysis: Competitive analysis is the study of competitors in an industry or business sector marketers use to uncover which tools and strategies they utilize to attract customers. It also shows marketers what elements competitors are missing that they can provide.