Digital audits: the secret weapon behind every great marketing strategy
When businesses are locked in a race to stay ahead of the competition and standout in the eyes of their target audience, it's not enough to simply have a website and post regularly via social media.
You need to adopt a strategic and data-driven approach to your digital marketing.
But before you can effectively implement this, it’s essential to fully understand exactly how your business is performing digitally, at every consumer touch point. Without this 360-degree view of your current online performance, it’s impossible to take the next steps needed for growth.
Enter the comprehensive digital audit.
This is essentially a full-body health check for your business, examining your brand’s vital stats online, and benchmarking your data with those of competitors and the wider industry.
A digital audit will not just forensically analyse your website – checking for SEO weaknesses, site speed issues, user-experience pinch points and the quality of your website content – but it will also assess your local SEO footprint, social media profiles and content strategy, your approach to newsletters, the effectiveness of your Google or social media ads, and ultimately how seamlessly you tie all of these different elements together.
Unlocking and scrutinising your company’s raw data on this scale, and distilling this down into clearly digestible action points, arms you with the information and next steps you need to pivot your business for growth.
But if you still need a little more convincing – take a read of these 7 key reasons why a full digital audit should be at the top of your to-do list ahead of signing off on any new marketing push or change in strategy:
Enabling a Data-Driven Understanding of Your Audience’s Behaviour
Success online is always limited by the extent to which brands truly understand their target audience, and whether these businesses are set up digitally to tap into their browsing and purchasing preferences.
A full digital marketing audit allows you to access invaluable data about your audience, including how they discover and interact with your brand, how they navigate your website, what potentially puts them off, and ultimately what turns them from a potential lead into a new sale or client.
This information empowers you to make data-driven decisions, ensuring your marketing efforts are aligned with your target audience's needs and preferences.
Delivering Cost Efficiencies
Securing the best Return on Ad Spend possible is what every marketer strives for.
By analysing past and present campaigns, a digital audit will identify underperforming target audiences, ads or channels, enabling you to confidently reallocate resources to strategies that deliver better results whilst identifying ways to improve those underperforming channels or campaigns.
Enhancing User Experience
Your website acts as your brand digital showcase or storefront, and as such is often the first interaction a customer has with your business. This means a friction-free and engaging experience here is paramount.
A digital marketing audit will expose any usability issues, technical glitches, or design flaws that might be putting potential customers or clients off and, by removing these conversion blockers, will help unlock sales and increase customer satisfaction.
Optimising Your Content Strategy
No digital marketing strategy can succeed without killer content. Here an audit helps to evaluate your existing content strategy, highlighting gaps, outdated information, or opportunities for improvements to boost engagement and to help the business better-resonate with its target audience.
By fine-tuning your content – checking you’re still targeting the right keywords to drive the most useful search traffic for your business – you can better funnel your target audience directly onto the most relevant pages of your website, shortening user journeys and improving user experience. This will ultimately boost your chance of converting users into a new client or loyal customer.
Improving SEO Performance
Without an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy in place, your business will be rendered undiscoverable via Google’s search results.
By taking a fine-tooth comb to your website's SEO set-up – including keyword optimisation within both your content (as above) and metadata, backlink quality, and site structure – you will ensure any weaknesses are swiftly ironed out, leading to higher search engine rankings and both increased and more relevant organic traffic landing on your website.
Boosting Your Social Media Presence
Social media offers the perfect way to interact with your target audience where they are already browsing and spending their time online. But if your business is not taking an authentic, engaging and strategic approach to your social media activities, you won’t cut through the noise.
A full digital audit evaluates your social media profiles in their entirety – analysing tone of voice, content quality, and engagement levels – before identifying how you can better align your content to meet your target audience’s preferences, highlighting potential gaps in the audience you are trying to reach, and revealing ways to build a more engaged and loyal audience.
Ensuring Measurable Results
Establishing a baseline for your current performance, a digital audit means as you digest and implement the action points recommended you will be able to clearly track progress and measure the impact of your efforts.
Acting as an invaluable tool that provides a roadmap to success, digital audits help business to identify opportunities, streamline their efforts, and stay ahead of the competition.
Ultimately, this isn't just about securing short-term gains as part of your next product launch or marketing push; it's an upfront investment in long-term growth.
So, what are you waiting for? Get your digital audit booked in now, before you’re faced with making marketing decisions you don’t feel you have the full data to support, and to ensure you’re offering your potential clients and customers the best possible experience with your brand online.
