In this guide you will learn:
- How to audit your digital marketing
- About key best-practices that you should focus on
- Creating an action item list for improvement
Start by Downloading the Free Digital Marketing Audit Template Here:
Why Audit Your Digital Marketing?
What’s working and not working with your digital marketing? What are ways you can improve the functionality and performance of your marketing tools? Our digital marketing audit can help you answer these questions.
Our hope is to guide you through the various sections and questions in the audit to help you assess and understand the current state of your digital assets, and what role they’re playing in the growth and development of your business.
Since you have elected to undertake a digital audit, the following are some signs that point to the need for one, and why it’s necessary:
- Identify and examine all of your digital assets so that you can apply the 80/20 rule later (80% of outcomes or outputs come from 20% of causes or inputs).
- Understand how your business and brand is presented to the world digitally and how it’s perceived.
- Identify problem areas and growth opportunities.
- Gather vital information for your future digital marketing plans.
During the digital marketing audit process, you simply inspect, examine, and analyse the digital assets of your brand to understand its online presence. The audit focuses on these areas: digital branding, your website functionality and content, SEO, and social media. Basically, it’s the sum of every online attempt you make to maintain your brand’s online visibility.
Whenever we do an audit for a company, we always start by opening the questionnaire itself, along with all online properties, like your website, Facebook page, Instagram and Google Business Profile, formerly known as a Google My Business Listing. With all tabs open, you will have quick and easy access to all your online digital assets.
BRANDING
Your brand incorporates everything you do to provide an identity for your business, while motivating and connecting with your audience. By effectively telling the story of your brand, it enables you to stand out to potential customers, while delivering a purpose overall message.
Your company logo is much more than just an image. It’s a point of recognition for your audience and an important foundation for the branding of your company. Your logo needs to convey what you do, who you are, why you do what you do and leave a positive brand impression. A company logo is a symbol of your company’s identity. It creates a first impression of your company and expresses your company’s value all in one. A well-designed logo is an easy way to convey to potential customers that your business is professional, trustworthy, and provides quality goods or services. An effective logo should have a design that conveys your brand personality, a style choice consistent with your identity, your business name, and a relevant colour choice. A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic and simple in form, and it conveys the owner’s intended message.
Do you use the same, or different logos in each of your different properties? An important reason to create consistent branding and marketing is building awareness. Customers are significantly more likely to purchase from a brand they recognize for their consistent image and content schedule, so make sure to maintain both with some regularity. The more consistent your messaging, the more consistent your branding, whether via words, design, offerings or perspective. Your brand should build awareness and develop trust and loyalty with customers.
WEBSITE FUNCTIONALITY
A website’s functionality is described by how easy a user can navigate your site, get the information they need, and/or purchase the product or service they want. Easy accessibility is key. Visitors want to know within a few seconds what your site is about and what you have to offer them. If they have to search all over to find information they will soon give up. A functional website is more likely to attract more visitors, keep them on your site longer, and allow and even help them to convert into leads and eventually customers. By following some of the steps below, you can improve your website’s functionality.
40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a site, so your site needs to load within that time frame. By using the link below, you can find out how long it takes for your website to load. You can run the report at https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
Customers want to know that your website is secure and private. An SSL certificate (your website starts with https:)scrambles data as it flows between your website and its visitors. Everything is encrypted including non-sensitive information, as well as names, passwords and banking details. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, your website will be vulnerable to hackers and Google will warn visitors that your website is not secure. Google also gives priority to websites that have an SSL certificate.
Generally speaking, modern websites aim for a clean, streamlined look, with lots of white space and fonts that are easy to read. Simplicity is key and makes a site more modern in appearance. Modern web design utilises the full area of a user’s screen, so take advantage of full width imagery and photography. Your site must be easy to read, navigate, and understand. The best way to keep visitors glued to your site is through valuable content, good organisation and attractive design.
Make sure to break out your navigation into clear categories and use drop down menus if your website holds a lot of pages. Make it legible and easy to read on any screen.
Making a website that works well on mobile phones is key. Approx 63% of users search via their mobile devices. Responsive design will make your site mobile-friendly, improve the way it looks on devices with both large and small screens, and increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your site. It can also help you improve your rankings in search engines. Use http://responsivetesttool.com to see how your website looks on various devices.
Multiple dedicated pages are for better SEO. Each page of a website can be optimised for different keywords. Since there’s a limited number of keywords you can target on a single page of a website, a downfall of one page sites is that you can’t target as many keywords, which is not great for your SEO.
It is also essential to maintain a dedicated contact page so that (potential) customers can contact you or find your business. It should include both an email address and a contact form for visitors to fill out. You may also choose to include a business address, phone number, or specific employee/department contact information and your social media links. A footer on each page allows easy access and an additional place for your social media links and menu items, as well as house your basic contact information like email, copyright notice and possible call to action button. To increase visibility, add your phone number/email and social media links to both your header and footer, this ensures that visitors can contact you without needing to visit your contact page every time.
Your mobile visitors already have a phone in their hands so a plugin will allow them to call you with one simple touch of the button. No more navigating to the contact page and no more complicated copy/pasting or memorising the phone number! Or, you may want to consider a ‘chatbot’. A chatbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Chatbots interpret and process users’ words or phrases and give an instant pre-set answer.
There are options if you are considering selling on your website. If possible, you could add a plug-in, like Woo-Commerce, to your existing site or consider transferring to an e-commerce specific site like Shopify, so people can purchase products instantly and hurdle free.
Links will often break when changes, updates and upgrades are made to your site. Broken links are frustrating to users and can lead them to give up on your site. They can also make your content come across as unprofessional, untrustworthy or just sloppy. Make checking links part of your regular maintenance tasks.
WEBSITE CONTENT
“Content is the king”, this phrase is sufficient to explain itself, that’s why it is the key to the success of any website. You need to provide useful content to your visitors, that includes targeted keywords that users usually search for in different search engines. When applied it will help to improve website ranking and increase traffic. Keeping your content fresh and up to date will help customers and search engines find you, and increase your SEO ranking.
Keeping content relevant to your business helps answer your audience’s questions, build trust, develop relationships, improve conversions, and generate leads. Today, customers expect high-quality, consistent content from their favourite brands.
There is a lot of opportunity to utilise the Homepage to help explain what your business is about. On your Homepage (above the fold) users should know precisely what the purpose of your site is and how it can help them (benefits). Use a principal headline to communicate your site’s underlying value proposition (what makes your product or service attractive to your customers). A powerful value proposition helps your customers truly understand the value of your company’s products and services. It also helps your ideal customers see how your services benefit them and are their best available option. It’s also creating an overall first impression. There are four essential pieces of information you should have on your homepage: value proposition, differentiation (what makes you different from your competitors), proof (testimonials) and calls to action. It’s still the most highly trafficked, and therefore most important page on your website.
Photos add interest to a page, and more easily engage users than just text. They also show company personality. By adding team photos to your website, will help to give life to your company, make your company seem friendly and inviting, while adding authenticity and credibility to your business. They are also a great way to show off your company culture.
Videos can convey huge amounts of information for potential clients, as well as hugely bolstering your SEO to help you get found in the first place. They can be used as an overview of what your business is all about, who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it, your culture and your space. Videos keep people on your website longer and engage them with your content. People work with people, and video helps people get to know, like and trust you. Videos keep your audience interested, no matter your product or service. Consumers like video because they are easy to digest, entertaining and engaging, and marketers like them because it can give a potentially huge return on investment (ROI) through many channels.
Blogging is a very important part of content marketing. If done consistently, it is one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness, while providing relevant and useful content to your target audience. It’s an inexpensive way for small businesses to drive traffic to their site, enhance inbound marketing efforts and attract more perspective customers.
- It facilitates SEO practices. Each time you publish a post, you’re giving Google and other search engines more content to index, and more content means your website will most likely show up for more searches. Basically, you are casting a bigger, wider net, which increases your chances to catch more prospects.
- It helps drive traffic to your website and helps with conversion. Visitors, and search engines, love fresh content – keep feeding them fresh content and they will come back to your website more often. And every time you have traffic coming to your website through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into leads. These posts can also be directly linked to your Facebook feed.
- It helps establish authority. You can use your blog to answer common questions your visitors might have, or you can use it to showcase featured products, etc. Anytime you write about something, you’re providing new information to your visitors and the more relevant informative your visitors find your website, the more authoritative you sound.
Cross-promoting your content from a blog to your social media sites can help drive traffic to your blog, because it enables sharing. You can share, retweet, and re-pin content on these platforms. This means that followers can also share your content with their friends and family, which helps expose your brand to more people. It’s an excellent way for you to gain new leads
Make sure to have your sign-up for a newsletter in a prominent place so it won’t be missed. A newsletter can provide great value, beyond sales, by informing your customers with interesting content that resonates with them. People don’t buy because you sell, they buy because they trust you, are loyal to you, and are fans of your business.
Offering a lead generator (a discount or free information in pdf format) to visitors who sign up for your newsletter will help to generate leads. A lead generator is a piece of content which is only accessible by completing an action, for example, subscribing to your mailing list.
SEO
The majority of online searches begin with a search engine like Google, in fact, 75 percent of those searches start on Google. SEO or search engine optimization is the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on the Google search. SEO aims to improve your website’s position and visibility in search results pages. Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.
To get an idea of how your website ranks, you can check your website’s SEO score at Google Lighthouse. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more. If you are interested in reviewing the Google Lighthouse report for more details and recommendations, you can run the report at https://web.dev/measure/
To improve your business’s local ranking, make sure you claim/verify your Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business). It’s a free tool that allows you to promote your business profile and business website on Google Search and Maps. With your Google Business Profile account, you can see and connect with your customers, post updates to your business profile, and see how customers are interacting with your business on Google. Google Business Profile is essential for local SEO as it enables your business listing to appear in local search results for queries specific to your products or services. For example, you can probably find local results if you search for “Italian restaurant” from your mobile device. Google will try to show you the kind of nearby restaurant that you’d like to visit. The majority of consumers, around 90%, will first look up a business online (through GBP) before doing business with it.
To maximise how often users find your business in local search results, ensure that your business information in Google Business Profile is accurate, complete, and engaging. Optimise your website and other properties, like Facebook and Instagram with updated descriptions, information and appropriate keywords relating to your business.
One of the most powerful ways to grab a local searcher’s attention is by creating Google Business Profile posts. These posts are almost like mini-ads for your company, products, or services. When you post content directly through your GBP you are sharing relevant information about your local business, which contributes to building your location authority. This tells Google that your business is legit. The more you legitimise your business to Google, the higher ranking you will get.
According to Google, businesses that feature photos on their listings get 42% higher driving direction requests than businesses without photos. While your business description is important, photos allow potential customers to actually visualise their experience with your business and determine whether it’s a good fit for their needs. Visualising gives them a level of predictability that makes engagement with your business more likely. 360 degree photos provide visitors interactivity and a good sense of a place, enabling them to explore your environment.
When a search result shows up in Google, you’ll notice a description under the heading, this is called a meta description. It’s a tag in HTML from an individual web page, of up to about 155 characters, which summarises a page’s content, so optimising it is crucial for on-page SEO.
Encouraging consumers to review your company is an easy way to expand your brand’s reach. Online reviews have increasingly become the front to your digital reputation. Reviews help you get noticed, lead to more sales, improve search engine rankings, inform your business, and convince customers to pick up the phone and call you.
Here is a quick video to show how you can access the link to make asking for reviews incredibly easy or part of your follow up process: https://youtu.be/O2fq-Bh8hRI
Responding to all reviews shows that you value your customers and the feedback that they leave about your business, good or bad. More than simply being the polite thing to do, responding to positive reviews is also a great way to support your marketing efforts, build buzz for your business, inspire customer loyalty, and call more attention to the great parts of your customer experience.
FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE
A Facebook Business page represents a business or brand and showcases the services it provides. It’s similar to a personal profile, but has more marketing and analytics tools available. It serves to help people learn about your business in terms of what you do, how you can be contacted, and where you’re located.
Your Facebook page will have a menu on the left side that allows your customers to view information such as an about page, services, photos, videos, events, reviews, community, shop to sell products, etc. These page tabs can be rearranged in any order from the most important to the least important. Your contact details, opening times, your website URL, and business description should all be completed. Flesh out your ‘About’ section to give visitors a comprehensive idea of you, your business, and what you offer.
Consider a carousel of photos or a video for your Facebook cover to further engage visitors. It enables you to cover more ground and create more of a story. Use your logo as your profile picture. All images and videos should align with your branding and represent the personality and uniqueness of your business. Brand consistency ensures that your brand is easily recognizable across all marketing channels and touch points. This creates a cohesive consistent brand identity, unified experience for both existing and potential customers.
There are a lot more options to consider besides the default ‘Contact Us’ button on the right. Pick one that is most appropriate for your business.
If you sell products add a ‘Shop’ tab to your Facebook page. It is especially useful if you have a Shopify website. This is a free tool that can help you sell more, right in Facebook. It’s a great way to display your products, spark conversation for potential customers through the “message” button, and sell to people on Facebook.
Posting to social media is the most effective marketing solution to increase brand awareness and visibility. When you post regularly on social media, your customers ”see” more of your brand, which helps your business stay top-of-mind to customers. It is a cost-effective solution to marketing your brand and getting it out there where it can reach potential customers. Regular posting, at least 3 to 4 times a week, keeps your audience engaged and coming back for more. Consistency is key in social media marketing for your audience to recognize your brand, grow your audience engagement, reach and build credibility, reputation and brand trust.
Generally speaking, social media account posts want to abide by the rules of thirds: 1/3 promoting your product or services (selling), 1/3 interacting with others (connecting), and 1/3 sharing industry news and tips (providing value) you believe your followers could benefit from.
Use your captions to ask questions and provoke discussion in order to garner more engagement with your content.
When a person takes the time to comment on your post, it’s always a wise idea to reply to that comment. It makes that person feel important and it shows the rest of your fans that you take their comments seriously. Also, by replying you can often get the person to comment again, which boosts the post’s reach.
INSTAGRAM BUSINESS PROFILE
Instagram is brilliant for behind-the-scenes content and sharing the human side of your business. It’s an entirely visual platform, which can give your followers an exclusive peek into life at your company and make them feel a part of your brand. An Instagram business profile provides premium features that will improve usability as a brand and help grow your reach and engagement.
Use your logo as your profile photo. Brand consistency ensures that your brand is easily recognizable across all marketing channels and touch points. This creates a cohesive consistent brand identity, unified experience for both existing and potential customers.
Complete your Instagram bio, found underneath your username. It’s a small summary about yourself or your business (who, where, what and why). Include your contact information, emojis, and more, provided you keep it under 150 characters.
Your contact information (link) tells people what you want them to do, like email you, call you, go to your website or read your blog. Depending on what link you are posting, you may want to add a short note about your link like “Read our Latest Blog post” or “Book your consult”. This is your call to action or your closer. It is the digital method of asking for the sale at the end of your pitch. A strong CTA not only convinces people to act, but it also tells them what to do and how to do it.
Think about developing a content calendar to help in the development and consistency of posting. When you post consistently, at least once per day, the algorithms will favour your posts and more people will see them, resulting in increased engagement. Posting consistently and frequently will not only strengthen your brand, but you’ll build loyal followers that will share and talk about your brand.
Think of maximising the storytelling potential of captions so people who see your posts really know the importance/impact of what you’re sharing. Use hashtags, along with your captions to connect social media content to a specific topic, event, theme, or conversation. Hashtags make it easier to discover posts around specific topics, because hashtags aggregate all social media content with that same hashtag.
Replying to comments left on your Instagram posts serves more than just the purpose of being courteous. Replying to comments can also help more people discover your page, attract buying advertisers, and incentivize more people to engage with your content.
Use Stories, as they get a lot of attention and help users capture a bigger picture of your business. Use them along with regular posting to further engage your customers. They can be behind the scenes pics and opinions of a usual business day.
Use highlights to showcase your most valuable and interesting content and promote your brand. Your highlights live front-and-center on your Instagram profile, so they’re perfect for helping new visitors discover what your company is all about. You can create categories pertaining to your business, like services provided, behind the scenes, process, etc.
ADDITIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS
Social media allows marketers to connect and engage potential customers where they are at: LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and even some of the younger platforms like TikTok. With a strong social media strategy and the ability to create engaging content, marketers can engage their audience. If you have low followers, very few posts and no engagement, some of your social accounts may be a waste of time. Not every social media platform is a good fit for every business, each platform has a mission, purpose, and unique audience. Invest your time in platforms that will reach and engage with your target audience.
The following additional platforms may be worth consideration, depending on your industry or target audience:
Linkedin has potential to market your business, share professional content and engage with industry specific groups. Creating a personal profile is also a place to add credibility with listing your education and additional training/certifications. Not to mention it is another place to link your website which is good for SEO. It will help to create awareness and improve reputation for your business.
YouTube is great, since video is one of the most popular content formats, and it’s regularly shared via social media. Google and other search engines tend to favour video, so sharing video via YouTube with good titles, descriptions and tags is a great way to improve your search engine ranking.
Twitter is great for short bursts of information, things like events, what’s happening now, etc. You want to use it to lead customers to your website. That being said, it may not be the most effective for local audiences.
Pinterest can be one of the best marketing tools out there for artists. Pinterest users’ feeds are all visual, which is perfect for displaying art. But unlike other social media channels, clicking on an image in Pinterest will lead you right to the source, making it so incredibly easy for fans to purchase from you.
TikTok and/or SnapChat could both prove fruitful, as these platforms are popular among GenZ (if that’s your target audience). They require some getting used to, but are great for featuring quick, fun, entertaining bursts of content.
Trip Advisor features millions of reviews and opinions, including both rants and raves about destinations, hotels, attractions, and restaurants. If you’re like most travellers, when planning a trip you appreciate hearing or reading others’ opinions before you choose a place.
CONCLUSION
The Digital Marketing Audit will assist you in gathering necessary, valuable information, and provide a baseline for your brand’s current digital marketing performance. This knowledge will help you to create actionable, effective and logical solutions to enhance your digital effectiveness.
Consistent posting on your platforms, to your target audience, will continue to engage current and potential customers. Educating and helping them, will develop loyal followers and ensure your future and continuous growth.
We hope you found this helpful. If you have questions or want help reviewing your Digital Marketing audit in more detail, book a consultation with us.
