January 16, 2024
It's time to clean up your digital marketing strategy, get rid of anything that doesn't spark joy, and hold onto the things that bring something genuinely special to your business.
What Exactly is a Digital Marketing Audit, Anyway?
A digital marketing audit allows you to identify the marketing techniques that are actually working and those that are not. During your digital marketing audit, you will review every aspect of your marketing strategy to see which is really crucial and which is an expensive waste of your time and resources. Instead of spending money on strategies and platforms that don’t work, the focus can shift to those that do.
Why exactly should you care about a digital marketing audit? How does a digital marketing audit work, anyway? The reality is, a digital marketing audit has several real benefits that make it well worth the effort.
1. Discover what your business is doing well with a digital marketing audit. Identify key success metrics (i.e. cost per acquisition and referral figures) to track the performance of your existing marketing strategy, then take action by doing more of the good stuff and adapting to areas in need of attention.
2. Find shortfalls in your current strategy. Rather than simply hoping for the best, you'll actively identify any shortcomings, so you can correct any issues and drive better results. Without a digital marketing audit, you’d simply be stumbling around in the dark. For example, you might find your ad budget isn’t delivering the results you expected. Learn from the shortfall and improve output by redirecting the ad budget elsewhere.
3. Be more deliberate about your marketing strategy. A digital marketing audit gives you an opportunity to look at your current strategy as well as your competitors’. By taking a more holistic view of your strategy, you develop a better awareness that shapes your future digital marketing efforts.
4. Improve ROI and accelerate growth. Are you ready to see better returns on your marketing investment? Only by reassessing and refining your current approach can you make sure you’re on target to reach and smash through your marketing goals.
Sounds great, but how do you actually conduct a digital marketing audit? Examining all available data at once is enough to make anyone go bananas!
Luckily, we can help you understand the aspects you actually need to examine to create the perfect marketing strategy.
Before you dive in and start looking at data, start by reviewing the foundations of your strategy, and answer some simple questions:
What are your goals? You need to review any existing marketing objectives, set ambitious targets, and think about how you’ll measure the success of your renewed marketing strategy. Once you’ve determined one or two clear goals, you can evaluate each aspect of your strategy against how well they’re supporting your targets.
Are you spreading yourself too thin? Do you have enough budget? Make sure you know the answer to those questions before you move forward. Are you suffering from low engagement on any of your marketing channels? If so, this may be a sign you’re spreading yourself too thin.
Which products or services are driving the most revenue? If you have multiple propositions, take a look at the products that are doing the best for your business. Carefully consider which products and/or services deliver the highest return on your investment.
Which audiences are driving the most revenue? Is your messaging aligned to your audience and the right product? If not, this is a crucial area to improve! The better your message resonates with your audience, the higher the ultimate return on your investment.
Next, look at the marketing channels you use. Are you using the most appropriate channels to target your audience?
Each channel has unique advantages and disadvantages. Consider:
Organic. Organic includes SEO techniques that help you naturally climb search engine rankings, these may involve creating your own blog, videos, and infographics, as well as providing guest posts or content hosted elsewhere that brings traffic to your site.
Organic can also mean driving unpaid traffic from social channels. Paid search. Paid ads allow you to reach a broader audience and target prospects at the beginning of the sales journey who are searching for content, a product, or service in your industry. With Google AdWords, you appear at the top of the search results, which helps drive traffic to your site, especially if you haven't mastered the SEO game.
Social media advertising: Which social media pages are appropriate to run ads for your business? Think about how you can target your audience with laser focus. Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram let you create paid ads to target users by age group, location, interests, gender -- you name it. Email: Your email list is a great way to reach potential customers, it also helps you engage with inactive customers and bring former customers back to your website to see what you have to offer.
Have you focused on optimising your conversion rates? A conversion rate optimisation strategy is a critical part of your digital marketing efforts. Ensure your content and website are continuously tweaked/tested to drive the best possible results. When thinking about CRO, start by looking at your website and landing pages. Does it adequately represent your brand and support your marketing goals? Can potential customers find the information they need to move through the sales funnel and ultimately convert? Do the landing pages reflect the message that was conveyed on the ad they clicked? You need to make sure you provide content that helps build relationships and clearly explains your products or services.
Make sure you ask these questions for each of your marketing channels:
Your digital marketing audit checklist should cover a variety of points for each channel. Let’s cover that checklist in more detail:
Who are you attempting to reach? You may have a wide audience or an incredibly niche market you want to target, whichever it is,it's important that you and your marketing team clearly understand your audience and can focus on their needs.
Whether it’s SEO, paid ads, social media or email, make sure you’re putting your business in front of the right people. Do you have the right value proposition for your audience? For example, if you’re promoting a B2B proposition, you may target the decision-maker on LinkedIn, but the user on Facebook. To check this, it would be good to go through your customer base and see if the audiences you’re targeting align with the users or buyers of your product.
Look at your buyer personas and make sure your marketing strategy supports their needs, pain points, and values. If you are targeting several markets, make sure you have separated your audiences or leverage data to identify new, high-value, sub-audiences.
What’s your main message? With any form of communication, be it an ad or blog article, you should focus on one clear message, and it shouldn't always be "Our products are number one!"
Focus on your customer value proposition or, in other words, what sets your product apart and how your services solve customers' pain points. Marketing messages should always be clear and concise. If you can't easily define the message of an ad or piece of content, your customers won't be able to either. Tune your communications to fit an individual prospect’s position in the marketing funnel. Put yourself in their shoes and ask what messages would catch your interest at each stage of the marketing funnel.
Do customers actively engage with your message or are they simply scrolling past? Do they take the time to watch a video through to the end, or do they leave halfway through? Are they commenting or liking your content? Or clicking through to your website?
Advertisements that actively engage customers often have a much greater reach and far more significant impact on your customers, which naturally leads to higher conversion rates and more sales. Impressions tell you how many times your content appears on social media, organic or paid searches. They tell you how many people saw your ad, search result or landing page and alongside the number of clicks, you can determine how effective your activity is. Click-through rates show the ratio of users who click on a specific link, compared to the overall number of users who viewed a page, email, or advertisement. High impressions with low click-through-rates could mean that your ad, or landing page, didn’t hit the right notes and wasn’t relevant to your audience. We often use CTRs as a way to measure results for a/b testing ads.
How much does your marketing activity cost? Remember, you aren't just looking at the cost in terms of how much you spent on paid ads. Marketing budgets include the costs to create supporting collateral, such as images, infographics, blog posts, landing pages etc. Pay attention to capital cost vs. CPC or cost per impression. You might have a lower cost per click, but the overall costs may be depleting your total budget and impacting your ability to broaden your campaign.
Take a look at your marketing budget. Is it adequate to your business's needs? If you have a tight marketing budget, you may need to prioritise the most effective channel or narrow your focus to a single audience. As your budget grows, you can expand across other channels and adopt a cross-channel marketing strategy.
How often do your advertisements, blog posts, or emails successfully convert your audience? If your conversion rates are falling, chances are, there is a disconnect between your message and your target audience. Crucially, is your marketing activity delivering the financial returns (ROI) you desire?
By now, you’ve probably started to identify some issues or areas of your campaigns that aren’t performing as well as originally hoped. When we conduct digital marketing audits for our clients, we typically see the following issues: Ad-hoc campaigns that prevent a seamless customer journey.
A fully integrated, omnichannel campaign helps you support customers throughout the entire journey. Typically, potential customers need to see a brand at least seven times before they take action. Unfortunately, some marketing teams create campaigns on an ad-hoc basis, which leaves customers confused and allows them to drop out throughout the sales funnel. Think about the length of your sales cycle.
Are you losing any customers who showed an interest in your brand but have fallen off the radar? Not A/B testing How will you know what works without measured tests? A/B testing allows you to trial different headlines, messaging and much more to find the best option. Underpinning your strategy with data, rather than gut-feeling, goes a long way towards achieving better results. No onboarding strategy?
Once customers have joined your funnel, you need a way to nurture these leads to turn them into paying customers. This might include remarketing, email marketing, chatbots, and Facebook messenger, among other strategies. Forget about clear results. If you’re spending money on marketing, you need to know it’s working. Collect quantitative data on how visitors engage with your content and brand, otherwise your marketing strategy will fail to convert. You might look at:
One wrong step can be your fintechs last shot. Conducting a digital marketing audit can be difficult but will go a long way toward improving your overall marketing efforts and your business. If you wanna give your fintech the best chance of success, you need a fintech marketing agency that hears where you want to go and knows how to get there. Most agencies think they can just jump into the jungle and figure things out in fintech. Most agencies run into silo problems, compliance issues, and high customer acquisition costs. But we’re not like most. Get in contact with us today to see how we can help.
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