Not living your best life on social media and beyond? Time for an audit.
Before you even think about implementing a new strategy across your digital marketing, first you need to look at what you’re currently doing well, not so well, and not at all.
Instead of sweeping it under the rug, a review will set you up to actually achieve your goals online and in your business. Plus, you can stay ahead of your competitors and better target your intended audience with your new digital marketing strategy.
Why Audit Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
Usually, it’s time to audit your digital marketing strategy when you feel like you don’t even have one. The first question that may come to mind before why you should audit may be, “I don’t have a digital marketing strategy. What am I auditing?”
You may not have a strict digital marketing strategy in place (i.e. a wordy document or a neat Asana workspace), but if you’re doing any sort of online marketing, there’s something to audit.
Other reasons you may want to audit, if you’re not convinced already, are:
- Your website traffic is crazy-low or on the decline
- You have a low following on your social media accounts or your engagement is reliant on bots
- The money you are spending on digital marketing feels wasted and your ROI isn’t clear for social media
- You want to optimise what you’re currently doing and get more people following your accounts and opening your email marketing
There’s bound to be more reasons why you’re less than impressed with your digital marketing activities and need an extra boost to your overall strategy. Ready? Let’s get auditing, starting with your SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
According to SEO blog and resource Moz.com, there are five billion searches online each day. Which means, there are people out there searching for your business.
A technical SEO audit by a professional can really magnify your presence online, but if you want to get started with making improvements today, look to how you can use your content to be found online.
Keywords should be driving all of your digital content on your website. Use a tool, such as Google Keyword Planner or Keyword Finder, to search for exactly what your audience is typing into Google to find you.
Is your website Mobile Responsive? If it’s not, you’re living in the dark ages. But if it is, there’s still a chance you may have issues loading certain page elements, which can therefore impact your SEO ranking. Google has a Mobile-Friendly Test tool that will run a report on the responsiveness of your website.
Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions are extremely important to your SEO strategy; they’re the HTML data you provide to Google to find your article or webpage, generally a summary of the information to benefit both visitors and search engines.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the valuable and consistent branded content you product to reach your target audience with the intention of making a sale. A sale, in the case of a venue, would be a booking where said customer found you via your video on cocktail recipes.
The content a business creates for their online audience addresses the first two steps of the buying process:
- Awareness
- Research
Traditional marketing tends to sway audiences to the Consideration and Buying stages, whereas content marketing can have greater reach, credibility, and encourage repeat customers.
Audience Research: do you already know who you’re targeting? And what they’re consuming online? Your digital marketing audit should address exactly who your current audience is and if they’re aligned with who you’re intending to target.
A Content Calendar is the easiest way to keep consistent across all your marketing channels, particularly the content you’re producing for your audience. You can set one up in your social media scheduler, many work with WordPress and YouTube also, or go down a more traditional path, such as Google Calendar or Excel.
Make a list of all the content you’ve made for your online audience. Blog posts, podcasts, videos, photo galleries. All of this content can be useful for the purpose of revitalising (i.e. tweaking it to better the content) or reworking (creating the content again, but in a different format).
Social Media Marketing
A social media audit is necessary for all businesses to commit to at least every 6-12 months. Your presence, and the channels online, are constantly evolving and require new strategies to reach your intended audience.
It’s not news that Facebook and Instagram are regularly adding new game-changing features to their repertoire, such as the introduction of IGTV in mid-2018. According to Instagram, traditional TV is a way of the past and the future is mobile, with mobile video accounting for up to 78% of data usage in 2021.
Identify which Social Networks your audience ‘hangs out’ online. Tip: You don’t need to be on EVERY social media platform to be successful. Stick to where you will gain the most engagement. Instagram may be fantastic for you as a venue as you can visually tell a story online, whereas LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter are text-heavy and tend to be drier.
Next, review your current Social Media Profiles. Take Instagram and Facebook, for example, and ask yourself:
- Am I posting on my accounts daily?
- Do I respond to comments and messages regularly?
- Is my bio or description clear on what my business is about and where we are located? Do we have our phone number, website and address on our account page?
- Am I using geotagging on all my posts? Do my hashtags provide better visibility to my direct audience?
Just some of the questions you can ask yourself when forming a social media audit of your current accounts. They may seem simple questions, but you may find your social media game isn’t totally up to scratch.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Paid advertising is just another form of digital marketing that can boost your visibility and allow customers to find you faster. When talking about online advertising, we’re talking Google AdWords and social media advertising, such as on Facebook and Instagram.
If you are running advertising online, it requires a certain type of vigilance and monitoring so you don’t end up dropping budget on ads that end up having no ROI.
Worst case scenario: you could be running ads that are semi-successful, that provide some ROI, so you keep doing it without the knowledge you could be spending the same amount and achieving much, much greater results.
Let’s start with Targeting, In your audit, be critical of the Geographic location you’re targeting, the demographics, and the device type your audience may be using.
The actual Advertisements can be failing, or barely thriving, for multiple reasons. Poor copy, poor visuals, or a misaligned goal. For Google AdWords, the quality of the ads is calculated by all of this, including the Click-Through-Rate (CTR). Bad CTR? Less chance Google will accept your ‘bid’ and show you up the top of the search for “Best pubs in Sydney”.
Here are a few quick tips to optimise your paid advertising:
- Add in your main keyword to your ad’s headline to increase conversion
- Use a shorter URL as the link to your landing page, anything extremely long or with numbers will look like spam
- Have fun with the description -- you want people to click-through, right? Intrigue them
- Add a clear call-to-action (CTA), tell your audience exactly what you want them to do, i.e. Book a Table, Sign up to our newsletter
- Make sure your landing page isn’t confusing or misleading; creating new, shorter versions of your website specifically for advertising will help with conversion
What to Do with Your Digital Marketing Audit Results?
The analysis part is over, for now. A good digital marketing audit will identify gaps in your digital marketing and help you plan for the future. It will also show you where you’re wasting your time and money, and how to create the content that will get you found online.
Still not sure where to begin? Not a problem, we’ve got your back. Let us show you the path to a more effective digital marketing strategy, so you can spend less time on content creation, and more time doing what you do best: running your business.
