As digital budgets skyrocket, brands need to push themselves towards developing marketing campaigns and systems that help maximize digital investment. Digital marketing teams can often be found managing complex digital platforms and campaigns to help brands save money, increase marketing ROI, and beat the competition. And to achieve that consistently, one has to depend on a regular digital media audit.
In this post, we will help you understand digital audits from inside and out. Let’s get started!
What Is A Digital Media Audit?
A digital media audit is nothing but a complete review of all digital media properties to gauge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, platform, or opportunity. Marketers conduct digital audits to magnify the strengths and weaknesses of existing marketing operations and campaigns to achieve better budget allocation.
You need a digital media audit when:
- You are launching a new business
- You are preparing a product launch
- You have bought a business
- Your existing digital campaigns are inefficient
It is essential that all the available online marketing channels and platforms are utilized for their strengths to reach the set marketing and business goals. Brands that conduct regular digital media audits often end up increasing their profitability and market dominance. But that’s not it.
Here are the other benefits of consistent digital media audits:
- An objective analysis of all the online marketing campaigns and platforms
- Helps develop a comprehensive digital marketing framework in the long run
- Match the industry-specific best practices, overcome competitors, manage customer and employee expectations
- Perfect opportunity to create a roadmap for corporate planning and execution
Steps To Perform A Complete Digital Media Audit
1. Decide the metrics and goals
The first step to a digital audit is figuring out the metrics and goals to measure in a digital marketing campaign. Indeed, Google Analytics shows over 200 metrics to track. But, you will have to narrow the list down to focus on metrics that matter.
Come up with a metric that can be used to check the pulse of your business. Concentrate on the top three metrics only if they show the health of your business and marketing channels. Most importantly, pen down your quarterly, yearly, and channel-wise goals.
2. Collect data from all channels
Once you set the metrics and goals, the next step is to gather all the data from the marketing channels. Collect all the performance data to analyze it in the later stages of the audit. However, at this moment, you should be focusing on the performance of your website, email campaigns, and social media channels.
Pen down the current bounce rates, dwell time, page load times, opt-in rates, click-through rates, and other vital statistics. Gather the open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates from your email marketing campaigns. When it comes to social media, focus on follower counts, likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates.
Once you have the statistics, you can contrast the results with the set marketing and business goals. Find out whether or not the results match your quarterly or monthly, or yearly expectations. In other words, find out whether or not you are happy with the progress of your digital marketing campaigns.
3. Analyze your content marketing strategy
The next crucial step in any digital media audit is to measure the existing content marketing strategy. You will be considering factors like keywords, forms of content, content for each stage of the funnel, content distribution, SEO, link building, lead conversion, and more.
Content is the backbone of any online marketing strategy. However, only 41 percent of the brands have a documented content marketing strategy. This makes it very important to measure the above factors and find out if the current content marketing strategy aligns with the set goals or not.
4. Evaluate and consider competitors
Competition is a significant factor that drives any digital marketing campaign. It is, therefore, crucial that you weigh your competitive environment and include competitor tactics, shortcomings, tools, market shifts, and cultural considerations while conducting a digital media audit.
You must conduct competitor analysis as you will be competing with other brands targeting the same market as you. So, ensure an extensive competitor analysis when you draft a digital marketing campaign. Also, factor in the competitive environment when measuring its progress.
5. Focus on messaging and positioning
Lastly, examine how you position your brand as you communicate the value of your products and services to the audience. Poor messaging and positioning can often lead to stellar products not making through in the market.
Therefore, make sure you deploy consistency and put customer in focus when analyzing your brand’s position. Not just that, compare the value proposition and unique selling proposition with that of your competitors.
Conclusion
Digital media audit is a necessity as it keeps you in the game for the long run. Indeed, running digital media audits can be exhausting especially if you don’t have prior experience. But, don’t worry. Always remember that our digital marketing experts are just a phone call away. Connect with us, and we will help you design a perfect digital media audit sequence exclusively for your brand. Don’t forget to check out other informative posts in the blog!
