Reading Time: ~4 Mins | Written By: Sydney Vardja
The sun is shining. Birds are chirping. And flowers are blooming. If you hadn’t guessed already—spring has arrived!
We’ve all heard the term ‘spring cleaning.’ It refers to the practice of thoroughly cleaning your house in the springtime.
But as we clean our houses, there’s another important space in our lives that we forget to clean: our marketing strategies. Just as our houses get dusty and cluttered, housing objects that no longer serve us—our marketing efforts do too.
It’s always important to ensure that your marketing efforts remain up-to-date with your company and its current actions. One way to do this is through a marketing audit.
Marketing audits are in-depth reviews of your company and its current marketing initiatives and impact. And here’s why you need one this season.
SEO
Your marketing audit will examine the current state of your SEO efforts. SEO, an acronym for search engine optimization, is the process of making your site better for search engines. Search engines are particular about many different elements of websites, including keywords, meta titles, and meta descriptions. When we neglect to consider SEO preferences, our site will be less likely to result on the SERP (search engine results page).
Another important consideration is the use of keywords in your digital marketing efforts. Keywords are topics that define what your content is about. From an SEO perspective, they are the words and phrases that users enter into the SERP. As a website and blog owner, it’s important to utilize keywords that users are searching for.
Your marketing audit will provide you with the keywords that your brand should be bidding on. The words themselves will also be accompanied by a range of numbers which represent the search volume per month for that particular word or phrase. The “Low,” “Medium” and “High” represents the competition bidding on that word or phrase.
Keyword examples:
- Digital project | 10 – 100 | Low
- Digital transformation | 1K – 10K | Medium
- Digital plan | 1K – 10K | High
Social Media
The social media part of your marketing audit will examine your social media objectives. Understanding the goals you want to achieve through the use of social media is vital. Next, it will look at the KPIs that will help determine whether these goals are being achieved through your executed strategy. Without KPIs, we would allocate much of our time to ineffective campaigns.
Your social media audit will also focus on channel messaging. How does your Facebook messaging differ from your Instagram messaging—or does it not? If your messaging is identical, it’s important to understand how content is digested differently on diverse platforms and the different audiences on each platform. Recommended hashtags will also help to determine the best ways to reach your target audience and stay relevant in your industry.
The social media section of your marketing audit will also provide a content calendar to showcase how industry experts would utilize social media if they were managing your brand.
Digital Ads
Your marketing audit will also look at the structure of your digital ads—in other words, how your campaigns and groups have been created. This will also determine the exact campaign settings being used and how beneficial they are for your goals. These include the campaign type and bid strategy that your brand is using. How your brand has defined its audience will also be important to look at as this can affect the exact audience that your brand is targeting.
The results and efficiency of your digital campaigns will also be examined. This includes conversion rate, click-through rate, cost per acquisition, cost per click, and any other metric related to efficiency. This is key when it comes to measuring campaign KPIs.
Moreover, the digital ads part of your marketing audit will examine the quality of your ads themselves. Looking at both creative aspects and the actual copy will help determine whether the content you are putting out there is aligned with the goals of your campaign.
Public Relations (PR)
The PR section of your marketing audit will provide a detailed outline of important PR elements like earned and paid media plans, award categories, influencer partnerships, experiential marketing ideas, and more. A personalized media contact list will also be sourced and provided for you to gain an understanding of which journalists your brand should be pitching to. A sample pitch will accompany this to showcase how pitching would best work for your brand.
Similar to the social media part of your marketing audit, key messaging, KPIs, and strategy objectives will not be neglected. This part of the audit will conclude with PR action steps to provide clients with an outline of where and how to start gaining brand awareness. This is key considering PR efforts can be competitive and therefore discouraging.
If you’re interested in leveraging a marketing audit this spring, we highly suggest checking out Canada’s Digital Adoption Program (CDAP), which offers a 90% reimbursable grant. Jelly Digital Marketing & PR is proud to be an official digital advisor. Contact us today for more information on how to work with our team for your spring marketing audit! We look forward to working with you.
Categories:
Marketing Insights
