Why are Digital Audits Valuable for a Business?

A digital audit is a meticulous review of all media channels, digital activity and resources to determine how well a business is leveraging these assets to meet its marketing goals, and how effective individual components are within current campaigns. 

A digital marketing audit can be a broad inspection of all activity, or it can be broken down into smaller chunks, such as a targeted SEO audit, social or PPC audit, depending on the focus of the business. 

Audits are a highly customisable set of reports that can be tweaked by organisation size, applications, expertise, industry and so on, and they highlight areas of marketing success, causes for concern, technical insights and provide suggestions to propel your campaigns to the next level.

Benefits of Digital Marketing Audits:

Essentially, if a business has an online presence, digital marketing audits are a truly invaluable investment; especially if you hope to achieve conversions or sales from your activity. 

Regardless of the extent of your digital activity, from blog updates to building a social media community, maintaining a LinkedIn presence or running full-blown SEO and PPC campaigns, audits will help you nurture your efforts to reach your goals.

Let’s take a look at how and why an audit will be your most valuable digital marketing ally:

Leverage your marketing strengths

Despite many people believing that the sole purpose of a digital marketing audit is to pinpoint the issues or negatives of an online campaign, a central focus of an audit is to highlight your marketing strengths. Knowing the elements of your campaign that perform well and resonate with your audience allows you to promote these strengths and leverage your resources to enhance them even further.

Audits can help determine what type of content your audience likes, do they react more to blog content, videos, images or infographics, for example. It can also uncover which media platform your audience responds to best, such as website performance, blog posts, social media or email marketing, you can then capitalise on this platform or content type to drive more leads and sales.

Pinpoint weaknesses in your marketing activity

In addition to identifying your marketing efforts’ strengths, digital audits also stress its flaws. 

You might be investing in a lost cause and wasting a considerable sum of money on these marketing efforts. A digital marketing audit will help you learn what segments of your digital marketing strategy are not performing well so you can eliminate or improve them, saving you money and precious time. 

You don’t always have to discard the weak points in your strategy, as audits will help you to discover improvements to implement if there are any.

By conducting a digital marketing audit, you can modify any underperforming initiatives and make them work in your favour. 

Evaluate competitor activity and performance 

For your business to exceed within its industry, evaluating your performance won’t cut it; you must also understand your competitors. Competitor analysis will help you understand the strategies and tactics of your main competitors and help you understand their strengths, weaknesses and any missed opportunities to leverage. 

Audit services will portray how your marketing strategy stands up to your competitors, and help you improve your strengths and discard your weaknesses to become an authority in your industry.

Boost your return on investment

By taking a deep dive into data analytics, full audits can disclose your exact marketing spend and review budgets to see if they are still working for your business. By reviewing successful and unsuccessful elements of your marketing, you can then decide to reallocate budgets into thriving strategies, or overhaul and rethink approaches that are a drain on your return on investment. 

If you notice decreases in areas of your marketing, it does not always mean they are a failure. Reviews are a great force for change, and a digital marketing audit will help you find ways to bolster these weak spots to strengthen your overall performance and, subsequently, your ROI!

Identify content gaps

Your website content should align with the many stages of the buyer journey for your target audience and any content gaps often result in a loss of business leads.

An audit exposes these holes in your existing content so you can update your roadmap and content strategy to satisfy these gaps and create informative, useful and shareable content that your reader is seeking.

A content gap analysis reviews your webpages, landing pages, blog posts, social media, eBooks, downloadable assets and more. Running a gap analysis is paramount to finding holes in your existing content and filling them with valuable assets that could navigate your readers to the point of purchase.

Reach and exceed your business goals

A marketing campaign aims to propel your business towards its goals, whether that is elevating brand awareness, driving leads, persuading sales and beyond. So, if your campaigns are falling by the wayside, your business will probably feel the effects. 

With the performance analysis and data-led recommendations that come from an audit, you can tune up lacklustre elements, pinpoint voids in your current efforts and identify opportunities to surpass competition to propel your business to meet and exceed its goals and maximise return.

SeventhElement’s success formula has been distilled for many years, combining creative thinking, content, activation & digital marketing auditing to deliver results that matter to you. 

Our team are experts in content marketing, SEO and PPC, with ample experience to fertilise your digital home. If you’re looking to nurture your digital footprint; drop us a line.