Have you ever considered undertaking a digital audit of your organisation? Do you know what this would cover?
There is no one standard structure of a digital audit but typically it is a qualatitive and quantatitive evidence based report on your key digital infrastrucuture, typically around marketing elements such as your website, social media and email estates.
The report should be personalised to your business’ industry, strategic goals, and history. Audits should go into your digital data to work out what has and has not worked well for your company. This data is then used to provide you with recommendations of actions to take to improve your digital marketing strategy.
Why should I use a digital audit?
An audit will help you to meet your digital marketing goals. Without an audit, it can be difficult to pin down what steps you need to take to achieve your goals, or how to prioritise these actions.
What should a digital audit include?
Analytics
The key element of any digital audit is the quantitive analysis of your digital marketing. Typically this would involve things like Google Analytics and Social Media analytics to evaluate how your website and social media are performing and email marketing stats to inform you what you are currently doing around emails and seeing if open rates, link clicks etc can tell you on how to improve your email marketing.
Customer Experience Journey
Understanding all of your customer’s touchpoints with your organisation’s product and services can be a vital part of a digital audit. Why not map out all of the human and digital touchpoints with your organisations’s services so you can see all the possible bottlenecks to then understand how digital elements could help you in refining this process and refining your marketing strategy.
Outline your aims
The first step is to determine your company aims. What are your long term aims? What did you want to achieve and when? How close are you to the goal?
Once you’ve revisited your aim, look at how your digital portfolio can assist you in achieving these goals.
Digital Portfolio
Another critical element of the audit is to actually understand what you have and how you are using it. It may sound silly but it can be very easy to simply engage with a variety of marketing elements like social media, email marketing without ever looking at how you are using them in a joined up way. It might be, as an organisation, you don’t even know what elements you are using! The first stop here would be list what you have and how you are using them and then perform further analysis on how they are performing. Some of the items you might consider, include :-
- Website design: is your website easy to navigate, well designed, and quick to load? Does it have many broken links?
- Brand image: does your brand have a cohesive online image across different channels, including consistent graphics?
- Social media content: are your posts reaching your intended audience, and more importantly are they leading to website engagement and sales?
- Email design and effectiveness: are your email campaigns designed well, and are your customers opening them?
- E-commerce performance: if you have an online shop, how good is the user experience?
- SEO: is your website high enough in search engines for a set of key phrases. Analyse what these key phrases are for your organisation and see how your website performs.
What are the next steps after a digital audit?
A digital audit should come complete with recommendations based on its findings. So, by the end of your audit, you should have an understanding of how you can build on the successful elements of your digital marketing. You should also understand how you can improve in areas that aren’t performing as well as they could be. In short, you should now have a solid idea of how you can meet your goals. This might include a timeline of when you should invest in things like a website redesign. Tactics should be specific to your main digital marketing channels.
Contact Us
Please contact me at matthew.morling@communityactionsuffolk.org.uk or on 01473 345321 and i’d be happy to have a discussion about anything in this area.