When you run a company, you typically review your employees periodically, and many companies will call those 360-degree reviews. You look at what initiatives and strategies are working to maintain a successful business internally and externally, as well as identify and find solutions for gaps or loopholes that can contribute to the strategy for the following year.
A digital marketing assessment has the same goal. You’ve got to analyze the 360-degree view of what’s going on with your digital marketing and the state of your online presence on an annual or biannual basis to figure out where you can improve. What ideas and tools could make your digital marketing program better so you can continue to grow your brand?
This assessment can include a lot of different areas where your company is reaching or communicating with your audience, clients, or customers. It could range from investigating what’s going on with your other social media platforms, your email marketing campaigns, your company’s website, and search engine optimization (SEO), or even any paid advertising campaigns you might be running.
Let’s dive deeper into these key digital marketing channels to learn how to assess their value and opportunities.
Assess Your Brand Identity and Message
Most companies have some type of presence both online and offline. You might have your offline presence, particularly if you are in or market for a brick-and-mortar business with a physical office, storefront, or retail space. The question is, does your online presence align with your offline, “real world” presence?
Make sure that your brand identity is aligned and synchronized. If there is communication or visual material where you’re putting yourself or your brand in front of customers in the real world, that should match digitally. That’s especially important if you’re launching any type of remarketing plans.
Traditional marketing is one physical area where the look and feel of face-to-face marketing should be similar to your digital channels. People would physically see with billboards, TV commercials, direct mail, print adverts. What they see there should be congruent with what they see on your website, social media, emails, and online advertising. So, if you’re in a company with a team that’s handling traditional marketing, but you handle the digital side, ensure you’re having consistent conversations and ensuring that objectives align between the different campaigns and channels.
Assess Your Website
Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing program. So, looking at your website is crucial to your digital marketing assessment. Now, what should you be looking for specifically?
Well, this is where we personally like to dig into Google Analytics—or whatever your other forum or tool is that’s giving you insights on traffic coming to your website. Assess what landing pages on your website get the most traffic, and if those are the pages you intend for people to land on. Are people converting on your website?
If you don’t know how to measure conversions, let’s put that on the checklist in your assessment as an area of opportunity! You need to figure out how to measure conversions on your website, and “conversions” could be people filling out contact forms, completing purchases, requesting demos, anything where someone takes an action that generates a lead or prospect for you. Once you understand how your analytics work, you can start looking at them to understand and ask further questions:
- What can you learn about your audience when you look at your website analytics?
- What landing pages are people entering your website on?
- Which traffic channels are people coming from when visiting your website?
- Is Facebook delivering more traffic? Is it email campaigns? Are people landing through organic searches? Are people coming to your website directly?
Another reason we want to pay attention to conversions is that it might also help you identify if there is a user experience issue. So, when you’re assessing your website, also determine how user-friendly and accessible it is:
- Is it easy for someone to get to your homepage and navigate their way around the website?
- Is it easy for them to get to your contact form or to make a purchase, whatever your call-to-action (CTA) is?
- Is your CTA even present and clear on your website?
Those are key areas you need to think about.
Assess Your SEO
As you’re looking at your website in Google Analytics, there is another area that you need to address in your assessment, which is your SEO. For most companies, Google plays a major role in this because Google still owns nearly 80% of the market share when it comes to search engines. So, you need to pay attention to keywords that people are typing in that trigger your site to appear. Now, here’s a little tip about that:
Google Analytics does not reveal all of that information to you.
As an area of opportunity if you haven’t done this already, we highly recommend that your company has an account set up on Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools.
You can use Google Search Console to uncover hidden keywords that Google Analytics will not show you. This will help you better understand what keywords people are clicking on when they do a search on Google.com that triggers your site to appear. Now, likewise, if you find that a lot of visitors come to your site through other search engines, such as Yahoo or Bing, Bing has its own version of Webmaster Tools, and you can sign up and do the exact same thing.
These tools give you access to lots of data, but you’ve got to understand what to do with it to make it applicable for your business. As part of your assessment, take a big picture view of that data, looking at the trends over the past 6 to 12 months to really get a better understanding.
- Again, what are the high traffic pages on your site, even down to blog, articles, or other recurring generated content pages?
- What are the keywords?
- Where’s your traffic coming from?
Those are some of the basics.
Assess Your Social Media
Another major area you want to cover in your digital marketing audit is really understanding your social media marketing. Social media has a few different parts because, typically, social media and content run hand-in-hand.
So, you might have to assess the content creation side of things. What type of content are you delivering that’s creating the most value? This could be on social networks as well as other channels. Then,, when that content is getting published within social media platforms, what’s performing well? How do you look at what to do with your social media and where to adjust?
First, assess each social network individually. Look at your accounts with fresh eyes. Literally, go into it as a visitor. For example, on LinkedIn, there’s a button that says “view as visitor” that allows you to see your LinkedIn business page as a visitor rather than an admin.
Assess your “About” section. Is it congruent with your description across channels, website, and traditional material? Do you have anything pinned or featured at the top of your page, the first thing you want people to see when they land there? Is it time to refresh your cover image?
Back to conversions, how have you configured the CTA button you’re sending people to click on? That’s critical, because depending on your industry, this can determine how customers or clients choose to access you. We’ve found that in some sectors, a chat button is much better than trying to send people to your website because it allows you to get into a conversation with your prospect or lead immediately. In turn, it allows them to contact you and freely ask questions. So, test out the variables and assess which one you’re currently doing, and which might make more sense.
As you’re assessing social media, you also want to pay attention to the trends and the direction that social media or a particular social network is headed in, or projected to head in, over the next few months. For example, the focus of the past several years has been video. But beyond post type, what story is your brand telling with its content? What are you sharing? Who are you talking to? What trends can you benefit from that fit your company? Right now, the huge trend is TikTok videos and Instagram Reels. Within those are subsets of trends every week, day, month of the year, different challenges that people are doing, and more. Do those fit your company? Can you do that?
Those are the questions you want to ask yourself during your digital marketing assessment to distinguish what’s right for you. So, with social media, again, you’re looking at settings and new features, examining content and post types, trends, and maybe even post style. Does the look or the feel of how we’re posting seem current? Is it up to date? Is there anything you might recognize as time to change or re-address?
Assess Your Email Campaigns
Another channel you need to examine is whether your company is running any email campaigns. Do email campaigns align with your overall messaging? Is the identity piece there and updated? Then, evaluate the metrics on the email marketing side. What do your open rates look like? Are you getting clicks from the email campaign to your website? And if so, then how do you continuously improve on that or play on what went well, such as drip campaigns or trigger automations? If not, where do you have areas of opportunity?
Assess Your Public Relations
Public Relations (PR) and visibility, specifically online, are important to assess so that you can maintain control or help shape the narrative around your company. Ensure you monitor your brand’s presence and what people say about you online. This could be individual journalists, publications, or even your online reviews from various social networks or rating sites. Is your company being seen in the light you want it to be seen? You might have to set up some searches to keep tabs on this. Some great tools to help you find media mentions are:
Log Your Assessment
Now, how do you put all this together? Our recommendation, and rule of thumb here at Go Getter, is a simple spreadsheet. Here’s how we lay ours out:
- First, we outline all the key areas that we’re going to be assessing.
- Next, in one column on our spreadsheet, we identify missed opportunities we found.
- In another column, we outline a solution.
- Then, we might have a few other columns dedicated to turning that solution into something actionable. For example, which team member(s) will own this opportunity, and in what time frame are they going to do it?
We usually also leave some space any other special notes that we need to enter in relation to turning the assessment into action items that can then roll into our strategy to make it even better. To help you get started, download a free copy of our digital marketing assessment spreadsheet below!
Conducting a digital marketing assessment is one of the most critical steps you can take when you’re planning out your year and looking at how to continuously improve the digital marketing presence of your company. If you have any questions on how to customize a digital marketing assessment to your unique business goals, or would like to explore training options for keeping up with conducting an assessment on a regular basis, please contact us.