How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit

Posted on September 6, 2024 in Blog

How is your marketing really doing? The best way to find out is to perform a detailed audit of marketing processes and performance. We’ve put together an internal marketing audit checklist for in-house marketing professionals.

What Is a Marketing Audit?

A marketing audit identifies your organization’s strengths and weaknesses across marketing channels and gauges how well your marketing strategy is working. For most companies, it’s not simply an audit of the marketing department; the audit often (and should!) include sales team representatives and company leadership for a more holistic view of marketing’s effectiveness and brand representation.

Marketing audits vary in scope and goals, but they should always have these three characteristics:

Objective. It isn’t easy to deliver an unbiased internal audit of the sales and marketing department when they’re the ones conducting the audit. That’s why many organizations opt to work with an agency that knows how to do a marketing audit without preconceptions or an angle.
Structured. Every audit should have an outline and map out key issues for analysis before it begins. This makes the process replicable in the future and allows you to measure progress. Start with an agreed-upon marketing audit checklist and use that framework as the starting point, but don’t ignore discoveries that add value to the report!
Routine. A single audit might provide a snapshot of current marketing efforts, but you’ll need to repeat the process bi-annually or annually to measure improvement. Some teams also conduct audits at the campaign level, providing bite-sized and frequent analysis to set up the next campaign for success.

How to Conduct a Marketing Audit

A well-run marketing audit has the structure, scope and data to improve marketing performance. One advantage of a marketing audit is that it can be shaped in different ways for different insights. It can focus on a specific channel and/or compare marketing channels, as well as the teams and processes running those channels, ultimately informing future strategy.

Here’s how to do a digital marketing audit in just seven steps!

Your Digital Marketing Audit Checklist

1. Decide on the scope of your audit.

Choose what your audit will cover, and draw clear lines around the subject. We recommend targeting specific campaigns, processes, or marketing channels; where these efforts overlap, you’ll need to decide what information is included and what isn’t relevant to the report. As always, what you choose to include should be based on organizational priorities such as reducing costs, growing brand awareness, or targeting a specific competitor.

2. Set your goals and KPIs.

Identify realistic, achievable goals for the audit. As you conduct your research, make sure the data and findings connect back to the primary goal of the audit. Select a few clear goals, such as those below, and choose KPIs to pair them with:

Meet X ROI
Determine the three most cost-effective marketing channels
Outperform X competitor in organic search for Y topic
Improve internal delivery time to X days

3. Confirm accurate data for benchmarks.

Find the data you need to gut-check real-world performance against your goals. And make sure that data is clean! One of the most common early discoveries of an internal marketing audit is that you’re working with bad numbers. When Oneupweb supports an organization with a marketing audit, we often refine tracking and analytics to improve data quality.

Jot down performance benchmarks that will help you gauge progress after your audit and resulting action items. Then, start analyzing what may have contributed to good performance or poor performance in the past. You can do this by organizing performance data by session channel groupings, landing pages, source / medium, geography, and other important dimensions.

4. Design roles, responsibilities, and unified focus.

Depending on the scope of the audit, you may need to pull in extra muscle to divide and conquer. Assign the analysis of specific marketing channels to team members who are in the best position to collect, organize, and distill platform-specific information. Some responsibilities will be obvious; your social media team should audit your social media, paid media will evaluate Google Ads, and so on.

Give each member of your auditing team unique tasks, but don’t forget to also unify them with the same focus areas so that you can compare performance across channels. Unifying focuses may be performance in areas such as these:

Return on investment
Audience and demographics
Brand awareness and reach
Internal processes
Gaps in skills, resources, and technologies

Each team may source data from different tools or reports to complete their mission, so it’s important to align on measurement standards before everyone gets started. Decide on how to measure traffic (landing page sessions vs. total pageviews) and conversions (purchases vs. dollar value), and the precise period your marketing audit will cover.

5. Assess your best competitor (if it makes sense).

Use your top competitor and/or industry benchmarks to gauge what’s working and what needs work. Depending on the scope of your audit and publicly available information, the competitive component of your marketing audit may include:

Keyword positioning – Who ranks higher for valuable shared keywords?
Ad spend – Based on tools like Google Ads and Semrush, who is spending more on PPC?
Social presence – Who has more followers, posts more often, or has higher engagement?
Messaging – Do offerings differ? Are there missed opportunities to promote what you already offer?
Pricing – Who charges more, offers more promotions, or bundles services?
Customer journey – How hard is it to convert from various digital properties? How delightful is it?

6. Organize your findings.

Throughout your research, you’ll find gaps in your marketing strategy or process. You’ll see areas where competitors outperform your efforts. That’s good! Each observation is an opportunity to improve. Work with your auditing team to organize these discoveries into a central location and pair each finding with a plan of action.

Here are a few examples:

Competitor pricing – We charge $X less than a competitor for Y service. We should test increasing prices with new customers for two months to determine effects.
Process – We spend X hours creating each email newsletter. We should reduce production time by Y hours by adjusting the process [in a specific manner].
Paid media – Our average cost per acquisition is $X. Over the next six months, we should reduce CPA by $Y by adding refining geo-targeting of display campaigns and testing lookalike audiences for social ads based on our our customer list.

Changes rarely happen without a solid plan. It’s especially helpful if the action items are specific, time-bound and organized in your project management system with people assigned to subtasks!

7. Track your progress.

Regroup after the next campaign, quarter, or year. Did you meet your goals? Even if you did, look for incremental ways to improve those KPIs. If you haven’t met goals, consider other tactics to get you over the line. If you’re out of ideas, we can help!

Finally, remember that one of the key benefits of a marketing audit is improved efficiency. Especially helpful for small and scrappy teams, audits determine what efforts to stick with and what to let go. In the long run, audits sharpen performance, improve results, and reduce unnecessary work – you just have to put in work up front!

Put Fresh Eyes on Your Marketing Efforts

Oneupweb has analyzed, audited, and improved marketing performance for over twenty-five years. There’s nothing like a fresh perspective from an industry leader to identify new ways of getting things done! Allow us to bring in experienced designers, developers, account managers and cross-channel strategists to deliver a comprehensive view of your marketing operations and map out improvements. Take the guesswork out of marketing; get in touch or call (231) 922-9977 today to learn more.