In the world of marketing, achieving success can often feel like trying to solve a big, complex puzzle.
Every strategy you use, every effort you make, all contributes to the big picture in some way and, with so much going on, it can often go overlooked if a part of the puzzle is missing. Even if you do know that something is missing from your marketing efforts, with everything else going on around you, it can be extremely difficult to determine just what that special something is.
What you need is a well-informed and effective digital marketing strategy that’s based on objective analysis.
You need a roadmap that lays out the most effective marketing strategies and shows you how to take your existing strategy and transform it for success.
Marketing Audits: Finding the Missing Pieces of the Puzzle
No one (aside from hamsters) wants to run in place for very long.
If something isn’t working, it’s natural for us to want to fix it, to not stick around and waste time in a problem space.
We naturally want to find a solution and jump to it, and so that's what we do. Unfortunately, that often leads to aimless jumping, lily pad to lily pad, unsure of where our next move is supposed to be and what the jump is that will finally lead us to success.
The key to success, however, the key to knowing where to jump is to ignore that inclination to immediately back out of a problem space and to sit with it instead.
Why would we want to stick around in a problem space? To learn from it, friend!
To take the time to see what’s not going right. Define the needs you have, define the needs your customer has, and take a good, comprehensive, and unflinching look at what you’re doing.
This is why conducting a marketing audit is critical to your success. In order to find where your current marketing activities may be lacking, here’s what you need to examine:
Your Competition
Most brands start with a competitive audit.
A competitive audit is a strategic assessment that involves analyzing and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your business or your product compared to those of your competitors.
It will examine everything from products and services to digital marketing campaigns, customer experience, pricing, positioning, and market share.
This is to get some insight into your competitor’s strategies, see what they’re doing that works for them and see what you can do better or how you can differentiate yourself from them to better improve your competitive position in the market.
Your Brand
A brand audit analyzes the strength of your current marketing strategies.
Here, you’ll take a good look at your brand and website goals to identify any potential disconnects between your site and your brand, with particular focus on the following:
- Brand identity — The distinct visual and written elements that define how your brand presents itself to the world. This includes your brand script, brand guide book, and your copywriting tone of voice.
- Values — Your brand’s core beliefs and principles. What you stand for most.
- Services — The range of products or offerings that your brand provides to your customers.
- Customer Experience — The overall journey and interaction that your customers have had with your brand from the first point of contact to post-purchase support.
During your brand audit, you’ll also take another look at your ICPs and buyer personas to see if you are truly hitting the mark when it comes to your target audience.
Your Website
A website audit will take a deep dive into your website’s and landing page’s performance, content, structure, and overall functionality and user experience.
Here, you’ll look for ways to improve your:
- On-page content — The quality and relevance of your website’s content, including how it aligns with your target audience’s needs.
- Site speed — Your web’s loading times. You want to improve this because slow pages can lead to high bounce rates and a poor user experience.
- User experience — How easy your website is to navigate and whether or not your visitors can quickly find what they’re looking for and accomplish what they came to do.
- Backlink profiles — Examine the quality and relevance of your backlinks to see if there are any that could be negatively impacting your site’s SEO ranking.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies — To check if your meta tags, headers, URLs, and content are using the right keywords to help your website rank higher in search engine results.
Your Content
A content audit is a thorough analysis of all of the content on your website from your product descriptions to your blog posts, your images, videos, and whatever else you’re using in your current content marketing or email marketing strategies.
The audit will evaluate your content’s quality, relevance, and how your it’s performing, keeping a sharp eye out for outdated, incorrect, duplicate, or low-quality content that could be holding you back or driving away potential customers.
Your Paid Ads & Social Media
A paid ads and social media audit will take a good, hard look at your social media pages to see how they are performing, as well as check on the overall effectiveness of any paid advertising campaigns (Google Ads, YouTube Ads, social media marketing ads, etc.) you have going on.
It’ll look at factors like click-through rates, conversion rates, ad spending, and ROI to see where you can save money and optimize your ad campaigns to get you the results you want.
Make It Actionable: Marketing Strategy
Conducting the audits mentioned above will provide you with an objective view of your processes, your brand, and your competition.
And once you’ve identified where you’re lacking, it’s time to begin turning your audit results into an actionable strategy.
Here’s how:
Precise Messaging
Dust off and update your personas and ICPs of your target audience, so you’ll have a clearer understanding of who it is that you’re trying to convince to buy your product.
This will let you refine your messaging and better paint your customer as the hero of his/her story.
Then you can more effectively hit their pain points, show them how your product or service is the answer to their problem, and how you’re the guide they need to find the success they’re looking for!
Get Yourself in the Competition
Your competitive audit will make it clearer to see what it is you have to do (or not do!) to make your presence known in the market.
Why would someone choose you instead of all the other companies? What is it you can do to make sure that they do?
Find out, quantify it, and create a plan to maximize your unique place in the market.
Expert Branding
Having a unique brand can help to differentiate yourself from the competition.
So, what is it that makes you special? What is it that will make your brand stand out to your potential customers?
Is it your brand voice? Your slogan? Your logo? Your brand colors or the images and illustrations that you use in your collateral?
Whatever it is, capitalize on it because having a memorable brand is what could possibly lead your customers to choose you over your competitors and build that brand loyalty that your company will need to succeed.
A Website That Engages and Converts
Your website needs to function as a part of your brand, as well as serve as a powerful tool to grow your business and engage with your customers.
It needs to be an information hub where your customers can access detailed information about your products and services and contact you whenever need be. It also needs to help generate leads, help you market your products, and showcase your company’s values!
Make your website a seamless user experience, where everything is easy to find and read, from no matter what device your visitors are using. And it’s not all about aesthetics either. In addition to looking good and being easy to use, you should also make sure your website is letting you gather insights on your visitor’s behavior and preferences to help you better understand what your target audience wants.
A great website is not just a luxury, after all, it’s a crucial asset for your brand’s success.
Optimized Content, Social Media, and Paid Campaigns
A strong social media presence is vital in today’s world.
Your socials should be engaging with your customers frequently, have a friendly and helpful brand voice, and offer valuable content, because when those stars align, customers naturally gravitate toward your brand.
It’s that simple. And once they do, optimize your content to keep them there. Great content encourages your followers will share, repost, and help you gain even more followers.
And the more followers you have, the farther your ad reach is going to go. And not just a set-it-and-forget-it ad campaign, one that is tweaked for maximum ROI, that targets the precise demographics most likely to engage and convert and retargets with precision to drive conversions and boost your overall bottom line.
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Your Next Steps
If all of this has you nodding your head, then why don’t we get to work? It’s never too soon to start prepping your brand to meet your business goals in 2024 and if you’re ready to do so, then here’s how you can get started today.
- Step 1: Schedule a custom demo to see how Designity can help you fix your marketing strategy for 2024.
- Step 2: Schedule a kick-off call with your designated Creative Director to discuss your first project.
- Step 3: Put your new marketing plan into action!
Are you ready to fix your marketing strategies?
