How to Audit Your 2022 Marketing Strategy

Now that we’re almost at the mid-point of 2022, it will soon be time to start building strategy and developing budgets for the coming year. It’s also a great time to review your business’s overall performance as it relates to your marketing strategy and ad spend.

Taking the time to perform an analysis now can help you find and correct weak spots along with looking for different ideas and solutions to employ now as well as for the coming year.

We recommend performing audits for key areas within the marketing and digital technology arena to ensure that your company is recognizing the full benefits of a strong marketing strategy.

That includes looking at your website design and development to ensure an up-to-date website that is fully functional, fast, and creates a user experience that exceeds your customers’ expectations. Equally important, you need to perform an SEO audit to make sure your site is being ranked on the first page of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) so that it can be easily found.

Prior to starting any audit process, it’s important that you are up-to-date on the latest trends and changes in digital technology so that you can make valid comparisons when examining your marketing strategy. It may be prudent to engage a digital marketing expert at this point to be sure nothing is overlooked.

Audit Your 2022 Marketing Strategy

Let’s look at several of the different audits that will enhance your marketing strategy and have you in top form going into 2023.

Website Audit

Just like your car benefits from an occasional tune-up so too will your website. In fact, in 2021, Google implemented a broad update that inaugurated Core Web Vitals (CWV), a change that greatly impacted a large number of sites that weren’t making the grade. Speed-related and mobile-focused, CWV can have significant effects on your SERP ranking and, thereby, your business.

Take the time to perform a complete website audit looking at everything from CWV to your content strategy and implementation, links, ‘Call to Action’ buttons, page loading speed, and overall site performance. Regular site auditing and maintenance are key to maximize conversion rates and sales.

SEO Audit

An SEO audit will compare your current SEO marketing strategy and keywords against current and projected search trends. Both on-page SEO and off-page SEO should be included in the audit with speed and mobile friendliness top of mind.

For on-page SEO:

• Keyword optimization
• Title tags and meta descriptions
• Internal linking
• Content quality and use of Pillar Pages
• Alt image tags
• Accessibility
• URL and site architecture

For off-page SEO:

• Backlinks
• Domain authority
• Local SEO
• Click-thru-rate
• Social media

SEO plays an important role in website success and should include all ecommerce and shopping components as well. Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy all use SEO to drive results.

Customer Feedback through Surveys

Customer feedback is always important and should be encouraged following any encounter. If the customer loved your service, then great. If not, then isn’t it better to know up front and have the opportunity to remedy the situation?

During an audit, you can review feedback collected over the year or solicit fresh feedback at the time. It’s a good opportunity to gather useful, current data along with gaining better insights into your customers including their problems and pain points. Some information might be usable immediately, while the rest can help in building better buyer personas for future campaigns.

Operational Audit

When evaluating a strategy, take the time to assess the various players in the game. A good audit should focus on productivity and look for areas to improve. Finding ways to free up time with automation and technology should be a top goal. Also, consider improving the skills of your team making them more effective as individuals.

Compliance Audit

Many people don’t take the time to think about compliance until they are being sued or having issues with a licensing bureau due to non-compliance. Either case is stressful and disruptive, which is why a compliance audit should be included as a step in an overall audit.

Ask these questions:

• Is all the software being used licensed properly?
• Does the business website comply with Americans with Disabilities (ADA) standards?
• Are all the images credited properly?

Your company may have other compliance audit issues that you must meet, so add them to the list.

Current Strategy Audit

Last, but not least, take the time to review the current marketing strategy considering everything else learned during the audit. After tuning up the website, updating keywords, gaining more customer data, and improving the automation and efficiency, can you also improve the strategy as well?

Rather than looking to stand pat, focus on maximizing the best performing aspects of the strategy and spending fewer resources on areas not producing the desired results.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is this — auditing your 2022 Marketing Strategy is a great idea. Every business should spend more time auditing strategies to maximize performance. Most don’t simply because of a lack of time. Regular audits can also uncover small problems before they have a chance to become bigger ones and hinder your overall success.

You are an expert in your business and may not have the time, knowledge, or resources to do an adequate audit of your B2C or B2B marketing strategy, whether in whole or one individual component, e.g., SEO or ADA Accessibility on your site.

Rather than skip this process, talk with Lounge Lizard. We have a team of marketing experts with core experience in all things marketing who are available to perform audits and help suggest strategy enhancements. Digital marketing and your marketing strategy is too important and website audits too valuable to put off until later.

Be sure to check back every week for great new Lounge Lizard blog articles.