Your digital presence has never been so critical, especially in a post COVID-19 world where consumers are wanting to conduct more and more business online. Understanding how your customers are engaging with your brand in a digital format and identifying ways to improve can easily grow your online revenue in the longer term. And let’s face it, the landscape continues to evolve so there’s always ways that you can improve the customer journey and make your brand more appealing. But how do you identify just what is working and not have to revamp your whole approach? This is where a digital audit can assist.
We often see brands have a strong visual presence online (think just pretty pictures) without truly understanding how the elements of the marketing mix work together to drive growth. Yes, beautiful photos are the sizzle, but there’s more to it than that to drive growth online and it’s often a combination of how you’re utilising the tools in a digital toolkit that can drive your growth. There’s no magic formula and each brand is different, but stopping and evaluating how you are performing to identify quick wins can make a big difference.
What is a digital audit?
The Mastermind team often recommends that a digital audit is the first step in engaging a new partnership. Why? Because it’s a great way to have a health check and be able to get a view for where your brands digital footprint is at and where there can be quick wins to improve.
A digital audit is simply a report to help identify your brands strengths and weaknesses online and work out ways to improve. It looks at what is working and how you can improve your brands digital presence.
There are lots of tools available to do this, but our Mastermind process is comprehensive and generally takes us 2-3 days to review your website, your email and social media (paid and organic) as part of a broader digital ecosystem. Yes, we know there are agencies who offer this service for free, but it’s more comprehensive than just running a report – this process is often at the beginning of a relationship and it’s a key way of understanding what a brands goals are and how the business is operating.
We look under the digital bonnet of your brand looking at how you’re viewed on the algorithms, what sources are driving the most traffic, how you can better convert. It’s often in this process that quick wins can be identified – eg not having a simple sign up mechanism in place to grow email subscriptions or for our liquor clients not having the right profanity filters in place for social to be able to ensure responsible marketing.
At times the solution can be better tracking, ensuring that your team can read the data or putting tools like Google Tag Manager in place to track key events and metrics to get a sense of your digital conversions.
What are the benefits?
- Improved efficiency in marketing spend
- Understanding of how the digital ecosystem fits together to drive sales or bookings
- Transparency around measurement
- Identification of ways to utilise the marketing toolkit online to drive growth
- More effective use of online spend in the long term (minimise wastage).
What should you expect as an outcome?
At the end of the process you’re provided with a detailed report of what is working and where you need to focus your activities to have some quick wins. Depending on your internal resources that’s often enough to set brands up for digital success. We’ve done this initial digital audit for brands like Grappa Ristorante e Bar, Swinging Bridge Wines or Jonah’s where the team then has the knowledge internally on what to do next. At other times our services need to be engaged further for strategies and ongoing implementation. It’s very much a tailored approach as for us it’s all about an ongoing partnership.
What do you need to do to prepare for the process?
The devil is often in the detail. The more that you can articulate your broader digital goals and objectives, the better the understanding of what you’re trying to achieve with relevant recommendations able to be made. Typically we’d ask for temporary access to your google analytics account, any online booking systems, email and social media accounts. It then allows us to get a more comprehensive view over the last 12 months.
How long does the process take?
Depending on the size of your brand it generally takes a few days to analyse the data available and then compile a report and indicative costings for next steps. Sound like something that would be valuable for your brand? Contact the Mastermind team to establish how we can assist in driving your brands growth online. There may actually be some grants and rebates available to help fund your path to success.
