How a Digital Marketing Strategy Audit Improves User Experience

A digital marketing strategy audit is like a health check — essential and something you need to repeat regularly. Digital marketing is a fast-moving sphere; if you stop for a while, you effectively go backward. 

If you want to keep customers coming back, you need to be creating interesting and relevant content.

You also need to build a smooth experience with no barriers to their engagement. We'll dig into how a meaningful digital marketing strategy audit can help improve the user experience (UX).

Article Shortcuts: 

• When to Conduct a Digital Marketing Strategy Audit
• 4 Steps for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy Audit
• How Digital Marketing Strategy Audits Improve User Experience
• FAQs

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy Audit?

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Think of all the digital marketing channels your business uses to get its message out there. Now, think of how successful each of those channels is. There, that's a digital marketing strategy audit. Done. 

OK, there's more to it than that. A digital marketing strategy audit looks at what a business is doing with its digital marketing campaign output and evaluates its effectiveness.

It can be an extremely detailed SOC 2 framework style document. Or it could be more ad hoc. Whatever shape it takes, it should include certain ingredients.

What Does a Digital Marketing Strategy Audit Include?

A digital marketing audit will break a business's digital marketing efforts into component channels. From there, you can then look into the results — customer engagement and conversion rates or whatever the appropriate metric could be.

Each channel and bit of content needs to be considered against your intended goals for it — if it was designed to raise awareness rather than secure conversions, click-throughs are more relevant than sales. 

Remember, marketing performance depends on delivering a good user experience.

If it's baffling, negative in tone, or mistargeted, your efforts will likely fail. Therefore, your digital marketing strategy audit needs to have user experience at the top of its list of considerations.

Other important factors include an awareness of overall business goals, SEO performance, industry position, and data security.

Finally, a digital marketing strategy audit should produce a detailed follow-up plan. This should show how a business might improve its output on all its digital channels and provide clear next steps.

When to Conduct a Digital Marketing Strategy Audit

In short: frequently. Ideally, you should have one scheduled regularly as part of your overall marketing strategy. However, there are times when you need an audit with no delay.

Here are some indicators you need to undertake one immediately. 

• Poor results. If your digital marketing efforts aren't bringing in the customers (or achieving whatever goal you set), then they need looking at. Catching this early can prevent customer churn and reduce wasted spend on unsuccessful campaigns.
• No uniting strategy. In a world of numerous channels, the user experience can be hindered by clashing messages and overlapping campaigns. Running an audit helps you align on all channels.
• Missing metrics. It could be that your strategy is resonating with your target audience, but you're unaware of this because your metrics are ineffective or inconsistently monitored.
• Catch that trend. Sometimes, a business needs to be part of an industry trend. Standing apart can look cool, sure, but it can also look like you've missed a key development that users are loving elsewhere. 
• Dated advertisements. Marketing can age fast. This is especially true with bang-on-trend, hyper-happening output that delivers a great user experience. Once the novelty wears off, your customers are likely to move on.

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4 Steps for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy Audit

Whether the audit you're conducting is quick and only for internal purposes, or is performed as part of a broader unified compliance framework, there are specific steps it should contain. 

1. Define clear marketing goals

What do you want your digital marketing activities to deliver?

Be specific: don’t just say ‘a great user experience’. Consider what stage of the customer journey you’re aiming at and what actions you want customers to take in response.

The part of your marketing that's focused on the top of the conversion funnel is all about attracting potential customer attention.

Another part might concentrate on getting a customer to interact with a free download. Be sure to choose marketing goals that suit the stage of the customer journey you are targeting. 

2. Evaluate Using KPIs

Use key performance indicators (such as bounce rate, click-through rate, and social media shares). These give an objective picture of digital activity current performance.

It's easy to get carried away, especially if you personally like a particular piece of content marketing.

The tragedy is that others may not, and your favorite jingle, image, or piece of content can fail to land when it comes to user experience. KPIs will tell you where these weak spots might be, and let you make data-driven decisions.

3. Identify gaps and opportunities

When you're given clear, objective information, you can see what areas could do with a digital marketing boost. And here's the good news: you will probably be given an idea of how to do this. 

This is because a KPI may tell you that, unfortunately, your brand awareness is in the doldrums. OK, not great news. However, you've now got a clear way forward.

Make sure your social media strategy is focused on shouting about the brand, build up your online presence, and save your plans to boost conversions until you’ve built up more of an audience.​

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4. Take action with a unified strategy

Put your responses to the digital audit into a cohesive strategy. If you’re not already, integrate a headless CMS to ensure all your marketers are using the same tool – this helps build consistency.

For agency marketers, tools like the Writecream Digital Marketing Agency Marketer can streamline this process, helping create personalized messages, ads, and outreach campaigns that align across all platforms.

Then, consider how the different channels you're using may conspire or clash, and think through how to get the best from an omnichannel approach.

For instance, if you have a lot of Instagram followers, consider integrating Instagram shopping rather than just running another discount-based campaign. By making it easier to click directly through from your page, you can create a simpler user experience. 

Consider questions of timing so you can be sure that your digital marketing gets as much chance as possible to shine. External factors such as the time of day, public holidays, and other distracting events can easily overshadow your campaign and impact the user experience. 

How Digital Marketing Strategy Audits Improve User Experience

So, now you know how to conduct a digital marketing audit, let's turn to the impact it can have on user experience. 

• Engagement: Connecting through relevance

One of the key weapons that a piece of marketing can wield is the power of engagement.

The more you can encourage a customer to stop, take note of what you're saying, and, as a result, do something that moves the relationship forward, the better your marketing is performing. 

The good news is that this audience engagement, which is so crucial for our marketing efforts, is also a vital part of what makes the user experience positive. 

• Personalization: Enhancing the customer journey

This is a specific and fast-growing part of user engagement. With personalization, the customer's tastes, buying habits, and other factors (such as location or birthday) can be leveraged to improve your e-commerce conversion rate.

Customers love this. It makes their life easier—if they get recommended products tailored to them, they can spend less time looking around your site. Plus, custom discounts and loyalty rewards help them feel valued.

• Smooth performance: Removing friction

A good user experience is often about how easy it is to deal with a particular marketing element. Here's a common issue: a site works great with laptops, but it's a disaster with mobiles.

Your audit can point this out by showing how few people are sticking around when accessing your site via mobile device. Improve this, and you'll improve user experience. 

Smoothness is hugely important. It's why surveys proliferate that ask a customer after an interaction, 'How easy was it to do what you wanted to do today?'.

Those surveys can feed into your digital marketing strategy audit to give you some beneficial insights into the user experience, which you can and should act on with minimal delay.

• Security: Building trust through data protection

This can be easy to overlook, but it should be a key consideration. Why? Because an essential part of the user experience is the knowledge that they and their information are being treated with care and respect.

This is a particular concern with personalization—it's built on detailed data that must be looked after with proper emphasis. Should there be any sign of a sloppy approach to data care, or should a breach take place, this can have disastrous effects on user experience.

Happily, a thorough digital marketing strategy audit will pick up on where security is an issue, allowing you to improve matters where necessary.

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FAQs

1. What does a digital marketing strategy audit have to do with user experience?

Marketing is all about user experience, so any attempt to rate digital marketing effectiveness should include a consideration of customer experience.

In addition, improvements that an audit will make possible should result in a better user experience.

2. Why do businesses use digital marketing strategy audits?

Digital marketing strategy audits are an essential tool that enables a business to properly assess and improve the performance of its marketing output across the full range of digital channels it employs. Digital audits help a business's marketing team get the most out of its marketing budget, which feeds into future business growth.

3. How often should you perform a digital marketing strategy audit?

A digital marketing strategy audit should be conducted at least once per quarter. However, major business changes, poor campaign performance, or shifting market trends may warrant more frequent reviews.

Regular audits help ensure your marketing stays aligned with user expectations and business goals.

Conclusion: Audit-Driven UX Improvements

Done right, a digital marketing strategy audit will help you achieve ever-better results from your marketing. It lays out all the marketing components of your business's output and enables you to see where things can be tightened up or nailed down. 

Marketing's impact relies heavily on a positive user experience. Using a digital marketing strategy audit with this in mind, you can assess and then improve the user's response, enhancing your marketing's overall performance. 

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