While looking ahead to a new year of marketing projects, it’s a good idea to include a digital business audit in your plans.
It is typically recommended that a business perform a marketing roadmap audit at least once per year.
Depending on your business, you may even want to consider running them more frequently. The more often you perform an audit, the more you will learn about your company’s digital footprint.
For example, Peak Activity takes a holistic approach to digital business audits by performing in-depth analyses that include marketing, technology, and operations to ensure the best possible experience for customers.
What is a Marketing Roadmap Audit?
A marketing roadmap audit is a comprehensive report detailing the strengths, weaknesses, and milestones of your marketing efforts.
This often includes an assessment of your omni channel experience by breaking down the following:
- A/B Testing Results
- Brand Identity
- Brand Messaging
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Google AdWord campaigns
- Search Engine Optimization
- Site speed
- Social Media
- UX/UI
- Website Compliance
- Website Conversion Paths
Why Do I Need a Marketing Roadmap Audit?
A marketing roadmap audit is all about insight. It can offer a fresh perspective on your business with data-driven reports that support industry best practices.
Whether your business has grown, downsized, or stayed the same in the past year, it’s important to understand why.
Suppose your key distribution center experienced a natural disaster in the past year. To get a realistic picture of how the company performed throughout the year, you will likely need to consider the conditions or effects of the disaster that may have had a lasting impact. If you discover that a halt in operations created an additional set of problems, your roadmap audit can shine a light on any adjustments needed for the next year.
To put it simply, in order to get where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve been. Therefore, a marketing roadmap audit is your starting point for a new year of plans.
How to Perform a Marketing Roadmap Audit
A marketing roadmap audit can be a huge undertaking. Depending on the size of your business and the industry, you may be able to perform your own audit, but many businesses tend to hire an outside agency for their expertise.
The nature of an audit is to examine previous records, which means that you’ll need to start by reviewing the business plans and goals from the previous year.
Questions to consider may include:
- Were timelines adhered to?
- Were goals met?
- Were there any unforeseen circumstances that impacted sales?
- Did you stay within the budget?
- What were some of the pain points experienced?
- What were the most successful topics for content?
- What are customers saying/experiencing?
- How do we rank among the competition?
Data and insights should be analyzed separately, as well as a broad overview. To understand how things should work, it’s important to have a firm grasp on how they currently (or previously) work. Planning for the future becomes much more manageable once past issues are addressed.
If you’re interested in contracting PeakActivity to perform your marketing roadmap audit, contact us and we can help!