It will be no surprise to those who do marketing for a living to hear that it’s a complex business with many moving parts. There is an argument that some marketers make it too complicated, but that’s for another day.
The point is, however many moving parts there are, there has never been a better time to stand back and audit your digital marketing effectiveness.
A digital marketing effectiveness audit gives you a formal process for asking what you are doing, why you are doing it and, crucially, whether it’s actually working. That means looking beyond individual campaign metrics and considering how your website, search visibility, content, customer journeys and communications work together.
Going through that process will be worth the effort – and can be illuminating.
What is a digital marketing effectiveness audit?
A digital marketing effectiveness audit is a structured review of your digital marketing activity to understand what’s working, what’s underperforming and where there are opportunities to improve.
It shouldn’t simply produce a list of technical problems.
The useful questions are bigger: Are the right people finding you? Is your content being seen? Does your website help visitors take the next step? Are campaigns contributing to meaningful business objectives? And are you investing time and budget in activity that’s actually delivering value?
For financial services marketers in particular, we’d look across the complete digital journey rather than assessing each channel in isolation.
Here’s where we’d start.
1. Audit your website effectiveness
Looking at your own website is always a good place to start.
If you imagine your website as a magnet, its strength – and therefore its ability to attract visitors – is partly governed by how well search engines understand and surface its content to people looking for what you offer.
SEO is constantly evolving and staying on top of it is a significant job. But our own work suggests firms aren’t always on top of the fundamentals, with basics such as page titles, meta descriptions, internal and external links, indexing and page structure all requiring attention.
If search engines can’t work out what your site is about, the chances of appearing in relevant search results for anything other than your brand name are going to be pretty low.
But website effectiveness goes beyond SEO.
An audit should also consider what happens once somebody arrives. Is it immediately clear what you offer? Can visitors find the information they need? Are the next steps obvious? Does the experience work properly across devices? Are there outdated pages or broken journeys creating unnecessary friction?
Traffic has limited value if the website doesn’t help the right visitor progress.
2. Audit your content effectiveness
Content, content, content.
A lot of time and money can go into creating content, but there are often issues that mean it’s simply not being seen – or at least not being seen at a level that justifies the effort and expense of producing it.
A content effectiveness audit should look beyond how much content you’ve published and ask what that content is actually achieving.
Which pieces attract relevant organic traffic? Which engage the audiences you care about? Which support important customer questions or stages in the decision journey? Which have become outdated? And where have you created multiple pieces of content competing for essentially the same subject?
Sometimes the problems are relatively simple. Are you clearly directing users towards your most relevant and up-to-date content? Can search engines discover and index it? If you’ve invested in video, have you made the content accessible and understandable beyond the video itself through useful supporting copy, transcripts or captions?
And don’t assume every old article needs another new article sitting alongside it. Sometimes improving, consolidating or retiring existing content is more valuable than creating something else.
The objective isn’t more content. It’s more effective content.
3. Assess your SEO and search visibility
SEO deserves specific attention because search visibility provides a useful indication of whether your website is being understood for the subjects you want to be known for.
Don’t limit an SEO audit to whether individual pages have meta descriptions.
Look at what your site is actually visible for. Are you appearing for relevant non-brand searches, or predominantly when somebody already knows your company name? Do your important service pages have enough authority and supporting content? Are multiple pages targeting the same intent? Are useful pages receiving impressions but failing to win clicks?
Search data can also expose a mismatch between the content a business is creating and what prospective customers actually want to know.
That’s where an SEO audit becomes more than a technical exercise. It becomes a source of customer and marketing insight.
4. Size up the competition
Next, take an objective look at the user experience of your website versus the competition.
What do they have that you don’t? How does their site look and feel, and what does that communicate about their brand? How does it all hang together as a user experience?
And how easy is it to actually invest?
On this last point, we often find links to investment platforms that no longer exist, are closed to new business or are simply wrong. That’s a small technical problem with a potentially significant impact on the customer experience.
Come to think of it, have you formally worked out who the competition is – not just at a ‘house’ level, but in terms of individual products?
Have you asked your customers who else they were sizing up when they considered your XYZ Plc investment trust or fund?
A useful competitive audit isn’t about copying what competitors do. It’s about understanding the experience and choices your prospective customers encounter when they compare you.
5. Review digital campaign effectiveness
Individual campaigns also need to be considered as part of the wider audit.
Clicks, impressions and engagement can tell you something, but they don’t automatically tell you whether a digital campaign has been effective.
Start with the objective.
Was the campaign designed to build awareness, generate engagement, attract qualified traffic, create leads or drive a specific action? The measures you use should reflect the job the campaign was supposed to do.
Then consider what happened after the click. Did visitors engage with the destination? Did they progress to another relevant page or action? Did the campaign attract the audience you actually wanted?
Looking at digital campaign effectiveness in isolation can also be misleading. Marketing channels interact, and activity designed to build awareness today may influence a search, visit or enquiry later.
The audit should therefore consider both individual performance and how campaigns contribute to the wider customer journey.
6. Review the customer journey
Marketing activity can perform well individually while the overall customer experience performs badly.
That’s why your audit needs to consider the customer’s path to purchase.
Map the journey from initial awareness through research and consideration to the action you ultimately want someone to take. Look for gaps, dead ends, unnecessary steps and inconsistencies between channels.
Where does somebody go after reading an article? What happens after they click an advert? Can someone easily move from researching an investment product to understanding it and then finding out how to invest?
The objective is to see your digital marketing activity as your customer experiences it – not as a collection of channels owned by different teams.
7. Turn your marketing audit into an action plan
It’s only once your audit is complete that you can create an action and communication plan to address the findings.
To mix metaphors, actions tend to be about fixing the things that are broken – plugging holes in a leaky bucket. Communications are the things that dial up the strength of your magnet and draw more of the right people towards you.
Prioritise findings according to their potential impact rather than simply working through the longest list of problems.
Some fixes might be straightforward: broken links, incorrect metadata or outdated calls to action. Others might identify larger strategic issues, such as weak positioning, gaps in the customer journey, ineffective content or a lack of visibility for commercially important topics.
Your audit should ultimately tell you three things:
What should we fix?
What should we stop doing?
What should we do more effectively?
This all may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many carts are before horses out there…
How effective is your digital marketing activity?
The point of a marketing effectiveness audit isn’t to create another report that sits in a folder.
It’s to understand whether your digital marketing activity is doing the job you need it to do – and what needs to change if it isn’t.
For financial services firms, that means looking at SEO, website effectiveness, content effectiveness, campaigns, competitors and customer journeys as connected parts of the same system.
If you are interested in an audit of your digital marketing activity and would like to chat to us about the next steps, please get in touch.
Author Simon Longfellow is an expert in investment marketing with over 25 years of experience working within the financial services industry.
