One of the best ways of streamlining your marketing efforts and personalising your strategy is to conduct an inbound audit. ‘Audit’ is a scary word, but the purpose of an inbound audit isn’t to catch you out, but to lift the lid on your marketing strategy to gain a deeper understanding of your processes, as a guide to driving growth. True, an inbound marketing audit may identify its fair share of blind spots and problems, and this is a good thing, but a good inbound audit is also about discovering opportunities and developing strategies for continuous improvement in your marketing efforts.
In this article, we’ll explore the main benefits of conducting an inbound audit for your business:
What is an inbound audit?
An inbound audit is a comprehensive analysis of your website, sales funnel, marketing efforts, and digital assets with the goal of identifying opportunities for improvement and optimisation for better results. For an audit to fulfil its purpose, no stone should ideally be left unturned, and so a good audit will analyse your web content, layout, design, and functionality, your lead generation strategies and nurturing efforts, as well as your sales and conversion cycle. The result is a data-driven picture of how efficiently and effectively you attract, engage, and convert prospects, what you are doing well, what you could do better, and how you can strengthen your processes to better sync with your goals.
But how does it benefit your business?
1. Better and more personalised marketing strategy
An inbound audit lays bare your existing marketing efforts, showing which tactics are actually generating leads and conversions and which ones aren’t. You can use these insights to refine your strategy, investing more into successful tactics and discarding or adjusting the less effective ones. This iterative and ongoing process of testing, auditing, and refinement helps you develop a more cost-effective and streamlined marketing strategy aligned to the needs of your customers.
2. Understand your ideal customers
By reviewing data metrics such as content engagement, social shares, interactions, and traffic source, you can better understand your audiences’ preferences and online behaviour. For example, high engagement levels on certain articles or social media posts may indicate topics your audience is particularly interested in, and may be linked to pain points they are experiencing. Similarly, analysing user reviews, social media comments, and feedback, can provide valuable insight into what they want and expect from a service provider. These findings can help you tailor your content messages to resonate with your target buyer personas.
3. Uncover sales opportunities
An audit can frequently uncover new opportunities for growth and expansion. Perhaps there’s a social media platform that you haven’t fully explored yet, or a new buyer persona that you haven’t targeted? Maybe there is an emerging trend or topic in your niche that you could create content around? By uncovering and capitalising on these opportunities, you can expand your reach and tap into new sources of revenue.
4. Improve your content quality
A key part of the inbound audit process involves analysing the performance of different content assets in terms of viewers/visits, comments, leads, and conversions. This analysis can reveal what types of content are resonating with your audience and what you should do more of, such as video, infographics, articles, and so on. This insight empowers you to deliver a more responsive user experience, which can lead to increased engagement and conversions.
5. Higher search position
An inbound marketing audit usually includes a root and branch review of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. This should encompass your choice of keywords, rankings, backlinks from other sites, web page load speed, and other on page and off speed search factors. By identifying areas of weakness, you can strategically optimise your site and content to improve your search engine rankings for specific keywords, thereby increasing visibility and driving more organic traffic.
6. Improved marketing ROI
An objective inbound audit can highlight areas where money and time are being wasted. This isn’t always comfortable reading, but it is an extremely valuable exercise when streamlining your marketing activities and getting the best value from your budget. For instance, if certain marketing channels aren’t generating sufficient ROI or if high-cost activities aren’t delivering the expected results, an audit will give you the data you need to make an intelligent decision about your next steps. Furthermore, by identifying inefficiencies, you can reallocate resources to more productive areas or find ways to improve your processes, thus optimising your budget and potentially increasing your overall marketing ROI.
Next steps – book a free inbound marketing audit with one of our specialists
At JDR, we offer a free marketing assessment and inbound audit as part of our strategic marketing services for small businesses. Your audit will show you how to generate more leads and enquiries from your website, measure where your business actually comes from, and highlight ways that you can automate more of your marketing and maximise the value of your time. To find out more and to claim your free website marketing review with one of our specialists, please click here.
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