Digital transformation is about your brand’s experience and content becoming more relevant to its target audience, in whatever medium they want it. To do this, you need to know where you stand now – and how you can take your digital presence up a level. A digital audit will help you get to grips with where you are now with your digital presence and see where there might be room for improvement. It won’t take long – but it’ll give you a thorough overview of the state of your brand’s online presence, so that you can develop a plan of action moving forward. Let’s look at why you need a digital audit and how to conduct one.
Why You Need a Digital Audit
First, let’s be clear on why it’s important to do a digital audit before embarking on your digital transformation. You need to have a clear idea of where you are right now, so that you can make informed decisions about where you want to be going next. A digital audit will help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your online presence, quantify how people are currently engaging with your brand, and identify areas for improvement in order to develop a digital transformation strategy. A digital audit is also a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with the language and data that’s out there in the world of digital analytics. This isn’t just jargon – it’s a whole new language that will help you get to grips with how people are engaging with your brand online.
How to Conduct a Digital Audit
A digital audit is often conducted as an audit of your website, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it’s probably best if you don’t audit just your website – as that can sometimes be a bit misleading. You need to see how you currently stand across all digital channels – from your social media accounts to your email marketing efforts. For the website, you can conduct an audit by reviewing your website analytics and looking at how people are engaging with your site. You can also take a look at the source of your traffic to see what percentage of your overall traffic comes from your website. For other digital channels, like social media, you can use free tools like Social Media Examiner’s social media audit tool to get a snapshot of your current engagement across all major platforms – and see areas for improvement. You can also conduct a social media audit by logging into each platform and looking at analytics, engagement statistics, and user demographics – to see how your brand is currently engaging across each platform.
What to Look For in a Digital Audit
When conducting your digital audit, it’s important to look at a few key areas. You’ll want to take a look at the volume of traffic coming to your site, the source of that traffic, the quality of that traffic (e.g. what percentage of people who land on your pages actually engage with your brand), and where your traffic is going after they’ve visited your site. For the volume of traffic, you want to check how many people are visiting your site and how many pages they are going through on each visit. This will help you identify how many people are actually engaging with your brand online. The source of that traffic will give you a good idea of the channels through which people are finding you – which is important information when thinking about your future digital strategy. The quality of traffic will give you an idea of how much value your visitors are bringing to your business. You can assess this by looking at things like the number of people who are clicking through to buy after visiting your site and how much time they are spending on your pages.
See Where Your Content is Working (and Where it Isn’t)
As well as looking at traffic and engagement statistics, you also want to take a look at the content people are engaging with on your site. This will help you see where your content is working and where it isn’t. When selecting the content you want to review, make sure you select content from all areas of your website – and not just your homepage. You want to see what’s working on your blog and on product and service pages too. You can analyze the content on your website by checking the bounce rate of each page to find out which pages are getting people to stay and which ones they are immediately leaving. You can also find out what percentage of people are clicking on each piece of content by checking out your click-through rate (CTR).
Discover Where Your Audience Is Currently Spending Time
The final thing you will want to look at in your digital audit is where your audience is currently spending their time online and how your brand appears in those spaces. This will tell you where your brand should be – and where it would be smart to start investing some energy. To do this, you’ll want to look at the sources of your traffic to get a good idea of where your audience is spending their time online. You can also look at what people are talking about in the spaces where your brand currently appears – and where it doesn’t – to get a sense of where your brand should be appearing. This will help you identify where your brand is missing out – and where you have an opportunity to get involved and start building your presence.
How to use this information?
After conducting your digital audit, you will have a clear idea of where you currently stand in terms of your digital presence. You can use this information to help you identify areas for improvement and decide how you can take your digital presence to the next level. You can use this data to help you with your content strategy and make sure you’re creating relevant, interesting, and engaging content that your target audience wants to see. You can also use it to inform your social media strategy and make sure you’re engaging with people in the right way on the platforms they are spending their time on.
Takeaway
Your digital transformation is all about your brand’s experience becoming more relevant to its target audience, wherever and however they want to engage. To make that happen, you need to know exactly where you stand now – so that you can make informed decisions about how to take your digital presence up a level. This is why you need to conduct a thorough digital audit before you get started with your transformation. Once you’ve conducted your digital audit, you’ll have a clear idea of where you currently stand. From there, you can use the data you collect to help you identify areas for improvement and decide how you can take your digital presence to the next level.
