How a Marketing Audit can Improve Conversion Rates and Marketing Strategy

Marketing is a series of experiments. With each blog post, whitepaper, or campaign, you hope for good results. This means rising traffic, click-throughs, and conversions.

But when your traffic is standing still and you aren’t seeing conversions, it’s difficult to know what exactly is falling short.

Stop and Conduct a Marketing Audit

First, what is a marketing audit?

A marketing audit is a systematic examination of all marketing assets created and data collected over a period. Examining this information helps marketers determine how well marketing efforts adhere to your big picture B2B marketing plan.

Here are few examples of assets and data the audit will review…

• Traffic
• Conversion Rates
• Buyer personas targeted
• SEO score
• Whitepapers

Why You Need a Marketing Audit

A marketing audit enables you to identify which tactics are working vs. which are falling flat. With this information at hand, you can focus on doing more of the good, cutting the bad, and improving the “just ok.”

A marketing audit also helps make your marketing more cohesive by connecting how individual marketing tactics fit into your B2B marketing plan.

How to Use Big Picture Insights to Improve Conversion Rates

A marketing audit delivers high-level data for each of your marketing assets. For example, you will map overall traffic, conversions, personas for each blog post, whitepaper, etc.

As you examine this high-level data, look for clues to determine where you might dive deeper.

For example, if you notice that you are picking up steam with a group of keywords related to an individual offer, take a second look at the landing pages to answer the following questions…

• What is the conversion rate?
• Does the message match between the CTA and the landing page?
• What conversion rate optimization best practices can you apply to the page?

Use the data to mark your successes and identify areas for improvement. Then make strategic changes that you think will move the needle.

Remember, marketing is about a series of experiments. A marketing audit gives you the information to analyze and improve each experiment.

Balance Subjective Marketing With Analytics
to Make Decisions

Much of marketing is subjective. Marketers make decisions on what they think will work for their personas.

This gut feeling is valuable.

The key is to balance these marketing intuitions with analytics.

If the data indicates the campaign is unremarkable, was it your gut that went wrong? If your gut still believes in the campaign, the data should point to a weakness that needs to be addressed.

For example, imagine…

• The data shows a CTA has a high click through rate, but the landing page converts poorly. Your next step might be to set up an A/B test of the landing page to test conversion rates (if the page has enough traffic).
• Your workflow consistently has a good open rate, but the click rate is disappointing. Make sure your offer connects with the headline, the CTA looks clickable, and most of all, that it is an offer your personas like!
• You’ve optimized a blog series with a set of keywords that has a high difficulty score and will be difficult to rank for no matter what. Instead of calling it a wash, research and reoptimize content for less competitive keywords.

Use the Completed Marketing Audit to Update Your To-Do List

The bad news about a marketing audit is that it creates more work for you.

The good news is that the to-dos you assign will become more targeted and results-oriented.

Use the marketing audit to update your B2B marketing plan to focus on tactics that work for your business. You could abandon certain tactics (PPC, content marketing, referral marketing, etc.) or you could change what platforms you target (LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest). You could double your effort on a specific persona. You could shorten a workflow.

Once you complete your marketing audit, you should set up new metrics and KPIs to monitor the success of the changes you are about to implement.

Some things you might track include:

• Blog post and optimized keywords
• Backlinking activity
• Traffic and conversion rates

The groundwork you laid with the marketing audit will serve as an activity sheet for past, present, and future efforts.

Conversion Rate Optimization is About Experimenting

A marketing audit will help you see how the little marketing tactics fit into the big picture. It will help you understand the results of your marketing experiments and turn them into successful, repeatable processes.