In a prior post https://themedicalstrategist.com/blog/websites/tools-for-your-m…eting-strategies/ we discussed analytics as an important tool to track several facets of your content marketing which provides:
- Content that is best received
- Amount of traffic each piece of content garners
- Where the traffic is generated from (driven by website SEO or social media)
- Keywords that drive traffic most
With this information, you will be able to take positive action.
Today, we will go a step further by sharing the keys to conducting a comprehensive marketing audit which helps you to differentiate yourself from your colleagues, strengthen your brand positioning, and get more visibility.
Marketing Audit
A marketing audit is a process of hearing what patients want and optimizing your marketing strategy accordingly. It involves every facet of your brand’s presence, from SEO to social media. By scrutinizing the results of an audit, you can transform your business into more efficient and targeted marketing.
Not sure what clients, and prospective patients are interested in or what values the public most likes? No idea how to go about refining your marketing plans to better match the future of your business?
A marketing audit can help answer this!
While no specific marketing activity works best for everyone, there are generally accepted best practices for getting started and how to analyze your efforts into more effective strategies.
What is a marketing audit?
An audit checks everything you have published from content to SEO, exposing all its strengths and weaknesses.
By assessing the goals, tactics, techniques, and activities making up your marketing strategy, you gain insight into the core systems of your business and brand.
After a marketing audit is done, you should have actionable takeaways of how to improve your website, content, SEO and social media. And you should more fully understand your offline marketing, like referrals, word of mouth, lectures, health fairs and other traditional strategies.
What to include in a marketing audit:
Consider the following:
Branding: Brand mentions and reviews. Tool- Google Alert
SEO: Organic rankings, Click-through rates, link profile/authority. Tools- SEMrush, Google Analytics.
Website: Ease of Navigation, Call-to-action, speed, user experience, indelibility. Tool- Screaming Frog.
Social media: engagement, influence. Tools- BuzzSumo. Twitter/LinkedIn Analytics. Facebook Insights.
Offline: Press, article publishing, health fairs, speaking engagements. Tool- MarketMuse.
Competitive analysis: brand reach, visibility, positioning, search ranking. Tool-SEMrush. Ahrefs. SpyFu.
There is a wide range of metrics within each of these categories, enabling you to understand your business and competitors better.
Keep your marketing audit in sync with your core business goals.
Web metrics
Many tools offer API integration with Google Analytics, which can speed up the audit process. Enter page URLs through your tool of choice and record a number of key indicators:
- Broken links.
- 404 errors.
- Duplicate content.
- Spam links.
- Traffic by channel.
- Click-through rate.
- Engagement.
- Pageviews.
- Dwell time.
- Shares by network.
- Content length.
- Metadata.
- Content type.
- Organic position by keyword.
- Page speed.
- Bounce rate.
Insights
What did you discover from your audit? It is time to take this information, focus on what worked well and fix what didn’t. Clean up any analytics-tracking errors and fill the gaps found in your existing content. Map out your plan of immediate, and long-term changes to your marketing strategy.
Tools like SEMrush and Moz can spotlight how you stack up against your primary, secondary and tertiary competitors by comparing link profiles, Domain and Page Authority scores, keyword positioning, top-performing content, social engagement and similar indicators.
With clear goals in mind, it’s up to you and your team to incorporate marketing solutions into your business model.
Recap
Strategies have become more sophisticated in business promotion thanks to the adoption of marketing automation software, the backing of analytics-driven investments and hands-on experience with newer tactics like content marketing.
An audit provides an advantage to you and gives you the edge over your competition.
Check back with us next Tuesday for more tips on health marketing.