Digital Marketing Strategy: Five Steps to Evaluate Your Approach

The renowned historian and documentary maker James Burke once said: “You can know where you are going only if you know where you have been.” Burke was talking about history, but the same idea applies to marketing.

Creating a marketing plan without first auditing your online marketing can waste money on unnecessary initiatives and leave gaps in your digital strategy. Many marketers avoid an in-depth audit because it seems daunting and time-consuming.

Working closely with marketing every day can make it difficult to see objectively where you stand. This article outlines a way to assess your online presence and improve your efforts using the practices and trends discussed at the time of publication.

Before addressing individual problems, review your marketing strategy as a whole. If your marketing plan has no clear objective—or the wrong one—there is little point in improving individual tools.

The questions may seem simple, but answering them carefully can reveal things about your business or marketing strategy that were easy to overlook. Ask:

What is the current state of your business?
How does your digital marketing strategy affect the business?
What business goals do you expect marketing improvements to support?
What does success look like for your company?
How can marketing contribute to that success?

To set yourself up for success, define what success means. A detailed audit requires clear criteria. An honest assessment of the current situation is essential, because you will use it as a baseline for judging future work.

Next, define how marketing is expected to affect profit. Understanding how marketing connects to the business helps you assess the current strategy and plan what comes next.

Every introductory marketing course covers this classic business tool. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is a simple but effective way to understand a business's internal position and external environment.

Once you have defined success and the role of marketing in achieving it, assess each part of your organisation's marketing against these four categories.

Strengths and weaknesses: these describe internal factors in your current marketing strategy, including your team's skills and capacity, how well it communicates, and the accuracy and volume of the data you collect.

Opportunities and threats: these are external factors that may affect your marketing strategy. Analyse the market and how communication channels influence traffic. For example, for a business well positioned on MySpace in 2005, Facebook's rise might have been a threat. Also consider where competitors are investing and whether you can outperform them.

When conducting a SWOT analysis, keep the business goals from the previous step in mind. These judgements are relative and depend on your organisation's ability—internally and externally—to use marketing to achieve its goals.

After completing a SWOT analysis of the overall strategy, take a closer look at the individual parts of your online marketing.

Search engines are central to many online marketing strategies because they are one of the main ways people discover products and services. A Fleishman-Hillard report cited in the original article said that 89% of consumers used a search engine to make a purchase decision.

Search optimisation is complex and takes time, which makes current work difficult to audit. Still, there are key ranking factors you can review and improve.

Assess what is working: start by identifying your SEO strengths. Gather your site's content, keywords and links, then see what is helping your search visibility. Prioritise the elements that perform well and reconsider those that do not.

Technical review: look for problems in your site's code or design. Are there broken links? Content with no internal links? Poorly written or outdated pages? Identify and fix the issues you find.

On-page optimisation: once you understand what is working and have identified errors, optimise your content. Review established practices for using keywords, metadata and tags.

Link building: after the site and its content are ready, build links by finding relevant opportunities. Seek coverage on established websites and create content your audience will want to share.

People often use search engines to find specific product information, while social media plays a major role in how they perceive brands. Social platforms have also influenced search rankings.

Many brands still underestimate social media. Some have weak or abandoned accounts; others present a different identity on each platform. Some have no clear objectives or plan for their social presence. An SMM audit can uncover these and other issues.

Measure engagement: review your social media presence and identify posts that generate strong engagement—comments, likes, shares and new followers. This will show which messages resonate and where your strengths lie.

Standardise your profiles: identify platforms where your presence is missing or your messaging is inconsistent. Inventory your existing resources and capacity to understand how many channels your team can manage well.

Review practices and trends: once you know which messages work and which channels to focus on, research practices and trends for those channels. Create a checklist that you can share with the whole team.

Create a calendar: after the audit, choose your priority channels and guidelines, then build a detailed social media calendar with your team. Each channel needs its own plan, while all plans should work together.

Content marketing brings SEO and social media together. Publishing useful content can strengthen SEO, and good content also supports social media performance.

Audit your content marketing to make sure it starts with the right goals. Many people look for shortcuts to success, but understanding what your content achieves today—and what you want it to achieve in the future—can help you avoid them.

“Don't look for shortcuts,” said Jesse Noyes, then a senior marketing director at Kapost.

“Instead, focus on creating quality content and publishing it consistently. Many companies try to exploit search engines and social media by looking for weaknesses in the algorithms to increase views. It sometimes works for a while. Eventually, platforms such as Google and Facebook improve their algorithms, and that content gets buried or penalised,” he added.

Many organisations lack a clear content strategy or overlook ways for content to work together across channels. A content audit helps brands check whether their work meets audience expectations and make better use of content marketing.

Consolidate your content: many companies produce content in a scattered way. Find everything you have published across platforms and decide where each piece belongs.

Understand your audience: before choosing where your content should live, research your audience. Which demographic groups does your content attract? Where do they spend time online? What else might interest them?

Content Strategy: once you have chosen your audience and channels, create a content strategy and calendar. Decide not only where to publish, but what suits each channel and how often you can produce it.

Optimise your content: once your content plan is in place, decide how to optimise content at each stage of the sales funnel—from SEO and social distribution to conversion and lead generation. Create clear guidelines for your content team and make sure existing content follows them.

A full online marketing audit may seem daunting, but you can improve your marketing only when you understand where you stand. These steps can help you review your activity methodically and use the findings to inform your future strategy.

Make it a goal to bring an outdated online marketing strategy up to date. If you do not have the time or team to audit it, get in touch with us.