The best place to start with digital marketing is, of course, the digital audit. Audits help you discover the path you have walked, the mistakes you have made, and the things you should be proud of. There are stories that emerge from the digital audit that show you the way ahead.
Starting today, we will take you through some of the stories revealed by Niswey’s digital audits. See if you can find a likeness to yours.
Our first story is that of a US-based product company.
The website had been up for a year. The business was based on gift cards for end-users, and loyalty programs for retailers and hospitality chains.
And there, one spots the first discordant note. Is the site B2B or B2C? “Well, both,” we were told.
The management of the company wanted Niswey to tell them how to go about its digital marketing. The basic business objective was to push end-users to do transactions, and get business users to sign up.
Well, let’s cross that bridge a bit later, we said. Let’s take a look at what your online story currently is. Here’s what we did.
Some of us went and spent time on the website. We explored web analytics, assessed SEO, visited the website as potential users, and checked out the social pages and tracked the goings-on there.
Hmmm.
The analytics showed that the number of users was increasing, but the site had poor engagement. Users weren’t staying long enough to complete transactions.
The user experience findings showed us why. It was difficult for users to find the information they wanted, or explore choices in a simple way. The design was image-rich but too fragmented to be able to give users a cohesive experience. The site was making the user work to find the information they were looking for.
SEO results showed that as many as 60% of the pages had duplicate titles and meta descriptions. Images were missing alt-texts. The site itself was missing the robots.txt file. Not a favorable situation, as far as search engines are concerned.
Then we got to the B2B part, which was hosted on a subdomain, but accessible from the home page and other pages. However, they didn’t have any analytics tool set up on the subdomain, so there was no data to dig up stories from. Content and UX-wise, relevant, useful, beneficial information for target customers was missing.
In a nutshell, what the company had achieved with the website was to establish a product idea that could be showcased to investors. And little else. Now that the focus had shifted to increasing sales and online revenue, the site left a lot to be desired.
The story for the company has to change now. It is shifting gears. Niswey has shared the results of the digital audit and our recommendations for online marketing, in line with their business objectives. A few months down the line, we expect to share a digital marketing success story for this company.
In the meanwhile, you can nail your digital marketing audit with the PInKBeXA framework. Intrigued? Just try it out, and don’t forget to let us know how it works for you.