What is a Marketing Audit?

Digital audits are much like auditing your menu for a restaurant. You want to learn if your efforts and strategies are paying off. You'll be reviewing your:

  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats

Marketing evolves and changes over time. If you fail to evolve along with these trends, you risk your strategies becoming stale and causing you to experience a lower return on investment (ROI) from the strategy that you have in place.

An audit provides you with insights into:

  • Which marketing efforts are producing the returns that you expect
  • Which marketing efforts are underperforming
  • What competitors or industry changes are threatening your strategy
  • Opportunities that you can begin to leverage to improve your results

Marketing audit examples often leave out that the audit will provide you with actionable steps that you can take to continue growing your business. You invest a lot of resources into your marketing strategy, so it’s important that you spend time analyzing the results to learn what works and doesn’t.

With this in mind, let’s go through the basics of a digital marketing audit and learn what areas you need to begin assessing today.

marketing audit

What to Include in Restaurant Audits 

1. Branding

Restaurant auditing should include a search for your brand. You must analyze how your restaurant has been doing through:

  • Customer relationships
  • Reviews
  • Complaints
  • Responses to problems

For example, you’ll want to setup Google Alerts for your business to see when your restaurant’s name is mentioned and respond to it accordingly. You can also take this time to scour:

  • Online reviews to learn about your reputation with customers
  • Complaints on any major sites, such as Yelp, Google reviews and even TripAdvisor

If you want your brand to be known for quality and all of the reviews say otherwise, it is off-brand and can hurt your business. You'll need to gather these data points to better understand what you can do internally to improve your digital presence.

Your branding will have a major impact on digital marketing.

Did this part of the audit come up with less-than-desirable results? Take this time to look inward and find ways that your team can improve its reputation. Perhaps you can incorporate new training and quality assurance guidelines that can improve your negative image online.

Also, if customers do leave negative reviews, be sure to respond to them and try to “make it right.”

2. Competitor Analysis

You’ve looked inward at your business’s brand, but now it’s time to see what the competition has been up to. A few things to review are:

  • Paid advertisements
  • Website rankings
  • Reviews
  • Menu 
  • Social media channels
  • Content marketing

Perhaps your new competitor offers online ordering and is using this strategy to take away some of your market share. You can then implement a similar system. Of course, you may find:

  • Competitor reviews are poor and you’re doing well
  • Social media has been a weakness of the competition and something that you can use to take market share
  • Paid advertisements are being used, and you can outbid your competitor to steal away leads

You may also add content to your marketing audit template to find weaknesses in your competitor’s content strategy that will allow you to rank higher for local terms.

3. Website

Your website is the gateway to your restaurant, and now is a good time to check your:

  • Design: Ensure that your site’s design follows best practices and is optimized to render well on all devices – including mobile.
  • Speed: Does your site load fast, or can you improve the load time? You can run speed tests on PageSpeed Insights to find loading time issues and areas that you can improve upon.
  • Function: Are all of your forms working properly? Are there pages that aren’t loading? Can you correct these issues?

If you have heatmaps installed, spend time looking through the data to find where users are getting “stuck” on your page and areas that you can improve to make the user experience better.

digital audit

4. SEO

Search engine optimization audits are a massive undertaking and are often best handled by a marketing professional. You’ll need to run your site through a tool like:

  • Ahrefs
  • SEMRush

You'll want to find:

  • New and lost keywords
  • New and lost backlinks

Using these tools, you can also run on-page SEO audits to learn if you have issues with your:

  • Internal links
  • Images
  • Redirects
  • Formatting and headers
  • Etc.

If you have duplicate content issues or redirect chains, you’ll need to fix these issues. You'll also want to compare your backlink profile to the competition to better understand if there are opportunities that you can leverage to improve rankings.

You may also find opportunities to improve the user experience, such as compressing images or serving static files via a CDN to improve site speed.

It's important to also check through Google Search Console and review your:

  • Robots.txt
  • URL structure
  • Structured data
  • Sitemaps
  • Etc.

5. Social Media

Social media is up next, and it’s time to look through all of your social pages and profiles to find areas to improve upon. You want to make sure that there’s consistency across:

  • Profile pictures
  • Cover photos
  • Profile bios

Check all of the links to your website to ensure that they’re working properly. Next, you’ll want to review your follower count and see if your followers are going up or down. If you’re losing followers, try to pinpoint why.

Perhaps you posted an off-brand post that caused you to lose followers.

If you find that you’re not posting consistently, why not take the time to create a posting calendar for social media? 

Also, review your posts and start responding to comments. If you fail to engage with customers, you risk losing followers.

6. Content Audit

Content audits are a lot of fun because they provide insight into how your website and its content have been performing. You'll want to look for pages that:

  • Lost traffic
  • Gained traffic
  • Became indexed or deindexed in search engines

You can run a tool like Screaming Frog to help you understand what pages are performing well and why. If you haven’t done a content audit in a long time, consider removing pages that are:

  • No longer relevant
  • Contain outdated information
  • Low value

During your audit, also spend time finding where you can update content to provide more value and restore rankings.

restaurant audit

7. Paid Advertising

Most paid advertising platforms provide you with a wealth of information that will help you understand:

  • KPIs progress
  • Click-through rates
  • Conversion rates
  • Cost per conversion
  • Reach 
  • Cost per click
  • Budget and spend

You'll want to see how all of these metrics performed over time and if there are adjustments that can be made to improve your ROI. It's important to run A/B tests on your landing pages, try to reduce the cost per click and improve your conversion rate.

8. Email Marketing

Finally, are you using email marketing? If not, you need to begin so that you can connect directly to your target audience. Restaurants that are using email marketing will want to analyze:

  • Starting subscriber count
  • Ending subscriber count
  • Email open rate
  • Email click-through rates

Perhaps you’ve neglected your email marketing or find that when you send deals on Tuesday, you receive a 40% open rate. Use the information from your audit and adjust your email marketing to improve open and click-through rates.

If you follow the steps above, you’ll be well on your way to a solid foundation for your digital marketing audit. An audit will help you identify what you’re doing right and wrong and how you can improve your restaurant’s marketing in the short- and long-term.