Is Your Digital Marketing on Track? 9 Key Factors to Evaluate

A digital marketing strategy set to autopilot isn't marketing. It's not strategic either.

Markets evolve, and consumer preferences shift, which means you need to continuously evaluate and refine your approach.

Whether you’re a law firm, an accounting firm, or run any other service-based business, these strategies will transform your digital marketing efforts from a random shot in the dark into a precision-guided growth system.

1. Review Your Goals

Before changing your strategy, revisit your goals by conducting a comprehensive audit.

To start, assess your financial performance by reviewing your sales, profit, and cash flow statements. Compare the numbers against your initial forecasts. If there are discrepancies, determine why.

Next, check in with your customers. Are they happy with your performance? Have their needs changed since the beginning of the year? Send out surveys or reach out for direct feedback. Q4 is also a perfect time to size up the competition. Evaluate yourself against other industry leaders. Are you keeping pace or losing ground? The answers to these questions will help you plan your future moves. But don’t stop there. Evaluate your current processes to identify inefficiencies, assess your spending patterns, and look for areas of potential growth or improvement. This approach provides a solid foundation, setting the stage for Q1.

2. Analyze Website Traffic

We've seen companies sink their entire budget on a new website that was aesthetically beautiful but didn’t deliver. Why? The answer is in the data.

If your website is underperforming, review:

• Bounce rates: High rates may indicate lackluster content or a poor browsing experience.
• Pages viewed: More isn’t necessarily better. Are visitors finding what they need or wandering around aimlessly?
• Flow: Where are users entering and exiting? This may reveal your strongest content and biggest drop-off points.
• Heatmaps: Want to find out where users are clicking and scrolling? A heat map will tell you.

3. Audit Your SEO Performance

SEO audits don't just shed light on the effectiveness of your content and keyword strategy; they also uncover technical issues like:

• Declining organic traffic
• ADA non-compliance
• Slow page loading
• Poor mobile responsiveness
• Lack of structured data

Our SEO specialists offer a free audit that will show you where your SEO score stands. We can also help you develop a strategy to improve your search engine rankings and overall online visibility.

4. Meet Google Search Essential Guidelines

In May, Google rolled out a new search feature called AI Overview—the company’s latest attempt to streamline user searches by eliminating clicking and scrolling. This feature presents information in a bite-sized summary at the top of the search results. Long story short, you want your content to be included in AI Overview search results. To increase the odds, you need to follow Google Search Essentials guidelines by:

• Making your website crawlable and indexable.
• Giving users quality, human-written content.
• Optimizing your web pages.

Our SEO team specializes in helping businesses overcome these challenges and has written about them extensively here.

5. Examine Social Channels

Too many companies are fooled by vanity metrics. Unfortunately likes and follower counts mean little if they don’t translate to business growth.

Dive deep into your social metrics to uncover hidden messages. Follower growth, for example, is great. But sudden spikes or drops? That’s where the truth lies. Find out what caused them.

Just as important: Remember that not all platforms deserve equal attention. B2B businesses, for example, will likely find more success with recruitment, investors, and networking on LinkedIn. On the other hand, B2C service businesses might find Instagram or Facebook more effective for brand awareness and customer engagement.

6. Evaluate Your Email Messaging

In terms of technology, email is ancient. But it is still one of the most powerful and widely used communication devices. To get more out of your email marketing:

• Send messages from a company account—not a personal one.
• Target your messaging to a specific audience segment.
• Send messages earlier in the week. By Friday, inbox exhaustion has set in.
• Keep subject lines between five and seven words.
• Keep body messages as short as possible—no more than 100 words, if possible.

Remember, these are guidelines, not hard rules. Always test to determine what works best for you.

7. Assess Paid Strategy Performance

Experience has shown us that a paid media strategy is one of the most effective digital marketing channels. But making it work for you requires:

• Tracking cost per conversion: What does it cost to acquire a customer versus the lifetime value they provide? If that ratio is imbalanced, it may be time to recalibrate your strategy.
• Investigating click-through rates: High clicks but low conversions is often a signal that your copy or value proposition is falling short.
• Reviewing Google quality: If your score is low, revisit your keyword strategy, keeping in mind that sometimes long-tail keywords have a lower search volume but higher conversion rates.

Need help putting these strategies into play? Partner with WISE for a comprehensive audit of all of your existing paid media accounts.

8. Assess Your Online Reputation

Building a stockpile of positive customer reviews must be part of your digital marketing efforts. Why? By some estimates, over 90% of customers read online reviews before visiting a business. Another 88% say they trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. To manage your online reputation:

• Regularly read customer reviews.
• Respond to them in a timely manner.
• Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews.

Is your business suffering due to negative, false, or defamatory reviews? You’re in the right place. We know how to remove them.

9. Evaluate the Bandwidth of Your Internal Resources

A successful digital marketing strategy isn’t just about external tactics. It’s also about having the right internal resources to execute those tactics. As you close out Q4, consider:

• Your team’s capacity: Are they stretched too thin or lack the expertise to refine your digital marketing strategy? If so, it may be time to outsource to a digital marketing partner like WISE.
• Time management: Can your team account for their time? While we believe using software to track our team’s behavior is invasive and erodes trust, we did implement a self-time-tracking initiative in Q2. This has significantly improved job satisfaction and productivity while giving us insights into workflow and resource allocation.
• Technology and tools: Does your team have the tools and resources they need to effectively execute your marketing strategy? Technology will never be a substitute for strategy, but it is a means to boost productivity and effectiveness.