The Audit Advantage: Why Review Comes Before Marketing Strategy

Think you're ready to plan your marketing strategy? Hold up a minute. There's a crucial step you might be missing—one that could save you from wasting time and money on changes you don't actually need. 

In this episode, I'm revealing why successful businesses always audit before they strategize (and how skipping this step might be costing you clients). It doesn't matter if you invest in a website audit, an email marketing audit, an SEO audit, or just a more general holistic marketing audit. Reviewing your efforts will greatly improve any future strategy you create.

__________________________________________

EPISODE 151.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here:

https://erinollila.com/marketing-audits-website-audits-before-strategy/
______________________________________________

Join the waitlist for Spring Clean Your Site 2025: https://erinollila.com/opt-in-spring-clean-your-website/

Here's info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about my VIP intensive options or just book a strategy session right away
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products
• Come chat with Erin on Threads, Instagram, or LinkedIn

Transcript

0:00

Hey friend, last week we talked about why strategy needs to come first in all of your marketing efforts, and that is a hill I will die on. However, there's actually something I have to tell you that might surprise you. And that is, strategy works. isn't always the first step. Why? Well, there's actually a step that comes before strategy, because you can't create an effective strategy if you don't actually know what you're working with. Today, we're going to be talking about Audits. And I know, no one likes the word audit. It sounds tedious, it sounds overwhelming, and it comes with this sense of you've done something wrong, right? You're being audited, you're being checked, and you haven't done things the right way. But that's not actually what an audit is. An audit can actually help you find your strengths. An audit can actually help you find new material that you can reuse or repurpose. And it can show you what some of the successful elements are in your current marketing that you can replicate elsewhere. And sure, I won't lie to you, an audit might find some things that aren't working perfectly. But the beauty in that is that there's always room to improve. And, if you do skip this step, it might cost you time, money, and potentially even clients. So, buckle in, today we're going to talk about why audits matter and how to do them right. Or better yet, how you can hire me to do them for you. Alright, let's jump in. So let's start with why audits matter. And let me share a scenario, let's say, of what happens, or what I see all the time in my business. Leads will come to me saying that they need, let's say, a new website copy, a better content strategy, or, , maybe more visibility, like stronger SEO. But when I ask them why they need these things, what happens is their answers are very often based on feelings or they are assumptions, you know, I hear a lot of like, well, it's not working right now, or, we need to sound a little bit more professional or quite the opposite. We need to have a little bit more personality in our, in our marketing or our competitors are outranking us right now. And when we dig in a little further to find out more information on those, let's just take the final one. What did I say? Competitors are outranking them. Let's say we briefly talk about, well, how do you know that or what are they outranking you for? Or, you know, are these terms even terms that you want your clients to find you through? Are they, are they terms your clients are searching for? I often get a lot of deer in headlight, blank stares, because sometimes surface data gives us information that we think we can make decisions on. But the strategy element, the most important part is we need to take the data and understand what it means for us, what it means for our particular businesses. Because, you know, I used to say this, I swear the first 70 episodes of this podcast was me saying the words, it depends. All of these things are so dependent on your own individual business. You know, where someone's, , competitor's keywords might be something that they should stress about, right? Let's say a product based business who is also investing in things like Google Ads and they're putting money behind attracting individuals to their, their products. Yeah, they might care a lot about their most direct competitors,, overranking them on certain things. Whereas a different business, , let's say a service based business. Let's say a wedding photographer., if they're writing a blog post about, , what to wear for an engagement shoot, and they're worried because a local competitor is ranking higher for them for that same phrase, I would really get More, or at least, , provide more data on their current SEO, because let's say this is a, like a Columbus, Ohio, wedding photographer, anyone in the entire world who searches what to wear for an engagement shoot can get Any photographer in the world's website. Does that mean, even if it is the best blog they've read, does that mean they will hire that photographer? No. For example, someone in England may not want to, , come to the U. S. to get married in Columbus, Ohio, or pay for that Columbus, Ohio, wedding photographer to, to come out to England. And that Columbus, Ohio, wedding photographer may have no interest in travel. So, Examples to show that we need more information to make strategic decisions. How do we get that information? Well, it's that favorite word of ours. The word, the word audit. We need to do an audit and find out more information before we can make strategic plans. I had a client recently who was convinced that they needed to completely overhaul their service pages because they weren't getting enough inquiries. But when we did an audit of their website, this was a new to me client, I should say, we discovered something that was actually surprising for them. Their service pages were actually converting well, but They weren't converting into clients. They were converting into email newsletter subscribers they had one button that led them to a contact form and then they had a huge banner in, in two places, encouraging them to join the email list. So what happened is people joined their email list and then their emails weren't optimized. To make sales throughout the email. So they didn't have the system set up on the back end to nurture those subscribers and encourage them to, you know, really reach out further. So there was a user experience gap and then obviously a conversion gap there. Had I just jumped into the project to do a complete rewrite of their services pages, it would have been more expensive for them. And it would have been more time consuming for us because We wouldn't have actually solved the real problem. Sure. Would I have liked to do a website project with them? Absolutely. But the reason why I highly suggested we do an audit before we do any website work together is because I liked their website copy. I saw potential for improvement, which of course we went over during the audit. And that's why an audit is also such an asset. But I, I personally didn't think that they needed a complete rewrite. And I could tell when I looked at those service pages. right away that they were lacking some of those key calls to actions, key conversion related activities that need to happen on the page. And that was likely a chance why they weren't seeing people book calls because no, they weren't asking them to book a call. They were just encouraging them to fill out a form to join their email list. So enough picking on my client. And as an FYI, I was given permission to tell the story because I would never pick on my clients. If I didn't have their permission. Again, we're still talking about why audits matter, and if you're looking for a non marketing example, I would say, think about it like going to a doctor. You wouldn't want someone to prescribe you medication based on an assumption of your symptoms. You would want them, for example, to run tests, you know, obviously if this is applicable. You know, you would want them to do the research that they needed to come to the conclusion versus just saying, oh. You know, you're not feeling too well? Oh, I bet you have Lyme disease, let's say, and not do any blood draws. That's what it's like when we make guesses and assumptions in our marketing efforts. What we need to do is diagnose before we can treat. Let's talk about the types of audits that you might need. And I'm going to preface this, take a deep breath because you don't need all of these. The key is knowing which ones matter for your projects. And let's talk about the project specific ones first. As I just mentioned, a web copy audit is one type of audit. And what we look at when we're doing website copy audits is the actual words on the page, how they're organized, the messages that they're sending, whether the words are aligning with your goals, and how they guide your visitors around your site, but, and the most important but, is that the website words are not the main part of a website audit. What we're looking at for your entire website audit is we're looking at things like user experience, like design choices, such as that client who, had, those two large email banners and just the one recommendation to like fill out the contact form. We're looking at how SEO plays a factor, it's, it's a very holistic view of the entire website based on copy, design, user experience, site navigation, and tech. In addition to website audits, there's also content audits. So if you have a body of work, we're going to review, you know, what content already exists, how it's performing. where the content gaps are. And note to self, I need to do a content gap episode because I remember saying I was going to do this a while back and I am a huge advocate for, you know, leaning heavy on content gaps when it comes to content creation. So I'll, I'll put that down in my notes., also when we're doing content audits, we're talking again about what your audience actually needs, how this all fits together. How it all relates back to your overall marketing plan, like your SEO efforts, like your conversion efforts, like any launches you might be having or anything else, , exactly similar to content audits. There's email marketing audits, and those might include again, you know, what content is existing, like email content, you know, how your emails are already prefer performing in relation to things like open rates and clicks, , and replies, things like that. Are there any gaps, anything missing? What's the consistency look like? Are there opportunities for evergreen sequences or launch or sales sequences? How are the current automations performing?, and then how, again, how it fits together with the content that you're creating, the copy that you've created. And there's more, obviously, anything that you were very particular on in your business, in your marketing efforts, like social media audits, like, , Ad audits, for example, two things that I don't do, although I do talk about social media within my other audits. I don't do specific social media audits, but I do want to bring those two up, as well as potential other ones you might do, , because you should be auditing the different systems in your business. And then you want One that I do fairly often for clients, I just call a marketing audit because a lot of the times people come to me already doing pretty good stuff. You know, they might already have a blog, they're active on social, they're regularly sending email newsletters, they have their website copy completed, but There's, they know there is a gap somewhere and they're not quite figuring out where those gaps are. You know, what is the highest priority right now? Like what maybe needs updating more, you know? Or like I mentioned at the beginning, where are the strengths? What's performing so well and how can we replicate that in different marketing efforts that we're doing? So for the , marketing audits, we're examining things like channel performance. Message consistency, conversion paths, the ROI on the different efforts. And then again, you know, the strengths and how we can replicate that. The key with these different types is to match your audit to your goals. Because honestly, sometimes you really need to go a lot deeper into one area and really do some effort there. And then other times, all you really need is that broader view to figure out how to prioritize your marketing efforts. All right, obviously, you know, you're here right now, cause I'm going to try to convince you how important audits are, but let's talk about the benefits and things that you might not already be thinking about. Because audits often reveal opportunities that you didn't know you necessarily had. Think of it like cleaning out your closet or the opposite, taking,, different season clothes out. And finding money in like a jacket pocket I know this is silly, but it's happened to me a handful of times in the past, and I think it's so fun., Audits are kind of like that. They're revealing opportunities that you didn't know were there. This is what I think people miss so often. And this is why I think people, when they get their audit as a deliverable, they're very excited about audits. You know, at the end, not necessarily the beginning. Everyone hates that word. Nobody wants to pay for an audit. Everyone's like, ugh, an audit. I'm so embarrassed about what you might see. And then they get the deliverable and they're like, holy cow. I did not know this. This is awesome. Because audits can give you content that you forgot about that can be repurposed. And remember, if you've already created the content and you're just repurposing it, it's like getting content for free that can work for you hard right now., it could also showcase the old projects that can be refreshed and relaunched., and successful elements you can replicate elsewhere. So I'm going to stop there for a second and talk about one of the clients that I work with in 2024., they themselves were a marketing company with. Huge clients who hired them to, create content for their businesses. And my role was to jump into a project that they had already started, which was refreshing and, you know, auditing their 10 years worth of content that they created for their blog on their website. Obviously there was tons of decisions that went into this project, so I won't go into everything, but what we found was we had so much great content that could be repurposed by just doing some, you know, SEO updates to it. You know, it was evergreen content. It was still valuable, but it needed to be refreshed for SEO., We also identified that there were stories that could be tossed and stories, you know, like I just said, that could be saved. And then when we had those saved stories, we also looked at, you know, I should have said this first, what could be refreshed versus, you know, starting from scratch and being rewritten because we did have content we maybe then were ranking really well for, but that it wasn't evergreen. It needed some updates. So we were able to assign that out to some writers to recreate the content. So we really just maximize the SEO potential that we already were ranking for., and then. Content gaps. Yet again, we discovered there were gaps where we could create new evergreen blog content , the reason I stopped to say this was, you know, we found so much, so much content that we could You know, save some of the marketing budget from creating new content by reusing some of the old things. We found so many things that could be just touched quickly and lightly refreshed that would perform and get more leads for the business. And then we also discovered some of those elements that, again, we could take what was working and then give to our writers for new content to say, Hey, These posts performs really well. You know, here's what we feel about them. Here's what we'd like you to replicate., here are some patterns we're seeing and then the writers could do their best job for us because we were better able to identify what we, what we needed for our marketing channel and you can have that too. So it's not just finding things. I know I'm, I'm a broken record. I'm so sorry, but it is not just finding things that are not working. It's finding again, patterns that are resources that you may be under utilizing Getting that clearer picture on what's working so that you can replicate elsewhere. It also does give you a better idea of your actual capacity. So how much time are you actually spending on tasks right now? You know, what's eating up your resources without giving you returns? And then how can we Review what we have to get a better understanding of like, you, how you can perform at a higher capacity with like less stress, less anxiety, less replication of tasks in the future. So now let's talk about practical application. Okay, let's, let's fast forward past me trying to convince you of something and just talk about how this works because I can hear some of you right now are thinking, Erin, this sounds great, but like, where do I even start? Well, the first step is to always get very clear on what you're trying to learn. You can audit anything and get a massive amount of information, but if you don't know what you're actually actively looking for and what you'd like to collect, you're basically going to overwhelm yourself with information that you may not need. So are you looking for that overall marketing performance? Trying to help make decisions on, you know, next steps or improvements, let's say. Is your website., something you're unsure about. Are you trying to figure out the effectiveness? Like, is it working well enough? Do you need improvements? And most importantly, does your website improvements need to be something tiny? Or is it a more massive project and a, you know, like a complete website rewrite, let's say, or redesign? It could be about content engagement. Again, email engagement. Pick a focus and choose to stick to it because you always can do other audits later. And here's the framework that I use when I approach audits with my clients. First, gather data. I'm going to be looking at things like analytics, customer feedback, sales numbers, you know, whatever is actually relevant to the focus area of the audit I'm doing., then Look for patterns. What's working? What's not? Where are the gaps? Whenever I do like a holistic audit, let's just use websites as an example because that's tends to be what I'm hired most often to do. I do like a complete holistic review before I do any nitty gritty. I go page for page on each website taking notes of what's working, anything that springs to mind that feels relevant to the task at hand. And then I go back with a more fine tooth comb to, to really like look at alignment. So does it match the current goals in the target audience? Are the conversions in the spots that they need to be? Are you actually asking for conversions? Are the SEO efforts aligned with the goals? Like all of these specific things that I'm doing. It kind of goes from like the more macro of the website as a whole to the micro of like word by word, paragraph by paragraph, tech by tech, code issues by code issues. Afterward, obviously, you need to document your findings. When I'm doing stuff for clients, I do this as well because it's so easy to forget that one little thing, which could significantly influence the strategy that comes after the audit., and, and then finally, you know, if you're DIYing this, you need to prioritize whatever it is that you found and determine what needs immediate attention and what can wait. And I do this for my clients because again, audits are overwhelming. You're correct there. And. You're going to get a lot of information when you get an audit back from me, but that doesn't mean you need to take action immediately on all of those things. And I guess maybe here's a good time to remind everyone that in, in March, I always offer a Spring Clean Your Site Challenge. It's like a workshop with me where you'll be reviewing your sites, creating your own, , audits and making improvements. So if a DIY is your approach to everything, definitely get that, get your name on that wait list so that you can learn more about it. But also here's another good segue to talk about the difference between DIY and professional audits, you know, because there is. Things that you can and should audit yourself, but there's also times when professional help can actually save you more money or time, or more importantly, the headache of doing it on your own, because you can probably handle things like a basic content inventory, simple analytic reviews, checking for any outdated information, identifying gaps that might be a Obvious, because some of the best content gaps are less obvious. I will say that, but, and,, gathering customer feedback, especially if you're willing to do surveys or anything like that. But you might want more professional help if you need, if you need special tools or expertise, , if you're seeing symptoms, but you don't really identify like what the cause of those symptoms are, if you are too, too close to the project to be objective, and I think we all know. That happens to the best of us, if the problem is affecting multiple areas of your business, or you need some data driven recommendations. So, like a car, for example, like you can do regular maintenance, you know, you can put the gas in every week, or you can maybe change the oil, but you also might need a mechanic's expertise for deeper issues or a diagnostic help. So whether you choose to DIY or to get a professional like me to do it for you, again, I really want to encourage you to document everything that you do because an audit is only as good as what you can do with the information afterward. And that's why prioritizing it's so important. All right, my lecture is done for the day, but what I want to make sure that you take away is that an audit is not just about finding problems. It's really, truly about discovering opportunities. It's about making sure every change you make moves you forward instead of just keeping you busy. Next week we'll be back to talk about different ways that you can build your strategic foundation. See you next week, where we'll keep talking copy.