Marketing Audit: Is Your Business Ready for 2022?
The new year is less than a week away. Depending on your company’s outlook, planning, and readiness, this can seem either daunting or thrilling.
To head into 2022 with confidence, take the necessary time to completely review your 2021 goals by compiling data and comparing results to desired outcomes. To ring in the new year with a competitive edge, it’s vital to know what is working and what’s not. That’s why a digital marketing audit is so critical for any online business, no matter the size.
This time of year is busy—so we have outlined a basic marketing audit that touches on some important considerations for any review. From a basic strategy to key trends in different marketing channels, this overview will guide you in the right direction.
Strategy Review
Since your marketing should be viewed as an ecosystem that seamlessly flows together, it’s best to take a step back and review your overall strategy, goals, and results. A few questions your team should answer are:
What markets are we currently targeting? Are we leaving any out for a particular reason?
Does each of our products/services have their own unique selling points? Do our customers know about them and are they clearly stated in our marketing?
What are our top competitors doing that creates a threat or opportunity for us?
Being as honest as possible, what marketing efforts are doing well and which ones are failing?
These questions can help you review your 2021 goals, prep for 2022, see the big picture of the health of your ecosystem, and uncover your marketing’s results-to-goal grade.
Channel Review
It’s also important to collect data and review each marketing channel of your ecosystem. These micro-reviews can help you pinpoint specific areas of struggle and success. Additionally, it’s also necessary at this point to research benchmarks and stats in each marketing category to ensure you’re ready to compete moving forward.
Here’s a starter list with common marketing channels to review. To get your mind moving forward, we’ve listed some 2022 stats and predictions to take into account:
Website: For many companies, this is the single biggest driver of sales and awareness. Customer expectations for websites are high and website traffic is overwhelmingly mobile and will continue to be so in 2022. Pro tip: marketers must make sure their website is optimized (and up to speed!).
Video: Research has found that 84% of consumers have been convinced to buy a product after watching a video, and they’re twice as likely to share videos than other types of online content. Cisco reported that by 2022, video will account for 82% of all online traffic.
Email: 59% of marketers cite email as their number one source of ROI. If you want to stay competitive with email marketing, pay attention to these predictions for 2022:
Integrating interactivity: Static emails just won’t cut it for your subscribers. They want engaging, interactive emails that they can interact with or manipulate without having to leave their inbox. Think: carousels, videos or sliders.
Focus less on open rate: This one may come as a shock! But with the release of Apple’s new privacy settings, Apple will preload all email content, which means that it also preloads tracking pixels. Emails will now appear as “opened”, even if the user never actually opens them. With this new change, marketers can’t track information from Apple’s users like; when and where users open emails or what device users use to open an email. Pro tip: marketers should shift their focus on different metrics, like conversion rate or list growth rate.
Making it personal: Personalization is an email marketing trend that has persisted throughout the years, so it’s on our list of email marketing trends of 2022. This strategy is a great way to get subscribers to interact with your emails and check out what you have to offer. Here are a few stats to prove our point:
Personalization improves open rate by 42%
Personalized subject lines increase open rates by 26%
Personalization increases the average clickthrough rate (CTR) by 14%
Personalization increases conversions by 10%
Digital Ads: Strategy first, then design. Less is more—the explosion of digital marketing options means that many businesses are spread too thin across too many channels. Smart businesses focus on dominating one channel.
Putting It All Together
Now is the time to take all of the data you have analyzed and turn your learnings into goals for 2022 and beyond. Oftentimes an audit leads to more questions and research—this is a good thing!
Marketing is an ever-changing world, which must be entrusted to experienced and successful professionals. The Pennock team has loads of experience in strategy development, paid social, and SEO. Start the new year off right by taking advantage of a simple digital marketing audit. Need a little help? We’d love to help make this your best year yet—let’s chat!