Digital Marketing Audit
ALI or the Australian Leadership Index requires a digital marketing audit in their business to ensure that they can identify their existing risks and complexities in the industry and take up suitable decisions to better the business processes and operations (Chaffey 2019, p.1). ALI requires to improve their products and position after learning and getting feedback from the customers. The main goals of the organization are provided in the following paragraphs:
i) Increase an awareness of ALI for driving public impact.
ii) Incrementing engagement with ALI reporting and data portal.
iii) Increasing blog sign-ups and contact enquiries with conversations.
iv) Developing the company into a measure of leadership reputation.
A thorough investigation of the digital marketing efforts is required to be audited, and the performance of the strategies, advertisements, posts, and practices of ALI are needed to be considered. The current digital marketing audit efforts do not generate any new leads, and they are not fulfilling their sales goals.
In June 2019, ALI was launched at Swinburne University and in the same month, traditional marketing campaign was being launched.
i) The Melbourne-based billboard campaign was for 2 weeks and
ii) The poster campaign was for 4 weeks.
In April 2020, ALI launched their digital marketing strategy via:
i) LinkedIn
ii) Google Ads and
iii) Website or blogs.
They have ensured that they are using these channels for maximum competitive advantages and visitors.
The process of digital marketing audit of ALI can be completed by identifying the catalyst, which includes the fact that ALI has noted a recent drop in its customers’ click on their corporate website.
As per PPC or pay per click data, the number of clicks has gone down in the range of March 2020 to July 2020.
Figure 1: Clicks Data
(Source: Collected from Google Ads)
On the other hand, CPC or cost per click of ALI is above the CTR or click through rate.
Figure 2: CTR/CPC Data of ALI
(Source: Data Collected through Google Ads)
They have arranged for several campaigns for PPC and have got the following statistical data:
Figure 3: Campaign Statistics
(Source: Data Collected through Google Ads)
It is being analyzed that most of the campaigns are removed and they were not present in headlines 1 and 2. It refers to the fact that the organization has weak digital marketing strategies and they have not effective in retaining their position through digital marketing like Google Ads.
Table 1: PPC Data of Keywords of ALI
(Source: Data Collected through Google Ads)
The total number of clicks for most of the terms is 1, which denotes that ALI has been unsuccessful in managing their position in top-level, as compared to its competitors. Hence, it can be concluded that they have been following a poor digital marketing strategy in their business.
After auditing their website clicks’ data, it is noted that they have a sharp fall in the website visits. In August 2019, the number of users was more than 1200; however, the number dropped to only 500 in June 2020. It was also noted that in February 2020, the number was below 100, which was extremely vulnerable for the organization.
Figure 3: Web Analytics Data
(Source: Collected from Google Analytics)
For the top 1000 daily landing pages’ data, the organization of ALI lacked a considerable limit. In August 2019, the number of clicks was 150; however, it dropped to around 70 in June 2020. As a result, it was clear that they were degrading compared to the previous data for last year.
According to the behavior flow analysis, there is a sharp decline in the number of users. The starting pages had almost 5700 users, which dropped to 2400 after the 1st interaction, 1700 after the 2nd interaction and finally 1200 users after 3rd interaction. Most of the users lost interest due to weak digital marketing and lack of content.
Figure 4: Behavior Flow of Customers
(Source: Collected from Google Analytics)
As per the data of LinkedIn, the total number of followers of the organization from Melbourne is 284 amongst 27 different locations. Moreover, they would have to optimize their content for both the audience and search engines. It would be referred to as creating content for the audience, which is separated into bite-sized chunks by headlines, which address the issues successfully (De Pelsmacker, Van Tilburg & Holthof 2018, p. 49).
2. Target Audience Evaluation
After evaluating the data from Google Ads, Google Analytics and LinkedIn, it is being checked that ALI is drastically losing its audience, especially in the last one year. It is the key issue of this organization. For this purpose, they would require to have a better reach of the audience through marketing (Chaffey & Smith 2017, p. 1). The second significant issue is that the organizational goals are not being served by their current digital marketing channels. One of the major reasons of such issue could be pandemic situation. Moreover, they have launched digital marketing strategy almost 1 year later than the traditional marketing campaign, which allowed their competitors to get better position. As a result, the performance is degraded drastically. The business goals of increasing engagement with ALI reporting and data portal as well as increasing conversions like contact enquiries and blog sign-ups; were not being achieved.
As a result, ALI would have to take other digital marketing steps, which would be quite useful and efficient for reaching out to maximum customers (Todor 2016, p. 51). For email marketing, they would have to consider specific steps for email marketing, which include building and growing database of the audience, designing their emails in such a manner that they can easily attract the customers, creating the content, segmentation of the database, deploying targeted emails, measuring their success factors of the brand and also sending test emails to these audiences for checking, if they are interested in ALI or not (Taiminen & Karjaluoto 2015, p. 2). The incorporation of email marketing automation would also be useful for the business. The software platforms enable marketers to execute their email marketing tactics simultaneously and automatically. The automation of repetitive tasks, which are undertaken regularly within the email marketing campaign.
ALI have the target audience of institutions operating in the government, public, not for profit and private sectors. Moreover, they even want to reach out to the journalists and media organizations, general public and the institutional leaders like senior leaders, who are responsible for setting and maintaining the values, mission and organizational character. ALI would have to ensure that digital marketing practices would be useful and accurate. As per the assessment, they would have to involve the right people at the right time, who could be termed as significant for taking up such steps in customer management. They can reach out to their target audience via email marketing and mobile marketing tactics. It is being analyzed that most of the audience is from Melbourne; hence they do not require to focus in this particular region; rather consider Europe and Asian countries for increasing the number of views and visit.
The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of ALI is provided. The main strength of this organization include creating new and innovative content for the customers. On the other hand, lack of customer engagement is a major weakness as they are getting lesser audience. Customer engagement would be required for a better integration of sales and marketing and threats of other similar organizations and competitors are present for them. Developing a new and effective strategy of digital marketing is the main opportunity for them. Since they are facing issues with the present email marketing techniques, they can select mobile marketing (Patrutiu-Baltes 2016, p. 61). This type of marketing is the multi-channel online marketing technique focused on reaching out to a specific audience on smartphones, feature phones, tablets, and any other related devices via websites. Emails, social media, and mobile applications would be useful for providing customers with better time and location advantages. Moreover, the website’s personalized data and content should be updated and highly effective, as compared to any other similar website, so that maximum customers are drawn to their website (Baltes 2015, p. 111).
The content that delivers high quality and value would be sufficient for quality content positioning as the authority in their niche market. Moreover, they should be active on social media to a high level to eventually draw maximum customers to their website (Kingsnorth 2019, p. 1). Mobile marketing would play a vital role in this type of customer-reaching phase, as almost 73% of the total customers have smartphones in 2020. The smartphone penetration at the point of saturation would help them gain maximum support from the customers. Emails, social media, and instant messaging have the chance of getting the maximum amount of customers; while using the Internet on mobile, and as a result, they would be ensuring that all the vital aspects and features are fulfilled without any complexity or issue.
ALI should incorporate SMS marketing. Even if any audience is not accessing Internet service, they would be able to get a notification about their website efficiently and promptly (Kannan 2017, p. 24). Mobile marketing approaches through SMS has expanded rapidly in Europe and Asia, and the website of the ALI has fewer followers and audience from these parts of the world. As a result, it would be extremely advantageous for the organization to gain the maximum number of audiences quickly. ALI would also be able to identify the choices of their customers and try to maintain content, according to these requirements.
Moreover, the organizational management should also be included so that the customers are attached to their website, and they select this particular website amongst all others. It would also improve their current position and increase the number of pay per click, which is less in the last year’s data. The approaches of email marketing and mobile marketing can also ensure that ALI would be quickly reaching out to their existing and new customers or audience. By the middle of 2021, the data would be on top compared to the last year. Hence, ALI would be able to eradicate their existing issues related to customer choice and also gain competitive advantages successfully.
3. Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that Digital marketing can be referred to as advertisement that is being delivered through different digitalized channels like search engines, social media, mobile applications, websites, and emails. It is the methodology by which other companies endorse goods, services, and brands. As a result, the customers majorly rely on the digital means for researching products. A proper audit of the digital marketing process is required to ensure that the business’s current position is known and the potential risks are eradicated successfully. ALI, is an ongoing public study of leadership for Australia’s greater good. The above-provided report has provided a digital marketing audit for ALI with consideration of target market evaluation.
References
Baltes, L.P., 2015. Content marketing-the fundamental tool of digital marketing. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Economic Sciences. Series V, 8(2), p.111.
Chaffey, D. & Smith, P.R., 2017. Digital marketing excellence: planning, optimizing and integrating online marketing. Taylor & Francis.
Chaffey, D., 2019. Digital marketing. Pearson UK.
De Pelsmacker, P., Van Tilburg, S. & Holthof, C., 2018. Digital marketing strategies, online reviews and hotel performance. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 72, pp.47-55.
Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), pp.22-45.
Kingsnorth, S., 2019. Digital marketing strategy: an integrated approach to online marketing. Kogan Page Publishers.
Patrutiu-Baltes, L., 2016. Inbound Marketing-the most important digital marketing strategy. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Economic Sciences. Series V, 9(2), p.61.
Taiminen, H.M. & Karjaluoto, H., 2015. The usage of digital marketing channels in SMEs. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development.
Todor, R.D., 2016. Blending traditional and digital marketing. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Economic Sciences. Series V, 9(1), p.51.
