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How to do a Digital Marketing Health Check for your Clients [Step by Step Guide]

Author: Carl Heaton

He is our senior instructor and originally from Manchester UK. Carl teaches our Web Design and Online Marketing Courses.

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Guide to Digital marketing for the business health check

When taking on new clients it is important to know how to do a full online health check in order to have a good idea of where they stand and what you need to run with. This article talks about all the ways you can do an online health check for your clients. We will talk you through how to make a relevant list of action points to help them climb the ranks, make more sales, or increase their reach.

Going through an online health checklist is one of the most efficient ways. We all have that colleague or friend who gloomily predicts that your digital marketing is a waste of time. That is mostly because they didn’t do it right. But never fear! Making sure you know exactly HOW not to follow in their footsteps is easy. We have compiled the handy checklist to help you through the potential minefield of digital marketing.

Be sure to tick off every box to ensure the best possible services for your clients.

Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of any marketing position. Knowing your sales funnel and being able to tick off a social media health check will put you in a much better position to not only get, but retain digital marketing clients.

Awareness, interest, decision, and action are the summary of the journey that an online prospect needs to go through. You need to be able to guide your client’s potential prospects every step of this journey. Don’t worry; it’s not as complicated as it sounds! Just make sure that you follow our step by step online health checklist, and you will be sure to have a handle on it in no time!

How can you determine if your story is worth telling

Storytelling has been around almost as long as humans have. This, in essence, is just what content marketing is. It’s the ability to build a relationship with your clients by providing high-quality content on a consistent basis, over a long period of time.

Content marketing platforms can be any multitude of things. It can range from radio, to print to digital. As long as you are constantly telling your client’s story about their product, they will be foremost in people’s minds. Check off these items to ensure that you are correctly practicing a content marketing strategy:

How can the writer point out the problem:

Understand your audience

That means finding their history, their life story, their preferences, likes, and dislikes. Then select a story that they can understand and digest. Let them feel rewarded just for listening, make them feel smart, or special. But, you’re probably asking, how do some people can talk about their socks and can still be interesting? All stories are worth telling, but how you tell is what makes them compelling.

Find a story that your audience wants to hear

An online health check must be performed to outline a problem people have across multiple platforms.You can even use skywriting if you really want to, but be sure to do an online health check to be sure that you are hitting all the actual relevant bases.

Create agitation

Expand on that problem. Show people just how badly they do actually want something.

Does the content address the users problems that you have created?

Ensure that your content creates the problem, agitates it, and correctly addresses the issue by providing a solution.

Tell your story in a captivating manner

Use a combination of short and long sentences. Vary between simple and complicated words. Speak so quickly that you run out of breath during the exciting bits, and when you get to a truly important point… break. Let there be silence. Speak slowly, and clearly with a soft voice.

Checklist:

✓ Make sure to understand the audience

✓ Make sure to find a story the audience wants to hear

✓ Make sure to create an agitate story

✓ Make sure that the content created addresses the user’s problem

✓ Ensure that the user tell the story in a captivating manner

Social Media analysis

Social media is a very powerful tool that companies can utilize to connect with their audience and grow their business. But in order for social media use to be successful, a social media plan must be in place.

Step 1 – Set your social media goals

Step 2 – Define your target market

Step 3 – Conduct a SWOT analysis

Step 4 – Analyze your competitors

Step 5 – Outline your company’s available resources

Step 6 – Critique your website

Step 7 – Perform a social media audit

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How to check the presence health check of our clients in the digital market

Content audit

well-executed content audit done on an annual basis can deliver big insights into your website’s blog and content marketing strategy.

A content audit involves taking a look at all the content on your website and assessing its relative strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritise your future marketing activities. It’s a qualitative assessment and evaluation based.

When done perfectly, A good audit will help you answer these questions about your content pieces:

Which ones are performing the best?

What topics does your audience most connect with?

Which posts have overstayed their welcome?

An audit will tell you where you need to focus your future efforts in terms of both SEO and marketing perspective.

Website audit

The website is a full analysis of all the factors that impact on the website’s visibility in search engines. This standard procedure provides full access to all the insights to any website, overall traffic, and individual pages.

Websites: Portals To Everything

A website is your main way of finding and reeling in clients. It’s your introduction and your first impression all in one go. To have, and offer, a really good website you need to do a few things. You will also need to stick to a few rules which have been laid out by the all-knowing Google.

There are millions of people using the internet all over the world every day. Imagine the opportunities if you could get even a tiny percentage to engage with your client’s website? That may seem like an easy thing, right? I mean the odds are that people will eventually come across your client’s portal, won’t they? Not necessarily.

In order for your websites to even get onto people’s screens, it needs to be able to be found. If your client sells donuts, people wanting donuts in their area will type into a search engine: “best donuts in…” There is little doubt that your client is not the only donut shop, and so the search engine will bring up a whole load of finds. You need to be sure that YOUR CLIENT’S site is at the top of those results.

This is where we bring SEO and overall conversion optimisation into play. When creating and maintaining a site, be sure to apply an online health checklist to all aspects of it. Knowing SEO best practices and implementing on your site is crucial to becoming the first option that potential clients find. But how do you do that? Simple! Just make sure that you check off everything on the below online presence checklist!

How we check the sites of our clients

If you want to learn more on google analytics. Read our article about Google analytics tutorial for business

Visuals, visuals, visuals! A pretty site is an engaging site! Make yours as interesting to look at as possible. Check out these visually appealing sites and you will surely be inspired to create your own:

How to make it easy to navigate: People don’t want to mess about trying to find what they want. Make it quick and simple to use. You should be able to get where you want to go on a site on no more than three clicks.
- Keep it consistent.
- Divide categories clearly.
- Make all navigation elements clickable links.
- Use accurate navigation titles.
- Ensure every clickable image has ALT text.
- Ensure your search feature works.

Create constant content updates: Google checks for content updates and ranks updated sites higher than stagnant ones. Make sure that your site is constantly being updated with fresh new content.

Give people love. Give people free stuff: It may sound counterproductive but give away free stuff. Everyone loves getting something for free, and this will add value for clients as well as help with word of mouth. Freebies come in many shapes and forms, from ebooks and software to coupons, videos and more.

While Amazon offers tons of free ebooks for its Kindle app users, Freepik has an awesome collection of free graphics resources. But don’t be mistaken, even though these two sites give away freebies, they also generate income through their paid and premium plans.

Create a Blog: A consistent blog catches not only potential client’s interest, but Google’s too. If your blog is a reputable source of info, you even get link backs from other sites.
- Because is a global creative experiences agency. The agency has a blog section on its website offering consistent blog posts for their audience. You can check out their award-winning blog here. They release more than 10 articles every month.
- HubSpot is another website with an amazing blog. Their blog has over 215,000 subscribers and attracts more than 2 million monthly visits.

Make a call to action obvious: Again, no one wants to muck about looking for the CTA button. Make sure that your CTA’s are prominent and there are enough of them.

A good example of websites with an effective CTA is Netflix, a streaming service provider. Right when you step into their landing page, the website presents you with a very persuasive vibrant red CTA on a dark theme background, guiding you to try out their free trial and choose one of their membership plans.

Create Brand Familiarity: Keeping your branding consistent helps people to recognize you instantly. Be sure to put the logo not just on the home page header, but all your pages so that the browsers know exactly where they are at all times.
- Take a look at Electronic Arts. On this website, you can see their logo on the top left corner on every page as you navigate through the site.

Make sure that social media is king: Be sure that site is easy to find on social media. EVERYONE is on social media, and things go viral in astonishingly short amounts of time. Be sure that you get in on that action.

When it comes to social media, the perfect candidate that is absolutely killing it on Instagram is GoPro. The brand tells stories to their growing 15 million+ followers on Instagram through the lens of their products in the form of pictures and videos captured on GoPro cameras by their own customers. We all can learn a thing or two from GoPro’s successful UGC-focused content marketing.

Make it Mobile Friendly: Many people consume content on their mobiles. There is nothing worse than going to a site that you cannot read because it is not coded to fit a smaller screen. Don’t be the guy who loses clients because your site isn’t mobile friendly!

Dropbox has a responsive website that applies fluid grid and flexible visuals in its design. As you can see on their website, all the visual elements rearrange themselves when viewing on mobiles or when resizing the browser window.

Dribble’s website has a good flexible grid. On mobile and tablet view, the columns condense down to only two. Several items including the view, comment and like counts as well as the name of each shot’s designer are no longer displayed.

Check browser compatibility: Make sure that your site is compatible with ALL browsers such as Safari, chrome, firefox edge, and opera. You can also do this the easy way by using these sites:
- Browsershots
- CrossBrowserTesting

Checklist:

✓ Make sure to check the sites of our clients to know them better

✓ Include visuals

✓ Make sure to make it easy for people to navigate

✓ Ensure that the content creation is consistent

✓ Make sure to give people love and free stuff

✓ Did you create a good blog

✓ Make calls to action

✓ Make sure that their social media is king

✓ Ensure that their website and mobile is friendly

✓ Make sure its browser compatibility

Social Media: The Viral factor

Some ridiculous statistics like 95% of the world is on social media in some form or another. You need to be able to understand how consistency, relevance, reach, and engagement affect your marketing. Making sure that all of these are constantly being monitored and updated will go a long way to making your client a social media mogul.

This isn’t difficult to do, just follow our online social media checklist to ensure that you are ticking all the boxes.

Create Consistency: Make sure that your social media posts need to have the same look and feel, and the same sort of message every time your post. Make sure that they are recognisable, and have a clear CTA. This will allow you to grow in audience engagement and reach.
Ensure Relevance: Ensure that your posts are relevant to your client’s product. Talk only about relevant topics. People who love donuts do not want to hear about other random topics.
Expand your Reach: Make use of both paid advertising and organic reach to reach as many potential clients as possible. Your posts need to do this to really have any effect. Sponsor your posts via paid advertising or make use of organic reach (which is basically people sharing your stuff).
Create Engagement: Make your posts interesting enough that people share and like them. People who like your posts will engage with them. We have all seen the posts with 1K likes. That is what you are aiming for. The more people that comment or like your post, the more important and popular your post is going to be.

Checklist:

In order to have a successful social media campaign make sure you cover the points below:

✓ Ensure there is consistency in the mood and tone of their post

✓ Ensure health check

✓ Double check the reach

✓ Make sure to create good engagement

How to create landing pages

A landing page is just a fancy name for the front page of a website. It’s the first impression, the foot in the door. In digital marketing terms, it’s a page that is specifically designed to receive and convert traffic from an online marketing campaign. You need to have a good understanding of how to use a landing page correctly, and what exactly it does in order to run campaigns for clients.

There are a few things that you will need for a solid landing page. They are not difficult to do, and by using our handy online health checklist you can be sure that you have got all of them covered.

Create the main headline: You need to be sure that you have a relevant and catchy main headline, this is the first thing that people are going to see, so it has to really pop.
Create a supporting headline: Go into more detail here. Explain exactly what it is that people are signing up for.
Choose a great hero shot: Imagery, imagery! Make sure that your page is gorgeous with a high-quality image that talks to your client’s campaign.
Create a benefits summary: Why are people here? What can they gain from signing up with your client? This is where the free stuff can come into play as well. Be sure that you have a really great baited hook to get people to join you.
Place your Call To Action: Make it very clear what the interested party’s next step should be. Create a simple call to action that is visible and easy to understand.

Checklist:

✓ Make sure the main headline is good

✓ Double check the headline

✓ Make sure the image used is related to the content

✓ Make sure the content benefits people by providing value to their lives

✓ Ensure to place the calls to action

How to write a newsletter:

E-marketing is pretty much using a digital format to market your product. This covers all digital platforms, including social media, websites, and basically anything that has anything to do with the internet, but especially email. As a digital marketer, it goes without saying that you need to know the online presence health check by heart.

Using email to market your client’s products is an efficient way of reaching a lot of people quickly. There are a number of things that you need to be sure of though, in order to make sure that you don’t end up in the junk or trash folder. Just follow our checklist to email marketing glory!

Know exactly whom you want to target: Make sure that your goals and audience are clearly defined. Sending emails to people who are not interested in your product is a waste of everyone’s time.

Make a good first impression: Be very clear who your mail is from and what it’s about. Include a hook to get people to actually open it. Remember, the inbox is the first impression; you want to make a good one!

Get crafty with content: Make the actual content of your email incredible. Give this lots of time and thought, and craft amazing content that people simply can’t resist!

Make it pretty: Design is as important in emails as it is in anything else. Make sure that your mail is easy on the eyes, and it will draw more people in.

Don’t be spam: Make sure that your mail goes to the inbox, not the junk folder. Run a Spam Filter Test to ensure email authentication records are in place and get a reputation check of your IP addresses and domain names. Also, verify your subscribers have opted-in and are actually

wanting to hear from your client!

Checklist:

✓ Make sure to know the target audience

✓ Make sure the message is clear and gives out a good impression

✓ Make sure to provide content people can’t resist

✓ Ensure the newsletter is well designed and attracts the audience

✓ Don’t spam with unnecessary things

Example of good and bad newsletters

Good newsletter:

This is an example of good newsletters because there is a sufficient amount of text supported with images and illustrations. Moreover, the hierarchy is very well organized and it guides the reader throughout the newsletter.

Bad example of newsletters:

This is an example of a bad newsletter. There are high chances where the reader will lose concentration and track while reading this post since there is heavy use of text and poor use of white space. Due to the lack of images and illustrations, it will repulse the audience.

Sales Copy: That Sneaky Devil

Writing copy is easy, right? It’s not though. Copy is what gets people interested in your client’s product. Copy can alienate, or intrigue. Copy is arguably the most important part of any advert. Creating a high-quality sales copy is imperative to being a successful digital marketer.

You could be marketing the most exciting product on the planet, but if you can’t explain it or get people interested, it’s useless trying to sell it.

Don’t worry if you are not the best writer on the planet, we have a handy online health checklist to be sure that you are not just playing hit or miss.

Start with your best benefit: Tell people why your product is the best. Be honest, although you can fluff a little. Lying is NEVER the way to go in advertising.

Expand on that: Your next step is to go a bit further in depth as to why people want and need your product. Make them feel like it will change their lives. Plant the seed that they absolutely HAVE to go out and get your product, like right now!

Go into detail: Explain exactly what the people are going to get. Are they the freshest donuts in all the world? Here you paint your word picture of just what they could be in possession of…
Show proof: As we said, no lying here. Back your statement up with solid proof.
Create urgency: Tell your people exactly why they need to act now! Don’t miss out!
Sum it up: Always sum up the most important benefits for your clients. Some people skip to the end of things, so be sure to get their attention even if they just read the last paragraph.
Create your CTA: A call to action is where your people actually go and get the thing that you want them to get. Make sure it’s in plain view, and easy to understand.

Read our article “14 Copywriting Books recommended by experts” winning combination of copywriting books.

Checklist:

✓ Always give people the reason to believe why the product is the best

✓ Make sure to showcase what people are going to get

✓ Make sure to have proof to show them that this is true

✓ Don’t forget to create urgency

✓ Make sure to sum up all the important benefits for people

✓ Create the calls to action

Checklist of what we have learned

To make sure that you are offering your clients a top class service, and that your business continues to grow, you need to master the checklist for each of the main Digital Marketing aspects. Websites are your portal to the world, be sure that they are easy to understand, and pretty to look at. Landing pages are like dedicated websites for specific campaigns and can be extremely useful in driving traffic to your main site. Be sure that your first impression on people is a good one with relevant sales copy and content.

Social media is the way of the future. In order to really make people aware of your client’s product, you need to reach them to tell them about it. This is where social media is an invaluable tool. Be sure that your content is relevant, consistent, and creates reach and engagement. Remind yourself you are in it for the long run and it’s all part of how to become a digital marketer.