[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text] Why start with a social media audit

 

Before designing a social media marketing strategy for our clients, we always start with a comprehensive social media marketing audit. Before Bad Rhino started adding audits into the process, our projects at times kicked off a bit rocky and may have slowed down our ramp up time. While no one was at fault, we realized that our discovery process needed deeper research, which came in the form of our audits.

What’s Involved in a Social Media Marketing Audit

Once a client has signed on with Bad Rhino, our social media marketing audit is part of our on-boarding process. Clients are sent a simple form that asks them to provide information on their own marketing as well as a few competitors or similar companies in the industry with a strong social presence.

Here are a just a few of the areas that Bad Rhino reviews in our Social Media Audit:

  • Social content categories utilized by the client and their competitors
  • Successful social content with high engagement
  • Poorly performing social content
  • Currently running social ads and promoted content
  • Post times, post frequency, post variety
  • Specific industry and/or company campaigns
  • Other important notes on social, website, etc

The below video is a quick two-minute overview I created to give you a better idea of what’s involved in the audit.  Take a look!

5 Reasons To Start With a Social Media Audit

Now that you know a little bit about our social media audit and what’s included, it’s time to talk more about why we start with them.  Here are 5 reasons we start our strategy with a social media audit.

1. The Social Media Audit Ensures Everyone is on The Same Page

First let’s start with answering, who is everyone? Everyone includes the client company, our contacts at the client, and also other employees. Everyone also includes Bad Rhino and all of our team members who have an active role with the client.

When our clients provide their ideas on their current marketing and their competitors, it ropes them all in and we’ve found it helps guide them in some of their initial thoughts. Having our clients on the same page with the data they provide us is absolutely critical.

And internally, when we run the audit, our team works together to complete the data. Not only is everyone learning a great deal about our client and their competitors, but our group research comes together to build a uniform presentation, which provides the concrete foundation we need to kick off a new client.

2. The Audit Uncovers Items That Need to Be Changed Immediately

Many times the issues are typos found in their bios and about page. However, our research can also highlight deeper issues that are affecting their overall reach and exposure. When we uncover these emergency items, we update and fix for our client immediately.

Examples of the above are poorly placed links (or even non-existent links), posts without any form of a call-to-action, and graphics that won’t be approved for important social advertising.

 

3. The Audit Data Designs the First 90-Day Strategy

Should we focus on channel growth or jump right into a sales-driven social media strategy? That’s a complicated question and until we have the research done, we won’t be able to give you the right answer. And that’s just one of the many complicated strategy items we need to cover quickly.

While much of the first 90 days is about testing both content and social ads, having the research in our audit helps us test much faster. When we can highlight and understand successes and failures in the industry, we’re already ahead of the curve.

4. We Learn from Competitors’ Successes & Failures

If there’s a competitor with a bad ass social media presence, then we want to know about it. We can learn from their best social content, top paid ads, contests and other strategies.

We also want to know if one of the top competitors has a poor social media strategy. This is an opportunity for us to highlight what they’re doing wrong and explain to our clients what’s bad about it.

The competitor review is just as, if not more important than what we research on our client’s social channels. What we uncover here is gold for our clients and it’s fun to share on our presentation.

 

5. The Audit Shows Our Client’s Social Media Transformation

We love this part! The audit is a great marker for when our client said, “It’s time to make a change and invest in Social Media.”  Whether they don’t have the time or just didn’t have the right people in place, hiring Bad Rhino was when they knew it was time to take social media seriously.

Our audit captures all of their current content, their social channel growth marking points, and all of their competitor data. After three to six months, our clients are typically amazed by how far they’ve gone. By that point they’ve started to notice community growth and increased social content engagement. They’ve also seen how many more loyal community members are commenting and sharing content regularly.

By this time, we’ve also been able  to locate the most profitable ads for our clients. Traffic and conversion rates should be on the incline by this point after we’ve spent time optimizing and testing everything.

Looking back at our client audits for companies that have been with us for three, four, five, or more years, it’s still wild to see their social media transformations.

Are you ready for your Social Media Transformation? Do you have a question about our Social Media Audits?

Contact us now and someone from our team will respond back quickly![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]