What are the key elements of a successful SMO audit and how often should you conduct one?

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, business owners find themselves increasingly pressed for time due to ever-evolving technology. Regularly auditing your Social Media Optimization (SMO) strategies is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. For instance, consider a local bakery that starts using targeted social media campaigns to attract customers. By frequently evaluating and refining their SMO tactics, they can ensure their online presence remains impactful and effectively drives business growth.

Your SMO audit breakdown is spot-on; I remember a local restaurant that revamped its social media presence using a similar approach. Initially, their online presence was inconsistent and lacked engagement. They conducted an audit, examining their accounts and analyzing performance metrics—ultimately identifying weak content strategies. By benchmarking against successful competitors, they found inspiration and ways to differentiate themselves. Implementing an optimization plan, they prioritized tasks and focused on creating visually appealing content with clear CTAs.

A practice I've consistently found valuable during audits involves dissecting the complete user journey into distinct segments within the marketing funnel and conducting separate audits for each segment. This approach facilitates the rapid and efficient identification of issues. For instance: Segment 1: Content/Ads Metrics: Impressions, Reach, CPM, CTR, CPC Segment 2: Website Metrics: Landing page performance, Traffic loss, Bounce rate, Add to cart, Checkout, Payment, Purchase

It’s highly beneficial to get an expert to help with this step, because often the analytics can be difficult to decipher. It’s important to understand the data to be able to make a decision on what needs to improve. Often people are making those mistakes to begin with because they’re unaware of the strategies that need to be implemented.

You must always track your data on weekly basis and review it at least monthly for performance. This way you can better stay on track consistently and make changes as you go.

KPIs typically represent the end results, while an audit serves to analyze the underlying metrics that influence these KPIs, thereby identifying any issues or challenges.

Creating content for social media and showing up online takes a lot of time and effort. It’s important that this effort is intentional and strategic.

With ever evolving social media platforms it’s also important to stay on top of trends and ensure you’re strategic. Creating following and going viral can be tempting and desirable but you must ask yourself, is that going to get me the results, ie. brand awareness, leads, true fans? Don’t put too much emphasis on vanity metrics, measure the data to ensure you’re getting the results your desire for your business. True loyalty and brand awareness is always going to be tangible.