Digital marketing strategy audit/health check

Score and benchmark your digital marketing capabilities and prioritize improvements using our practical health check audit

How will this digital marketing strategy audit help me and my business?

Do you want to know where you most need to improve your digital marketing? With so many great opportunities for deploying digital marketing, it can be difficult to know which to prioritize. In larger businesses, you will need to justify your plans to colleagues by showing clear priorities.

Start your journey to improve your digital marketing here by reviewing your activities against best practices defined in the Smart Insights RACE Planning system.

To use the spreadsheet, simply answer the questions about your digital marketing effectiveness or score your digital capability on a scale of 1 to 5 using the drop-down selection of options and a Radar diagram will be automatically created to summarize areas needing improvement.

Dr. Dave Chaffey originally developed this spreadsheet when consulting to audit clients' websites and digital communications against best practices using analytics and also collaboratively when completing workshops and interviews with digital stakeholders.

Now it's popular with Smart Insights members for completing similar interviews with stakeholders or in a group review session, for example: between agency and client. It can also be completed quickly by a manager reviewing current weaknesses in digital marketing for a business to show the gaps and what needs to be improved.

This worksheet also includes a separate RACE SOP Audit to help review and select over 70+ Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that can be used to improve always-on marketing processes in your business. The benefit of applying SOPs to your marketing are that they:

Provide an efficient, repeatable way for completing marketing tasks that are performed regularly
Helps clearly define a sequence of best practices to apply for completing specific sub-tasks, tools and measures to use when working on a process
Useful for onboarding new team members to train them with processes they will be following
Can now be supported by GenAI to support completion of tasks as explained in our AI for Marketing Learning Path and Templates.

Who is this audit for?

We’ve designed this audit spreadsheet to be as flexible as possible, so it can be applied for different types of businesses and roles:

Company directors and marketing managers – identify priorities you can direct your team and agencies to work on
Digital marketing managers – create a prioritized roadmap of digital marketing activities and review actions as a checklist
Agencies and consultants – use it to compare against and improve your own marketing audits and recommendations to clients

How is this spreadsheet audit structured?

The spreadsheet defines two complementary approaches:

The ‘RACE SOP Audit’ tab evaluates 25 core activities across RACE and more detailed SOPs within these. There are columns to add your own evaluation and recommendations and track updates as they are implemented. For each SOP we summarize the Opportunity, Strategy and Action and show you which Smart Insights templates and Learning Paths will help you improve your capabilities. There are c70 SOPs overall.
The RACE Healthcheck audit tab defines questions for a strategic digital marketing review that you can score with your colleagues, teams or clients. We created this spreadsheet for reviewing gaps in digital marketing capabilities when consulting with stakeholders in businesses. Members can now use it for similar reviews. There are c50 questions across RACE. Businesses can be rated on a scale of 0 to 5 and a radar diagram is automatically produced to show the results.

Resource Details

Author: Dr. Dave Chaffey
Format: A multi-tab Google Sheet to score and chart your digital marketing capabilities to show activities you must improve. Can be downloaded to Microsoft Excel.
Related templates: Multichannel retail / Ecommerce benchmark audit

About the author

Dr. Dave Chaffey

Dave is co-founder of Smart Insights and creator of the Smart Insights RACE planning framework. For his full profile, or to connect on LinkedIn or other social networks, see the About Dave Chaffey profile page on Smart Insights. Dave is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognized by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing.