Audit Your Digital Marketing: Ways to Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of Biznology and a senior strategist at Conversion Revealed Context and Solo Segment. I'm the co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. and Outside-In Marketing, and sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. I'm a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for 8 years and retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. Today you'll be hearing from Andrew Skolkin, who'll be presenting Auditing Your Digital Marketing: Ways to Improve Marketing Effectiveness. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Andago, a content marketing agency helping businesses make the most of their website, email, and social media marketing efforts. Garrus Corp, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data, a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. Solo Segment, Analytics That Unlock the Revenue Trapped in Your Site Search. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes. You can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our presentation, you can use BigMarker to chat with your fellow attendees. Just type in the chat tab. There you can also see tweets about our webinar. Feel free to tweet with the hashtag #BizKnowWebinar. If you have a question to ask our speaker, click the Q&A tab. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Andrew. Lastly, in the Handouts tab, you can find a PDF of today's presentation. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker, Andrew Skolkind of Andigo, a content marketing agency helping businesses make the most of their website, email, and social media marketing efforts. Andrew is a veteran content marketer, web developer, and digital strategist. He founded Andigo to help firms find a more strategic and productive mix of tools that genuinely support online brand goals over time. With a passion for true collaboration and meaningful consensus, his work touches social media, search engine optimization, and email marketing, among other components. So if you've ever struggled with auditing your digital marketing, this is the webinar for you. Andrew, take it away.

Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. To borrow a phrase from Willy Wonka, we've got a lot of time and not much to do, so I'm going to dive right in with an overview of what we'll be covering this morning. We'll spend most of our time on that last bullet point, what to measure, but I want to establish a bit of a framework first. So let's dive right in here with why audit. So why should we audit, and why are we looking at a picture of an axe? The axe is a reminder, I hope, of the value of keeping our tools sharp. You may feel like you're getting more done if you just keep doing what you're doing all day long without stopping, but if instead of plowing through, you take a little time, reassess, reevaluate, take the occasional break, keep your tools sharp, you'll get a lot more done. I'll add on the macro level that we audit to ensure that our marketing materials and our marketing efforts match our marketing goals. So what are we hoping to learn with our audit? Well, we're not just looking for weaknesses, we're looking for our strengths as well. Of course, we want to address any weaknesses we find and try and improve them, but it's great to go with your strengths as well. So if you can find them, know you're doing something well, know that something is resonating, you want to do more of it. We also audit to make sure that we're being consistent across all our channels. We want to be consistent in branding and everything that we do, because unless you're GEICO, which is why we've got GEICO's logo sitting up here, for some reason they seem to be able to get away with cavemen and geckos, and the most recent one I saw was fleas playing badminton. Everyone else, we really need to stick to something that's a little bit more consistent. Next question we have is when to audit. And this is one that it gets a little complicated, in part because there's no simple answer. I can't say, well, once every 18 months you should go through this process, in part because this process is a little bit fluid and really depends on who you are and what you're doing. Certainly outside events like regulatory changes, new competitors or existing competitors who change up their products, are going to have an impact on what you're doing, and they might be a good trigger for saying, hey, we should really examine things at a little bit deeper level. Internal changes should be thought of the same way, whether that's changes from your product team, changes from, you know, the C-suite who might be pushing everything in a new direction, or information from your sales team, which is an often overlooked but valuable source of information. They're the folks with boots on the ground talking to prospects, talking to clients. You'll really want to focus on that. So if it's been a while since you've done any auditing, then you'll want to set a schedule. I mentioned 18 months before, and maybe you want to set something like that as your minimum. One of the other things we hear when we're talking about when to audit is that as we start talking about what we're doing in an audit, a lot of our clients will say, well, aren't we really sort of bleeding into what happens when we're just doing regular maintenance as we're looking at all the things that we're doing? And there's some truth to that. You certainly don't want to be ignoring the feedback that you're gathering and setting it aside so that once every 18 months or whatever you can do an audit. You want to be using that more often. But it's fine that the two sort of bleed into one another. I wouldn't worry about that too much except where the distinction matters, maybe for budgeting. Beyond that, it really doesn't matter for, for the purposes of what we're trying to accomplish. Next, we can talk a little bit about what we want to audit. There's a whole lot of stuff in that box there on screen, and I've listed it pretty much all there on the slide, all self-explanatory, I would say, except for process and efficiency, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. The one thing that is not on this list that is probably a glaring omission to a lot of you is analytics. And it deserves to be first on our list and also kind of doesn't belong on the list at all because it isn't a thing unto itself. It is a— it underpins pretty much everything that we look at. You can see I've listed 3 different kinds of analytics data to look at: reach, engagement, and response. And we'll talk about, you know, all those things, but You know what these are, right? Is your list growing? Are you adding new followers? That's, you know, reach. Engagement is whether people are clicking on your links or sharing social media posts and so on. The one thing that I'd like to stress here more than anything else, in an audit, you really want to pay attention to the difference between process metrics and business metrics. And you certainly want to pay attention to both. Process metrics are pretty much everything that you're thinking about when you think about analytics— likes, follows, subscribers, all that kind of stuff. But it's also the kind of stuff where if you go in with that data to talk to your CFO, maybe even your CEO, he or she is going to look over the top of his or her glasses at you like, really? Why do I care about subscribers or likes? That's, I mean, that's absolutely the truth. So that's where business metrics come in. And simply put, business metrics are anything that you can, within a step or two, put a dollar sign next to. So sales, of course, if you're increasing sales. A lot of us aren't working in a direct e-commerce model, so that's not necessarily going to apply, but certainly lead generation or the quality of leads generation— leads generated, things like that are gonna fit in here. So with that, let's dive into the actual elements that we wanted to take a look at. First up is branding and design. If you're like most firms, you develop your brand and design elements once and then maybe add on to them as you need, maybe as your product line expands. But for the most part, you're really not going to do a lot with them. That's partly because you become a little blind to your brand. You're surrounded by it, inundated with it all day, every day. So you're probably not thinking about it much. You don't even notice it much. But it should be reviewed more frequently than that sort of once-in-a-generation moment. Some of the things that we want to look at, some of the questions that we want to ask are going to be about relevance and differentiation. Is your brand reflecting who you are now, or have you changed since the branding was developed? Are you making everything available across formats? Are you consistent, not just in message across business units, but also across formats? And, you know, are you increasing your reach and engagement as you're with your brand, or is it hurting you? We want to make sure that our brand is true to who we are and that we pay attention to the buyer's journey. We'll dip back into that in a moment. I also want to keep— have you keep in mind that brand content itself can be a part of brand. If you think of the Forbes 400 list, that's content, and yet it's a part of their brand without any question. US News and World Report— I happen to have a high school senior who is in the middle of college application hell. She, you know, she's aware of US News and World Report in a way that she wasn't 2 years ago or 18 months ago. So some of the things that we want to look at as we're talking about content balance, I would say, is a big part of it. If you have— and here I'm talking about content marketing specifically— if you've got too much content and not enough marketing, then you're really giving away your expertise and your time without much to show for it. You're really not going to gain anything from it. If you're doing too much marketing without offering value in the content, then in today's environment, people are just going to tune you out. There's no way around it. We're too bombarded with messages for there not to be that component to it. I mentioned earlier about the buyer's journey. Keep in mind that your prospects will go from just realizing that they have a problem that they need to solve to realizing that the class of services or products that you offer and your competitors offer exists and could be a solution to their problem. To moving to a point where they decide that that's the right solution for them and now they're deciding amongst you and your competitors. You need content for all those stages. Different content is going to work for different folks. Maintaining voice and perspective is important. Perspective is particularly important, I would say, because it's your prospect's perspective that matters. Make sure your content is presented in that way. We'll get back to that in 2 or 3 slides from now. One thing I haven't listed here, keyword strategy and SEO, which you should be checking your content against whatever strategies you have in place there. Make sure you're not diluting your efforts. But honestly, there's a whole day's worth of material right there that I'm happy to chat with anyone one-on-one sometime in the future or even do a presentation for your marketing department on that. But for right now, it's not It's not something we can get into in the next 10 or 15 minutes. One more thing, different is better than better. This is really important enough to have its own slide and something you want to take a look at as you're examining your content. Even if you've got great quantitative results, people aren't necessarily going to believe them. And if you don't have quantitative results that you can point to, forget about the whole better. idea because people really are going to dismiss it as content, as marketing fluff. So better to stick with what differentiates you rather than trying to prove that you are better. So moving on to your website, which will be another key component of your digital marketing. Again, here we're going to bring in questions of brand and content, which we've just been talking about, but we also have the technology much more explicitly. So what should we be looking at? CTAs or calls to action you want to take a look at, and you should be tracking whether they're getting results. You should be doing testing along the way to make sure that different offers, different placement, different design— all these things can have an impact on whether your calls to action are working as well as they can or if there are improvements that you could be making. Getting back to this idea of perspective that I brought up earlier, it doesn't apply just to your content, it applies to your website and how you've organized it as well. If you think about your website or take a look at your website, just start by taking a look at the top-level navigation that's probably across the bottom of your header, and you can see whether that is arranged in a manner that is, uh, it aligns with the silos or departments in your company, or if it aligns in ways that match what your audience is interested in, right? So Basically, in a nutshell, you wanna be able to gather all the information in a single place that's gonna appeal to a single kind of client rather than making them look for it elsewhere. You wanna bring that client, that information to the client. This of course leads us into the next bullet point, which is segmentation, where of course you're the same product or service that you're offering could be purchased by different kinds of clients, whether that's different organizations, different industries, different organization sizes, different roles within the industry. You may, you could make yourself a little crazy trying to appeal to all of them, but you certainly want to appeal to the main segments of your audience and make sure your website is organized around their interests. Finally, on this list, we have attribution, and that is a topic that we could spend a lot more than 30 minutes on. At its simplest form, I'll say that if you've got an email address anywhere on your website, it doesn't belong there. Basically, you want to put a mail form up so that you can feed that information into your CRM, customer relationship management system, and know for sure where this lead came from, be able to attribute it to your website. And you can go a lot farther with that and attribute it to different parts of your website or different sources of where folks came into the website. But suffice to say that at the very minimum, you really want to eliminate those gaps where you're you're getting inquiries and you don't really know. You don't really know where they came from. On the back end, I just mentioned customer relationship management integration, and that's a big part of what you want to do. And this is an area where, particularly if you're part of a smaller team, you may want to partner with your IT department or your IT consultants to make sure you're choosing tools that— and integrating them into your marketing efforts. In a way that gives you the data that you want long-term, captures all this data as you're attracting prospects, but does it in a way that doesn't make you do any extra work than you really need to, and also doesn't put any more strain on the resources of either your infrastructure or your IT staff. So that's something I would certainly pay attention to. On-page and off-page SEO are again topics unto themselves, so I'll simply say that You want to review overall keyword strategy on a regular basis, and you want to make sure that your content continues to reflect that strategy. Finally, goals. And I perhaps should have put that in quotes because we don't mean just having goals in the general sense, but in the more specific sense in that many packages, Google Analytics, certainly just a lot of the packages that you'll be gathering analytics data in, have what things that are called goals or something similar to that, where rather than just being able to track raw numbers, you can track the number of people who are downloading a particular white paper or who are doing something on a particular page. It goes beyond just the basic metrics of who came onto your site from this page, who left the site at this page, and things along those lines. Moving on quickly to email marketing. I'm gonna talk quickly about this and social media so that we don't run out of time. Email marketing, it's old, it's been around, it's not sexy, but it is still a really highly proven tool, particularly for staying on prospects' radar if you happen to be introduced to them at a point where they're not ready to make a decision. Reach, engagement, conversion with a question mark, because for most of us, we're not in a business where email is gonna convert directly, meaning you're not getting— you're not putting an email out like Amazon might about today's special and then having people click on it and make a purchase. Most of our B2B clients don't have something like that, but if it's there, you definitely want to pay attention to that. Here again, I will encourage you to evaluate the tools you have in place and take a look and be aware of what's available on the market. Things change really fast, And this is another area where working closely with the IT folks, or if you're a large enough team or have a well-enough staffed consultant, what's known as a marketing technologist, can be really, really helpful. And of course, with email marketing, you should be testing design, layout, the offers you're including, the content you're including, what segments you're appealing to, and how you're appealing to them. Similarly with social media, reach, engagement, and again, conversion possibly. Are things that you should be looking at. And again, I encourage you to make sure you know what tools are out there. Um, very recently, Google, to their My Business or Google Business listing, they added something called Posts. So if you, uh, well, until about 20 minutes ago, I'm gonna guess, if you had searched for Antigone Media, uh, and found us online, over on the right-hand side of the page, there would be not only a listing with some information about us but also this post about this webinar. And it— they may have taken it down at 11 o'clock. You don't get to control when they go up and down. But it's another interesting and, at this point, underutilized way to make use of things that aren't just traditional social media and that may help move the needle. I don't know of a way to measure that tremendously well at this point, but it's certainly something to consider and another instance where you really do want to pay attention to what's new and what's happening. Finally, we get to efficiency and approach. We've talked about the actual tactics that we're implementing and how to improve ourselves with auditing, but we really do want to take a bit broader view. And as I say on the slide, you have to know the investment you're making if you're going to know how good your return is. And it's not just about outcomes here. I think a lot of people focus on outcomes, and that's certainly an important part of this and should be the bulk of your effort, but there's also the output that you should think about, meaning you've got your budget, you know how much staff time you're using, you know what consulting, you know, outside costs there are, and you should be able to measure or compare what you're outputting in terms of, I'll call it marketing work product for that investment. Is that going up over time? Is it going down over time? If you bring in a new writer, let's say, to your staff and she writes— is capable to output a lot more writing than your previous writer, is that good? Is it bad? Is it good writing? Is it more effective? You certainly want to pay attention to those things because even though you think you don't care about them, someone does. You know, someone who has profit and loss responsibility is certainly going to be much more open to whatever arguments you might want to make for defending your budget next year. if you've got information like that at the ready. So I'll wrap up with some general recommendations. Think big, as in big picture. That should be a big focus of what you're doing in any audit, particularly if it's a, you know, sort of once in an 18-month cycle kind of an audit. Thinking small matters as well because the details really are important. Find specific tools. I'm not sure we've got a Funny line break there, but the scorecard that we've got at antigo.com/scorecard is a very broad overview kind of a tool. You can go to that page and there'll be a link to it. It's a Google Doc that you'll then be able to make a copy of and adapt to your own use. Very useful because it allows you to score stuff over time. It's got nice color coding to it and everything else. Revisit existing tools. Tools might not be the best word there. Quite honestly, but everything that we've been talking about, everything that you've put in place is— you had planning documents when you made it. So there were wireframes and sitemaps and things like that from your website. There are tactical documents and strategic documents when you put together your social media marketing work. Take a look at all those, see if they're still relevant. If they're not, update them and then examine what you're doing now again. those and see. And I'll remind you that the ultimate goal here is to make sure you're matching your marketing materials to your goals. One last note since I'm just about out of time on consultants. Obviously, because we do this, I'm not going to say never hire a consultant. In fact, I'll say it's really worthwhile to hire a consultant because the outside perspective that an outside team brings is enormously valuable in exercises like this. So definitely worthwhile. But I would also caution you to choose wisely and filter the recommendations that you get through— well, you know, sort of consider the source. You know, that old phrase about never ask a barber if you need a haircut is applicable here. I don't mean to imply that, you know, there's some sort of little dishonesty sort of implied there, and that's not the case at all. I don't think barbers are dishonest. I think it's just that barbers are barbers, and they're going to look at you and say, yeah, I could make you look better. Of course they could. You still look fine, but they could make you look better. So if you're looking at a firm that's primarily a design firm, they're going to focus on your design and branding and maybe not notice things about your— notice things that aren't critical but could be improved and not notice, you know, the backend of your website. And of course, a web developer is going to be vice versa. So take that into consideration. And with that, I'll hand things back to Mike.

Great stuff, Andrew. I'm sure attendees have a much stronger idea of how to handle their auditing for digital marketing, but you didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions teed up for you, and I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the Q&A tab. Before we do that, though, people who use your site search are your best prospects. They know what you want and they think you have it. If you, like most companies, your site search lets them down just at the moment they're ready to buy. If you're ready to improve your site search ROI but you don't know where to start, SoloSegment has a special offer just for listeners to this webinar. The first 3 listeners to contact info@solosegment.com will receive 50% off the Site Search Inspector for their website for 6 months. You can immediately start tracking search metrics, plus you can give your team access to a knowledge base that tells them exactly what to do to improve those metrics. Again, email info@solo-segment.com and tell them you are at the Biznology webinar to get your half-price discount while it lasts. If you're too late to be one of the first 3, you can still get 20% off by mentioning the webinar. We're about to start firing questions at Andrew, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. Andago, a content marketing agency helping businesses make the most of their website, email, and social media marketing efforts. Garrus Corp, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data, a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. And SoloSegment, analytics that unlock the revenue trapped in your site search. So now on to your questions. Our first question is, and I kind of think this is funny given the thing that you asked about, you know, never ask a barber whether you should have a haircut, but is there ever a reason not to do an audit? I mean, as someone who does audits all the time, maybe you're not the right person to ask that question, but would you ever come into a situation and say, hey, this isn't the first thing I'd recommend for you?

Well, I guess there's sort of 2 questions there. Is there ever a reason not to do an audit? I don't know. I mean, there are times certainly that an audit may be overkill or might not be necessary again because you've just done something or because everything is so new. But certainly there are times where I would say, hey, let's not do an audit. Let's just dive into fixing this big problem, right? And whether that's on a website or with social media or something else. We'll worry about the audit later and we'll certainly start gathering analytics. And that's actually a good point, an interesting point. I'm not sure how strongly I would recommend an audit without a lot of data to go with. You know, then you could say, well, we can take a look at some things on the surface, but it becomes a lot of opinion to say, well, I don't like the purple on the header of your website. You know, Stuff like that. You're just not—

Right, right, right. So, so if they don't have analytics, then that would be first?

Yes, absolutely.

Got it. So, um, let's see, second question. Um, do companies ever object to doing an audit? Uh, it says, not sure my boss would go for it, seems too vague.

Huh. Um, because we're couching this or basing this on, on analytics, We're not being vague. It's exactly that. We're not just saying, oh, let's take a look and we'll see if we can come up with a reason to, you know, update the design of your one-sheets. Something like that, yeah, you know, and there are a lot of folks out there who do that kind of thing for free, which of course means that, you know, that they've got something to sell. We certainly do have something to sell, but we offer this standalone and we have clients who for whom they have inside folks or another team who they rely on for web development or, you know, content marketing work. So I do think it's, it's worth doing, especially if it's more quantitative. If it's just qualitative, then, you know, we get into the situation where someone says, I don't like green, and there's not much value to that.

Right, right, right. So Do you do the same thing each time you do an audit, or is it— does it really depend on the situation for the company?

Really depends on the situation. Um, we'll, you know, we've got a basic framework that follows very, you know, closely to what we were talking about today, and we expanded onto that. Something we didn't talk about today at all was, uh, pay-per-click advertising and, you know, SEM-type work. Um, if clients are doing that, that should be a part of of the audit, but it really does get tailored to what a client needs. And as anyone who goes and takes a look at that scorecard will see, that scorecard is very general and very broad, but it'll paint a nice picture if you use it over time. You're going to have to dig a lot deeper though to get any real value.

And I think we have time for one more question. What's the biggest surprise you ever uncovered in an audit?

Oh, geez, Mike, you couldn't have given me a heads up on that one? I don't know. I would have thought about it.

No, I wanted to surprise you.

Yeah, I wish I had an answer for that. I'm not sure about the biggest surprise that we've ever come up with.

Well, I can throw you another one if that one's too hard. How about how have audits changed over the last couple of years?

The amount of data, the amount of analytics data that's out there has made it just much more productive, without a doubt.

Got it. Hey, Andrew, that's all the time we have for today, but I really want to thank you for these great ideas, and especially I want to thank our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions we didn't have time to answer, you can email your questions to Eileen, E-I-L-E-E-N, at mikemoran.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Andrew for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, 3 Steps to Lead Online Marketing in Tomorrow's Digital Earth, with Dan Abelow at 11 AM on November 14th. We hope to see all of you back then. Bye, everybody! Bye!