It's Time To Audit Your Marketing (Here's Why & How)

Your marketing needs a check-up. And you should be giving it one regularly.

Here's the why and how of getting or doing an audit to cut the waste, get better results, and gain confidence in your marketing.

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Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about audits. You need to be doing audits on all the channels that you're active on. And this is a really important thing that we often overlook, we often miss. It's the idea to have a second pair of eyes looking at the stuff you're doing so you can get feedback, so you can cut the waste, so you can improve your results, and so you can learn some stuff in the process to do better in the future. The reality is you are not an expert in all of the things. And that's a good thing. You don't need to be an expert in every channel and in every tactic. You don't have the time to learn everything and to stay up to date on all the platforms and the changes and the technology. Marketing constantly changes. You cannot always be up to date and always know everything. And at the same time, you need to deliver the best results possible. If you're investing in Google ads or Facebook ads or spending money on LinkedIn or display, wherever you're investing your budget, you need the best result possible. And so you can't afford to waste time figuring it out. One, because you don't have the time to learn it and to go through figuring it out, but two, because that's expensive. Those mistakes that you'll make, the budget that you'll waste while you're figuring it out, you can't afford. And so, because of these three things, you not being an expert in everything, which is totally okay, and needing the best results really as quick as possible, and not having the time or luxury to figure it out, we need a different approach. We need some help. And this is where you need someone to audit your stuff. The good news is there's lots of people who can help you with this. And also, you don't have to do this very frequently. I recommend at least once a year, ideally twice a year. So every six months. And if you don't have someone looking at your stuff, looking at the channels and who is an expert in that platform in that channel to give you real, honest, brutal feedback about what's good, what's bad, and what you should change, then I can guarantee you're wasting your budget. And I see this all the time that there's some setting you didn't realize or you didn't fully understand, and therefore you've been wasting budget every day. And this can add up really quickly. I had one client who was spending a lot of money on paid advertising on Google Ads, and they were sending the traffic to a landing page that had a form on it. And everything looked good. However, they weren't getting the conversions that they wanted. And so I audited their account and audited their landing pages. And it turns out 99% of the traffic was mobile, and the landing page had a form, and on mobile, there was an issue with how the form displayed. You couldn't actually click into the form to put any information into it. And so the form was basically useless. So over the last two months, they had spent$80,000 on ads and gotten zero conversions because the landing page was broken. And no one thought to look at the landing page and test it on mobile. They checked everything in the ad account, but they didn't check the landing page and they didn't check it on mobile. The budget you waste from issues like this can add up fast. This is why it's so important to have someone audit your stuff and to have internal processes to help you QA and audit your stuff. And also, if you don't get outside perspective, if you don't get feedback from other people, then you're stuck breathing your own exhaust. You're not getting new ideas, you're not being innovative about what's next. How do we improve? And this is really important because if you keep doing the same things, you're going to get the same results. But actually, if you keep doing the same things, you're going to get worse results because your results will erode over time. The competition will copy you, things will change, costs are rising on ad platforms. So doing the same thing and not improving, not changing is detrimental to your success. And finally, if you don't have outside perspective and someone to give you feedback and to audit your stuff, then you probably, if you're like most of us, will lack the confidence and the certainty in your success. You may think it's working, but you don't really know. And so you're going to doubt is this working? Will it get us the results that we want? Until you have some feedback, some validation, you can't be sure. And so you'll never be fully confident and have the certainty that you need to say, yes, this is right, this is working, and this will deliver the outcomes, the results that we expect. But when you get feedback, when you have someone audit your stuff, you can very quickly save a bunch of budget. You can stop wasting that budget and save a ton of money. And that isn't just saving the budget, it then means that budget you save can go back into producing positive outcomes rather than no outcomes. So you're not just saving budget, you're actually making your budget stretch a lot farther, which is really important. And that leads into the second thing, of course, which is getting better results. If you save your budget and you use that savings to get more results, you're going to get better results. But also, there's often improvements you can make, optimizations you can make that someone who audits your stuff can tell you, can point out, can recommend so you can get better results. Even if you don't save any budget, you can still get better results. So getting more and better results on the same budget is awesome. And if you can get even more and better results on less budget, that's even better. But I think the biggest benefit of having someone audit your stuff is that you get back that confidence in knowing this is going to work, in knowing you're on the right track, that you're doing things in the right way, and that you can expect the certain outcomes from the things, the investments that you're making. Plus, you get to learn and improve your skills by seeing the different attributes or settings or tactics that can be used in that channel. So you level up your skills, you get more confidence, you save money, and you get better results. There's a ton of benefits here to having someone audit your stuff. And I practice what I preach. And so in the advisory board, my coaching group, we bring in guest experts every month to help us level up our skills and to get the knowledge that we need to stay up to date on all things that are happening. And this week we're bringing in an expert, one of my good friends, on Google Ads, so that we can make sure our ad accounts are set up correctly, that we're using them in the right way, and that we're maximizing our results. And we'll even be diving into some of the ad accounts of members in the coaching group to look at them together, real time, and to have an expert analyze them, audit them, and point out things we should change, things we can cut, and things we could improve. So this is really important and it's something you should absolutely be doing. So here's three things you need to know about how to do this. First, it should be obvious. Get a second opinion. Whenever you're getting a quote for any kind of home project, you never want to take the first quote that you get. You always want a second opinion. It's helpful to have different perspectives. No one person has the quote unquote right answer. And so you want a couple different opinions, perspectives. Because if you're not an expert in this channel or in this platform, then it can be easy to get misled, even unintentionally. Oftentimes people have good intentions, but they may give us advice that's not the best for us. So get a second opinion. Don't trust yourself or your team. Get someone else to come in and give you an opinion. And six months later, get a different person to come in and audit your stuff. More than one is good. Diversity is good. And again, we do this inside the advisory board. We're constantly bringing in different experts to give us feedback and to audit our stuff and to level up our skills. But you can also start by auditing it yourself. If you begin from square zero from scratch, and you imagine that you didn't set up the ad platform or the ad account, or maybe you actually didn't, but just imagine that you didn't if you did, and say, what should be in place here? We should have these types of buckets and categories. We should have these levels of investment. We should be running on these keywords or with this targeting. We should be updating the creative this often. Figure out what does good look like and compare it with what you're actually doing. Because in many cases, you know what you should be doing, but no one's taken the time to actually look at what are we really doing versus what do we know we should be doing. And so, as an example, there's many people in the advisory board who are not running retargeting ads. This is low-hanging fruit. They should absolutely be running retargeting ads. And we talked to them about this because it's a huge opportunity. And they know they should be doing it, but they're not doing it. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Again, time is often one of them and priorities. And for many of them, there are more important priorities first, but this is something that they should be doing, and they know they should be doing it, but they're not yet doing it. And this is why auditing it yourself can be important, because I bet you're in the same situation. There are many things that you know you should be doing, but you have not done yet. And if you have a good justification for that, that's fine. But if you don't, then you know your next action should be one of those things. And finally, schedule the next audit. I referenced this before that when you have someone audit your stuff, you want to immediately then schedule the next one for six months. This is like your checkup with the doctor. You don't want to do it when you need it, you want to do this preventatively. And so scheduling the next audit in six months is really helpful. That way, when it comes to six months, you don't have to figure out who to audit it or how you'll audit it, or if you should. It's already been booked, it's already been paid for, you already have it there waiting for you. Let me make this practical for you so you have an actionable next step here. Which channel or platform are you spending the majority of your budget on? Or which channel is your biggest bet? Which channel are you investing the most time, effort, or budget into, or which channel needs to deliver the outcomes that you're looking for? That's the place to start. That's the thing to get an audit on. And then go and get a second pair of eyes. Find someone who can give you helpful, useful feedback, advice, recommendations. We do this in the advisory board, and if you join, you'll get that. But if you don't, find someone. There's lots of people for many different platforms and channels who can help you. That will allow you to maximize your budget, to get more results, and to have the confidence that you need to know you're on the right track. Auditing your stuff is key, and it's okay that you are not an expert in every channel and every platform. You don't need to be, you shouldn't be. But it's irresponsible to assume that everything is fine and to assume that it's good. There's always room for improvement, there's always room to cut the waste, and you'll never know until you have someone to audit your stuff.