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7 Things that Happen After Auditing Your Digital Marketing

Written by Steph Hermanson, CRO | Aug 21, 2020 6:42:00 PM

Since your business’s digital footprint has never been more important, you took the first step to make sure it’s the best it can be with an audit. At Atomic Revenue we call these Digital Operations Audits. But now what? What did you do with the information gathered from that audit? Now you have all this info, but where do you start?

The following 7 things are the most common areas of your business that can be impacted after a digital audit. If we did the audit with you, we may have recommended one or more of these to you already, but did you move forward, or do you feel you need assistance with how to optimize your digital plan? Here’s a review of those recommendations and what you can do to make it happen.

7 Ways to Optimize Digital Marketing for the Greatest Revenue Impact

In business as in life, an objective, third-party point-of-view can bring to light many things that are invisible to someone who is used to seeing or doing the same thing all the time. It's amazing what comes to the surface when you let someone from the outside take a look under the hood. That’s what the Atomic Revenue Digital Audit does.

Not only do we objectively identify what’s missing from your digital operations and what needs attention, but we also care for what is working and what's not, using data to get to the heart of the matter and validate the outcomes.

And though the digital audit outcomes are varied as each business is unique, there is a pattern to which actions most businesses need to take to get the results they crave. If you’ve had our digital audit, you may be implementing one or more of these seven actions to improve your digital operations strategy and get you on the road to profitability.

1. Expanding your internal teams and hiring immediately.

The audit may identify that employee bandwidth needs to be increased so you can do more of the things that are working and to increase output OR you need to replace the current internal team.

2. Increasing or reallocating budgets to your teams.

You may want to up the spend in various areas or on tactics that are performing well to meet your KPI and revenue goals.

3. Completely restructuring your expectations.

The audit may have shown the outcomes you were getting were not what you were expecting. When we assessed digital through lead generation, sales conversion, and customer advocacy, there was nothing happening in one or more of those buckets. For example, maybe the focus was all about advocacy and you weren’t supporting the sales team as much as you thought.

4. Letting go of under-performing agencies.

You may have been outsourcing work to an agency and then our audit found that they weren’t delivering on promises made or on contracted elements. This happens a lot when you don’t look closely and the agency to dictates your KPIs, or you’re too hands-off or unfamiliar with the digital marketing industry (you don’t know what you don’t know).

5. Expanding contracts with marketing vendors.

You can also find the inverse to be true and the audit validates what the agency has been telling you to do, and now you are ready (with data to justify the decision) to increase your spend with the agency to increase ROI.

6. Resetting goals and KPIs.

The audit may have identified that the KPIs and goals you set were completely unrealistic. Now expectations need to be reset, as well as milestones along the way. For example, even though you were pushing new inbound leads, what’s really coming out is a community of referral partners and advocates. This could mean readjusting to view digital marketing as digital advocacy and a focus on creating a partner program.

7. Restructuring your entire lead generation process.

Finally, in relation to #6, generating leads through digital is not working the way you thought it would. You now need a comprehensive plan that takes into account the 200+ tactics that affect revenue generation to create a better strategy, which means a complete overhaul of your digital marketing plan.

Need Help with These 7 Things or Do You Need a Digital Audit?

If you have taken Atomic Revenue’s Digital Operations Audit recommendations and acted upon them, that’s great! If you need assistance with this process, we do that too. We never leave a client out in the cold without knowing where to go next and how to get there. We even offer a human capital resources team to help implement the recommendations if needed.

Never had an Atomic Revenue Digital Operations Audit but think you may need one? With the pandemic market forcing a buying/selling paradigm of all digital, all the time, whether B2B or B2C, your digital footprint is crucial to growth.

Plain and simple. Without a strong digital approach to capture leads, convert them, and create customer advocacy, and then measure the outcomes, you’re flying blind and letting the competition gain traction. So, if you think you need an audit, you’re right. There is never a wrong time to get an objective point-of-view to see where you can gain strength and launch revenue.

Atomic Revenue Digital Operations Audit – Starts at $5,000

Atomic Revenue conducts a customized Digital Operations Audit that starts with a kick-off meeting including an interview process and an online survey, the gathering of data about your company’s goals, objectives, and assets so that an audit can take place. During this phase, our team also works with your team to gain access to your digital assets that will be audited, including but not limited to your website login, admin access to social profiles, and more. 

Next, the Atomic Revenue team assesses the information collected during the kick-off meeting and starts auditing your digital assets. This process takes approximately two weeks to complete. Any additional information required while the audit is in progress will be requested as needed.

The last step is a written Digital Operations Audit delivered in an approximately 10-25 page PDF document and an action-plan checklist that shows all of the recommendations made by level of importance and impact, assigns who is responsible for completing the task, and the ability to check-off the task with complete.

The Digital Operations Audit is delivered to your team for review and a final meeting is scheduled to discuss the results. Once that final meeting is complete, any additional edits or clarifications to the audit are made and a final version is delivered to your team.

You end up with a comprehensive assessment, documentation, and recommendations for integrating website, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email, paid ads, other digital assets for revenue impact, and a three-tier recommendations report (must do, should do, and ideal efforts) to improve digital lead generation, sales support, and customer advocacy. Base price includes 1 URL, 1 email platform, and 3 social media platforms.

We also offer optional Digital Operations Audit add-ons: 

  • Additional website analysis
  • CRM system analysis
  • Additional social media platforms
  • Marketing automation audit
  • Additional email platform analysis

"When I met Atomic Revenue, bank leadership was happy with our traditional marketing but we had no marketing attribution data. Without performance benchmarks, we could not measure the effectiveness or return-on-investment of a marketing budget. The market required a shift away from traditional marketing campaigns, but credible ROI metrics were necessary to measure the improved impacts on buying behavior. This is the problem that Atomic Revenue solved for us."
– Karen Loiterstein, Sr. VP Marketing

A Complimentary Digital Marketing Assessment Consultation

Are you ready to identify what parts of your digital marketing are working to generate leads and convert your audience, which are not working, what roadblocks are in your way and how to navigate around them to realize your full revenue potential? Contact us for a full (and FREE) revenue operations assessment today and we can dig deeper into your digital needs together.

About the Author

Steph Nissen is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and one of the owners of Atomic Revenue. She develops and implements revenue operations strategies for companies all over the United States along with managing a coast-to-coast team of contractors and employees. As Atomic's EOS® Integrator, she is skilled in the art of getting all departments to work toward the same goals to sustain predictable and profitable revenue streams for Atomic Revenue and our clients. Steph is also a nationally known, dynamic speaker.