When Auditing B2B Digital Marketing Becomes Risky

Written by Nick Stamoulis

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The goal of a digital marketing audit is to assess the current state of your marketing with the goal of making things even better. It’s good to periodically do an audit at least once a year, anyway, but there are also moments where an audit could be necessary for other reasons, such as declining leads. An audit involves gathering data and then interpreting the data to make positive changes in the marketing.

Yet, audits aren’t always positive. Sometimes they can do more harm than good. Here are some thoughts as to how a digital marketing audit can be risky, and how to minimize the risk.

Be Careful How You Interpret Data

Data is neutral – it’s neither positive more negative. The usefulness of it is in how the data you track is found and then interpreted. As soon as you collect the data, your human nature is creating a bias in that data. For example, if you collect the data with a certain time frame in mind, or if you have an expectation as to how the data should like.

These perceptions could create biases in the interpretation. This could negatively impact your digital marketing campaign, especially if these biases cause you to be very off in how the data is interpreted. You don’t want to make changes with these biases because they could ultimately be incorrect. Data is only as good as it’s interpreted, so this is something to keep in mind. You need to have your team look at the data too, just in case.

Don’t Disrupt Existing Campaigns

A digital marketing audit could both directly or indirectly impact existing marketing campaigns – either because the audit itself caused you to believe the campaign should be paused, or it was halted while the audit itself was taking place. Either way, if you halt any campaigns, this could be to its detriment, no matter how the data looked that led you to that conclusion.

Simply put, some marketing campaigns take a while to get going. If you halt it before that occurs, you could never really see it achieve its peak. If you stop it and then start it again, then when you begin again it could be like starting from scratch. There is an art to knowing if it’s time to stop the campaign or not, and it is much better to be conservative. Don’t let the results of the audit make you think otherwise!

Too Fixated on Quick Wins

In an ideal world, an audit would take place with an eye for creating or refining a viable, long term strategy. Yet, it’s all too easy to get swept up in the data, thinking that it leads you in the direction of a quick fix that will have magical results.

Well, remember that quick fixes pretty much never have magical results. They work only for the short term, and then stop working abruptly. This is no way to treat your marketing. It’s much better to use the audit data to build or refine your long term strategy.

A digital marking audit is a necessary evil. It can be very helpful if you know exactly how to handle it and you don’t get swept up in quick fixes. Using the data to take a conservative approach is the way to go.

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