Basic Asset Audit: What Do You Have to Work With?

As mentioned in the very introduction, this article series does not focus on the intricate details of marketing execution. There are many sources of information on copywriting, creative marketing and many veritable guides on managing various advertising channels, but this is not one of them. 

You do need to be clear on exactly what your assets are and which elements you can leverage and pivot on to move the needle on your business. In other words, conducting a periodic, basic audit of the resources you have at your disposal is useful regardless of the maturity of your business.

Personnel

Make an audit of the personnel resources you have at your disposal. You don’t want to find out three months into your campaign activities that you are lacking a professional graphic designer, a seasoned PPC expert or an email expert. Make sure you’re clear on your needs before you delve into any kind of on-the-ground activities.

Creative & messaging

If you have your market intelligence and brand articulation pieces down, weaving together a storyline and actual copy should be rather simple. You want to make sure you have a substantial arsenal of well-crafted messages for attracting and retaining customers. Your creative is also a cornerstone in your strategy. This is obvious but bears stressing in an age where many marketers spend more time on numbers and reports than on actually looking at their own marketing campaigns from a consumer’s perspective. Your basic assets are the front-facing elements of our business; your facade: know your winners and losers well!

Knowledge

Do you understand the fundamentals of each channel that you’re about to partake in? While you definitely don’t need to be an expert on all channels (and they all run very deep), you need to have a working knowledge of what constitutes quality work and acceptable results. Also, you’ll need to be clear on what purpose each of your marketing channels serve; both in terms of your own needs and their typical utilization.

Budget

This is a critical one. Be clear on how much money you are actually willing to commit to getting your digital marketing function to work for you. How do you approach this? First of all, what does your cash flow (or expected cash flow) allow you to invest?

Second of all, how much data do you need to optimize your campaigns? To use a crude number, you need a bare minimum of 30 sales per month per channel to actually find enough data to optimize your campaigns – and this is true regardless of the channel.

Thirdly, you obviously need to budget for quality staff. It often helps to start with the budget estimation so you can use the budget figures at hand when actually sourcing contractors. Traditionally, media agencies frequently charge a percentage of media-spend when calculating their fees. This is, however, becoming an outdated billing metric; often bloating the budgets. That said, it does give you a feel for what professionals might charge for managing your campaigns. In very crude terms, allowing for a 15% management fee should give you a feel for what the manpower costs will be.

Do You Need an Agency?

This is a big decision to make, and there are many factors to consider. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Do I have the required skills in-house?
2. Will I benefit from developing these skills over time?
3. Are there specialized agencies that support my vertical and business model specifically?
4. How long will it take for me to upskill my workforce, and how much would it cost versus hiring an agency?
5. Do I already have a baseline of performance or are we starting from scratch?
6. Can I get a contract for only a specific time period?