Ultimately, all digital audits should answer one simple question: what’s really going on here?
Perhaps it’s an unexplained decline in sales, leads, or traffic. Or a need to understand the landscape before launching a new business, or expanding an old one. Whatever the reason, someone calls for an audit to get to the heart of what’s happening.
It’s hard to get excited by an audit – even the word brings to mind accountants with green eyeshades, unearthing every last mistake. And an audit can easily become a dead end: a document that lives in a drawer or a long list of problems divorced from solutions.
At BFM, we’re part of the weird minority that gets excited by a digital audit. That’s because we understand the full scope of the possibilities they offer. In an audit, we can join the dots, grasp the situation, and – most important – start helping you prioritize and fix problems or exploit the opportunities we reveal.
Our Advisory team combines intellectual heft and digital chops, so we have smart, relevant points of view, and the ability to get up to speed on a business fast. We’re flexible enough to work with careful deliberation or great urgency. And we don’t believe in paralysis by analysis, so our goal is always to produce insights and recommendations that leave you primed for action.
We’re here to help.
Exploring the Ecosystem
Because we have our own in-house strategy, production, and delivery capabilities, we can audit any aspect of your current digital ecosystem, be it a website, an app, your digital marketing, or all of them together.
We take a discipline-by-discipline approach to examining your efforts, with multiple expert teams weighing in. You might have UX designers looking at your site’s ease of use, SEO specialists looking at your on-site optimization, developers checking your code, or paid media specialists looking at your AdWords, depending on what your audit requires.
When we compile what we learn, we contextualize it for you and explain our findings with as much confidence as the data can justify. We report back to you in depth, prioritizing the issues that we find by business importance and resolution effort, so that you can tell the difference between mission-critical issues and minor fixes. And because our experts have already looked over everything, we have a head start on anything you’d like us to resolve for you.
Looking out at the Landscape
Many startups are just starting to work out who their competitors are, partly because their competitor list is in flux along with their own business model. More established businesses tend to know who their competitors are and keep a close watch on them (closer than feels healthy, some of the time).
But regardless of how far your business has developed, the fact you’re immersed in the landscape can sometime make it harder to see the landscape. Beyond what’s new – emerging competitors, new marketing tactics, evolving audiences – are the big, macro trends, the long-term shifts that you can sense in your day-to-day work more clearly than you can see them.
When we turn beyond your own channels and turn our gaze to the wider landscape, these are the kinds of issues we look to tackle. Our Advisory team is stacked with formidable researchers, with the ability to bring new perspectives while quickly and obsessively absorbing what they need to know about the industry you’re in.
Our team can tell you what’s standard practice, what’s best in class, and what’s changing in the business models, branding, and marketing of your industry. But even importantly, they can reach into the information to extract the insights that show risks and opportunities – giving you a head start in preparing for what’s next.