I have read a lot of marketing audits other people produced. Most of them are inventories, and an inventory is not an audit.
You can tell within about a minute. If it opens with a list of technical errors exported from a tool, what you have been sold is a scan with a cover page on it.
An audit exists to answer one question: given everything you could do, what should you do next, and what should you stop?
Everything else in the document is evidence for that answer. A finding that does not change a decision does not belong in the report, however true it is.
This is why the 200-issue export is worse than useless. It is technically accurate and it leaves you exactly where you started, holding a longer list than you had before with no idea which three items matter.
| Area | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Positioning | Who is this for, and would they recognise themselves in your copy? |
| Proposition and pricing | What are you selling, and is the first step small enough for a stranger to take? |
| Website and conversion | Does the traffic you already have turn into enquiries? |
| Search and discovery | Can the people looking for this find you, and are you chasing the right terms? |
| Content and authority | Does the work you publish accumulate into something, or is it disconnected? |
| Measurement | Do you know which activity produced your last five enquiries? |
| Ownership and capacity | Who decides, and do they have the time to? |
The last two are the ones cheap audits skip, and they are the ones that most often explain the rest. A business with no marketing owner will not execute the recommendations in any audit, so a report that ignores the question is prescribing something that cannot happen. That gap is usually the real problem.
It arrived within two days. Nobody understood your business in two days. They ran tools.
Nobody asked about your commercial reality. An audit written without knowing which service makes you money, or which clients you would rather not have again, is optimising towards a goal nobody has stated.
Every recommendation is something they sell. If the finding is always “you need more content” and they are a content agency, you have received a proposal wearing an audit’s clothes.
It is free. Free audits are lead magnets. That does not make them dishonest, but it does mean the document exists to produce a next step rather than to tell you the truth, and occasionally those conflict.
There is no stop list. A report of only additions, from someone with no stake in your capacity, will not survive contact with your actual week.
Properly done, for a business of five to fifty people, it is one to three weeks. Roughly a third of that is conversation rather than analysis, because the useful findings tend to come out of talking to whoever handles enquiries.
Price it against what it prevents. The point of an audit is to stop you spending a year and a five-figure budget on the wrong priority. Judged that way the question is not whether it is expensive, it is whether it is right.
If you already know what the problem is and have not done anything about it, an audit will tell you what you know and delay you by a month.
Buy an audit when you genuinely cannot see which of several problems is the real one, for instance when you cannot tell whether you need a new website or a strategy, or when you need something credible to hold a decision steady inside the business. Those are the situations where an outside view earns its cost.
Most founder-led businesses are not short of marketing activity. They are short of a decision about what matters. The Founder-Led Marketing Scorecard takes about three minutes and tells you which of seven areas is holding the rest back.
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