The Marketing Audit You Can Run on Your Own Business

Hope is not a marketing strategy. Audit first.

Most owners skip this step because a marketing audit sounds like something you pay for. It is not. It is a list of questions, and you can answer most of them yourself in an afternoon using nothing but your own analytics and a critical eye.

This is the marketing audit checklist I run on an account before we touch anything. It exists to find the gap between the marketing and the actual booking, and that gap is almost never where people assume it is.

What is a marketing audit, and do I need one?

A marketing audit is a structured look at whether the pieces of your marketing are pointed at the same thing. You need one if reach has gone flat, if nothing is converting, if you are about to spend money on ads, or if you are about to hire somebody and want to know what you are handing them.

How do I audit my own marketing?

Open your site on a phone, your social analytics for the last ninety days, and your email platform. Work through four sections and twenty questions: the message, the mechanics, the content, and the funnel. Leave blanks where you have no answer, because the blanks are the point.

Section one: is your message actually saying anything?

1. What do you claim that a direct competitor cannot? If you cannot answer in one sentence, stop here. Everything below is downstream and none of it will work yet.
2. Cover your logo on your last five posts. Would a regular customer know it was you?
3. What is in it for the reader in the first six words of your bio? Not what you do. What they get.
4. Read your homepage headline out loud. Would you say that sentence to a person at a party? If it makes you wince, it makes them scroll.
5. Text three customers and ask why they picked you. Not a survey, three texts. The words they use back are the words that belong on your site, and they are almost never the words you are currently using.

Section two: the mechanics most people never check

6. Do the links work? All of them. Bio link, the link in your last ten posts, every button on your site. This one catches something roughly half the time I run it.
7. Does the link in your graphic match the link in your caption?
8. Is every price, date and credential on your site currently true? Expired offers and old prices do quiet, constant damage.
9. Load your site on a phone on cell data, not wifi. Time it.
10. Can somebody buy or book in two taps from your bio? Count them.

Section three: is your content doing a job?

11. Pull your last twenty posts and sort by reach. If the top three and the bottom three are basically the same post with different photos, you have a message problem, not a posting problem.
12. Can you name the job of each of your last ten posts? Educate, engage, convert, or build community. If a post has none, it was filler. More on the four jobs here.
13. How many of your last thirty posts could a competitor have published unchanged?
14. What is your ratio of finished-product posts to how-it-works posts? Most businesses sit around 90/10, and the 10 is the part that converts.
15. When did you last publish something only you could have written?

Section four: where the money leaks

16. Where does social actually send people? If the answer is nowhere, social is a hobby, not a channel.
17. What happens to somebody who joins your email list today? If the answer is nothing until the next newsletter, you are losing your warmest people at the exact moment they are warmest.
18. What is one new customer worth to you? Average sale multiplied by how many times they come back. You cannot judge any marketing spend without this number and most owners have never worked it out.
19. How many of those would this year's marketing budget need to produce to break even? The answer is usually one or two, and it reframes the entire conversation about cost. I break the price bands down here.
20. What is the next step you want a stranger to take, and is it visible in the first screen of everything you own?

What do I fix first?

Count your blanks and fix the cluster, not the individual question. Blanks in the message section mean more posting will make things worse. Blanks in the mechanics section are the cheapest wins on the list and should be fixed this week.

Blanks in section one mean a messaging problem. More posting makes this worse, because it is volume on a message that is not working. Decide what you claim that nobody else can, then rewrite everything downstream of it: the bio, the pinned posts, the site headline, the welcome email.

Blanks in section two are the cheapest wins on the list. Fix them this week. Broken links and stale prices cost you nothing to repair and quietly cost you money every day they stand.

Blanks in section three usually point at capacity, not taste. Nobody schedules four posts a week and then forgets on purpose. It goes patchy because it sits on top of a full week and it is the only thing on the list with no external deadline.

Blanks in section four are the real leak. You are paying to bring people to a road that does not go anywhere, and no amount of content fixes a funnel that ends in a cul-de-sac.

When to hand it over

Some of this you will fix in an afternoon. Some of it is a rebuild, and a rebuild competes with running your business.

Month one of every retainer we run is exactly this audit plus the strategy that comes out of it, across every channel, written down with the gaps ranked in the order they cost you money. That is how our retainers start. Strategy on its own, without the ongoing work, starts at $1,500.

Run the twenty. If more than half come back blank, send me what you found and I will tell you which one to fix first.