You’ve been here before
You’re spending on SEO, running ads, posting on social, sending emails, maybe doing some content. Each channel has its own vendor or internal owner. Each one reports metrics that look reasonable in isolation. But when leadership asks “is our marketing working?” nobody can give a confident answer.
Maybe you’re a new marketing leader who inherited a program that was built piecemeal over years. There’s no documentation on why certain channels were chosen. Budget allocation seems based on history rather than performance. You need a baseline before you can make changes.
Or maybe you’re considering firing your agency and want an independent evaluation before you hire the next one. You’ve been told different things by different vendors, and you need someone with no agenda to look at the whole picture.
The common thread: you’re making marketing investment decisions without a clear understanding of what’s producing results and what’s draining budget. This audit answers that question across your entire program, not channel by channel in silos.
What we examine
Four areas of marketing health, evaluated together because channels don’t perform in isolation. We go deep on the channels you’re actively investing in and evaluate the rest at the strategic level.
Channel performance and spend
What you’re investing in each channel versus what it’s producing. Not vanity metrics like impressions or followers, but leads, pipeline contribution, and revenue where trackable. We look at spend allocation across channels to see if budget matches opportunity or if money is spread too thin across too many things to move any of them. If a channel is underperforming, we determine whether it’s a strategy problem, an execution problem, or a “wrong channel entirely” problem.
Measurement and attribution
Is the data you’re using to make decisions accurate? Conversion tracking, lead attribution, CRM connectivity, analytics configuration. We frequently find that the channel someone thinks is underperforming is actually undertracked. A broken form event or a misconfigured UTM structure can make a productive channel look like a waste. Before we can evaluate performance, we need to verify that the scoreboard is working.
Strategy and execution quality
Being present on a channel isn’t the same as using it well. If your social media strategy is posting product promotions to an audience that doesn’t engage with sales content, the problem isn’t social media. It’s the approach.
We evaluate whether each channel’s strategy fits how that channel works, if messaging is consistent across channels, and if there’s a cohesive plan connecting awareness through conversion. This is where “random acts of marketing” become visible.
Competitive context
What competitors are doing across channels, where they’re investing heavily, and where they’re absent. We pull competitive data across organic visibility, paid activity, content strategy, social presence, and authority signals where meaningful for your market.
This gives your performance data context. If your organic traffic is flat but competitors have tripled their content output, that tells a different story than if the whole market is flat. We also identify white space where competitors haven’t shown up yet.
See how this fits into our full process
What you get
Everything stays with you. Take it to any team, any agency, or execute it yourself. Delivered as a written report, a prioritized roadmap, and a live findings walkthrough.
Channel performance scorecard
Each active channel rated by budget allocation, performance against business metrics, execution quality, and optimization potential. You’ll see which channels are earning their budget, which need strategic adjustment, and which should be cut or paused so resources can be redirected where they’ll produce more.
Measurement audit
What’s tracked correctly, what’s broken, what’s missing entirely. The most common finding: it’s not misconfigured. It’s not there at all. No offline conversion data flowing back to Google Ads, so the algorithm has no idea which clicks turned into revenue. No channel attribution pushed to the CRM, so sales and marketing are working from different scorecards.
No key events in GA4, so there’s no way to know which pages or channels are producing meaningful conversions. Specific fix instructions for each gap so your team can start making decisions on accurate data.
Integration assessment
Where your channels are reinforcing each other and where they’re operating in disconnected silos. We map the handoffs: ad click to landing page to nurture to sales conversation, and flag where the chain breaks.
What we often find is subtler than broken links. We’ll hear how your customers talk, learn what their real pain points are, and then look at whether any of that language shows up in your SEO content, your ad headlines, your landing pages, or your social. Usually it doesn’t.
There’s something that makes your company different, but it’s not translating out to the channels. Or we’ll see something clearly working in Google Ads, but nobody has thought to build organic content around the same themes. These are integration failures that don’t show up in any single channel’s reporting.
Competitive marketing overview
What your primary competitors are doing across channels: organic visibility, paid presence, content strategy, social activity, and link profiles. Where they’re strong, where they’re coasting, and where nobody in your category has invested yet. Based on publicly available data and competitive intelligence tools, not proprietary information.
Prioritized roadmap
What to fix in your current program, what to cut, what to invest more in, and what’s missing entirely. Organized by impact and effort so you know where to start. Each recommendation includes the reasoning, not just the instruction. If the answer is “your program is solid and the real issue is measurement,” the roadmap says that.
Findings walkthrough
A live presentation where we walk through every finding and answer questions. We’ll cover what we found, what it means, and what we’d do about it. You’ll leave with clarity on priorities and a realistic sequence.
How you’ll think differently
The audit gives you more than a channel-by-channel report card. You’ll walk away understanding how your marketing program works as a system, which changes how you allocate budget, evaluate vendors, and make strategic decisions.
Which channels are earning their budget
Most companies evaluate channels by the metrics each vendor reports. Paid search reports ROAS. SEO reports rankings. Social reports engagement. None of those metrics answer the question leadership is actually asking: “What’s driving revenue?”
The audit connects channel investment to business outcomes across the full program. What surprises clients most: companies give too much credit to a channel they personally enjoy and not enough to the one quietly doing the work. Once you can compare channels against the same business metrics, the budget conversation changes.
Where your execution is wrong for the channel
Some channels underperform because the strategy doesn’t fit how the channel works. Social media is where we see this most. A company posts four times a month in a space that requires three times a day, then concludes “social doesn’t work for us.” Or they expect bottom-of-funnel conversions from a channel that plays a different role in the buying journey.
Someone researches on LinkedIn, watches a comparison video on YouTube, gets confirmation from ChatGPT, then visits your site directly. That conversion shows up as “direct” in your analytics, and social gets zero credit. The audit identifies where channel expectations are mismatched with channel reality, so you know whether to fix the approach, adjust expectations, or walk away.
What your competitors aren’t doing
Competitive analysis usually focuses on what others are doing well. The more useful finding is often what nobody in your category is doing at all. Channels or topics where the competitive field is thin. Content gaps where buyers have questions and nobody is answering them.
These are the opportunities where moderate investment can produce disproportionate results because you’re not fighting established players for the same space.
Is this the right move?
Not sure which audit you need? Here’s how to tell.
The marketing audit is the right move
You’re spending across channels without confidence in what’s working. You need a clear-eyed look at the whole program before restructuring or changing agencies. You want findings that cover the full picture, not a channel-specific deep dive.
Think it’s an SEO problem
Organic search specifically has stalled or declined, and you want deep diagnostics on technical health, content, authority, and competitive positioning. An SEO audit goes deep on one channel instead of wide across all of them.
Think it’s an AI visibility problem
You’re visible in traditional search but invisible when buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity about your category. An AI visibility audit examines how you appear across AI platforms specifically.
Not sure yet
Want to understand what marketing services look like before committing to a diagnostic. Our marketing services page explains the approach, the channels, and when different levels of engagement make sense.
Learn about marketing services
How it works
Five phases. The scope and depth vary based on your program, but the sequence stays the same.
01 Discover
Kickoff conversation to understand your business, goals, current marketing program, and what’s been tried before. This is where we need transparency from your side: what you’re spending, where it’s going, what you think is working and what isn’t. We also review your analytics, CRM, and reporting tools to understand what data exists. Your self-assessment is an input, not the diagnosis. It tells us where to look first.
02 Strategize
We build the audit framework based on your specific channels, competitive set, and business model. A B2B company with a six-month sales cycle needs different evaluation criteria than a direct-to-consumer brand. We determine which competitive intelligence matters, which metrics map to your actual business outcomes, and where to focus analysis time for maximum insight.
03 Execute
Independent verification across all active channels. We pull competitive data, review campaign performance, audit measurement accuracy, evaluate content and creative quality, and assess strategic coherence.
This is where your team’s assumptions get tested against reality. If you’ve been told a channel is working, we verify it. If you suspect something is underperforming, we figure out whether the problem is strategy, execution, or measurement.
04 Launch
Synthesis and roadmap development. Findings get ranked by what will move the needle most. We build the channel scorecard, assemble the competitive overview, document the measurement gaps, and create the phased roadmap. Each recommendation explains the thinking rather than just the instruction.
05 Optimize
Findings presentation and recommendation delivery. We walk through everything live, explain why certain changes come first, and answer questions. If a recommendation doesn’t fit your constraints, whether that’s budget, team capacity, or timeline, we adjust on the spot. By the end, you’ll have a clear plan you can start executing.
See complete marketing process with timelines
Frequently asked questions
Why do you need to know our actual spend?
Because a $2,000 monthly budget and a $200,000 monthly budget require completely different strategies. Channel recommendations, competitive benchmarks, and ROI expectations all depend on what you’re working with. Without real spend data, any recommendation is theoretical. We treat this information confidentially, and the audit isn’t useful without it.
How is this different from the reports our current agency sends?
Your agency reports on the channels they manage. They have an incentive to make those channels look productive. This audit evaluates everything together with no agenda.
We might conclude your agency is doing great work and the problem is somewhere else. We might find that a channel they’re managing is the wrong investment entirely. Either way, you get an independent perspective.
Will the audit tell us to spend more money?
It might tell you to spend differently. We often find that companies are spreading budget across too many channels to be effective in any of them. If you have a $5,000 monthly budget, putting a little into seven channels means none of them have enough to produce results.
The recommendation might be to cut five and concentrate on two. We also look for the treadmill pattern: agencies making micro-optimizations month after month while missing real opportunities for expansion or experimentation.
Is this a sales pitch for your marketing services?
We’ve delivered audits that concluded the client’s program was solid and the real problem was their website or brand positioning. The findings belong to you. Whether you hire us, keep your current team, or bring in someone new, the diagnostic stands on its own.
What if we only do one or two channels?
The audit scales to your program. If you’re only doing SEO and paid search, we evaluate those two channels deeply plus the competitive picture for channels you’re not in yet. The value isn’t just assessing what you’re doing. It’s identifying what you’re missing.
What happens after the audit?
It varies. Some clients restructure their program internally based on the roadmap. Others bring us on for specific channels. Some realize they need foundational work like brand positioning or website improvements before marketing investment makes sense. We don’t push toward a particular outcome. The audit gives you what you need to decide.
Have a question not listed here? We’re happy to help.
Get the full diagnostic
Find out what’s actually driving results across your marketing program, what’s draining budget, and where the real opportunities are. If the honest answer is “keep doing what you’re doing but fix your tracking,” that’s what we’ll say.
Investment: $1,500 – $3,000 depending on number of active channels, competitive complexity, and depth of analysis required. This is broader than a channel audit because it covers performance, measurement, and integration across your active channels.
Exact scope is defined at kickoff, but the output is always a prioritized roadmap and live walkthrough. One-time fee, no recurring commitment. Everything delivered and owned by you. Approximately 3-5 weeks from kickoff to findings.
