The Audit You Can Run Yourself in a Week

Most marketing audits are sold as a deliverable. Most of the value is in five questions you can answer yourself in a week, and the answers usually make the next decision obvious.

Do this before you hire anyone, including me.

Day one: where did the last twenty customers actually come from?

Not attributed. Actually. Pull the last twenty closed deals and, for each one, find out how they first heard of you. Ask sales. Ask the customers if you have to.

You will find one of two things. Either a channel you’re barely funding is producing most of your revenue, or the channel absorbing most of your budget is producing very little of it. Both are actionable and neither shows up in a platform dashboard.

Day two: what does each channel actually cost you?

Total spend divided by customers acquired, per channel, including agency fees and the loaded cost of internal time. Not cost per lead. Cost per customer.

The gap between cost per lead and cost per customer is where most marketing budgets quietly die. A channel producing cheap leads that never close is more expensive than an expensive channel that does.

Day three: where does the funnel actually leak?

Four numbers: visitors, leads, qualified opportunities, closed customers. Then the conversion rate between each pair.

Most companies have never calculated these honestly and are surprised by which step is worst. If the drop from lead to qualified is severe, you have a targeting or definition problem and more traffic will make it worse. If the drop from qualified to closed is severe, that’s usually sales enablement or pricing rather than marketing. More on why traffic that doesn’t convert is a symptom, not the disease.

Day four: what do you already own that isn’t working?

Every company past a few years has assets nobody is using. An email list nobody mails. Content that ranks and doesn’t convert. A customer base nobody has asked for referrals or reviews. Case studies that were never published.

This is consistently the cheapest growth available and consistently the last thing anyone looks at, because activating something you already own is less interesting than launching something new. See reactivating a dormant database.

Day five: what would you cut?

Rank every line of marketing spend by your confidence that removing it would hurt revenue. Be honest about which ones you’d struggle to defend.

Anything you can’t defend with evidence is a candidate. You don’t have to cut it today, but you should know it’s there. That list is usually 15 to 30 percent of the budget.

What the answers mean

If the numbers were easy to assemble and mostly made sense, your instrumentation is fine and your issue is strategy or execution.

If assembling them took three people and produced contradictions, that’s the finding. You cannot allocate capital against numbers you don’t trust, and every decision you’ve made this year was made on those numbers.

Fixing that comes before any campaign, and it’s where the first thirty days of a real engagement go.