What a Marketing Audit Should Actually Tell You

By Chase Powell · · Marketing Strategy

Over the last 20 years I've seen a lot of "free marketing audits" land on business owners' desks. Most of them follow the same pattern: forty pages of charts, a red score next to your name, and a pitch on the last page.

You finish reading and still don't know what to do Monday morning.

A real marketing audit should leave you with decisions, not data. Here's what a useful one covers.

The five questions a good audit answers

Before getting into the pieces, here's the test. When you're done reading an audit, you should be able to answer these:

  1. Who is winning in my market, and why?
  2. Where am I losing customers I already paid to get?
  3. Which of my marketing dollars are working, and which aren't?
  4. What should I fix first, second and third?
  5. What will it cost, and what should I expect to change?

If an audit can't answer those, it's a report, not a plan.

What it should look at

Your market and competitors

Not a generic list of "top competitors," but a clear read on the businesses actually showing up when your customers search. What are they offering? How do their reviews compare to yours? Where are they strong, and where is there an opening nobody is taking?

Your website as a sales tool

Not "is it pretty," but "does it turn visitors into calls?" Can someone on a phone figure out what you do, where you work and how to contact you in five seconds? Is the phone number tappable? Does the form actually reach someone?

Local search and your Google Business Profile

For most local businesses, the map results matter more than anything else. A good audit checks your categories, services, reviews, photos, and whether your name, address and phone match everywhere they're listed.

Reviews and reputation

How many reviews you have, how recent they are, how you respond, and how that stacks up against the businesses you're competing with for the same customer.

Paid ads

If you're running Google or Facebook ads, are they pointed at the right searches and the right people? Are you paying for clicks that land on a page that can't convert? If you're not running ads, would they make sense for you, and at what budget?

Tracking

This is the one nobody wants to talk about. If you can't tell which calls came from Google, which came from Facebook and which came from a referral, every other decision is a guess. A good audit tells you whether your numbers can be trusted.

Follow-up and speed to lead

How fast do leads get a response, and where do they land? In my experience this is where a lot of local businesses quietly lose the most money. (We wrote more about that in Speed to Lead.)

What the output should look like

The finished product should be short enough to act on:

  • A prioritized list — what to fix first, and why it's first.
  • A 90-day plan with who does what and when.
  • Plain English. If you need a glossary to read it, it wasn't written for you.
  • A conversation. Someone should walk you through it and answer questions, not just email a PDF.

Red flags

Be careful with an audit that:

  • Gives you a single score out of 100 and not much else.
  • Finds that you need every service the company sells.
  • Never mentions your competitors by name.
  • Ignores tracking and follow-up entirely.
  • Promises specific rankings or results.

Doing it yourself

You can do a lot of this on your own in an afternoon. Search for your main service in your city on your phone and note who shows up. Read your three biggest competitors' reviews. Fill out your own contact form and time the response. Ask your team where your last ten customers came from.

You'll learn more from that afternoon than from most free audits.

If you'd rather have it done for you, that's what our MarketTap Blueprint is: a hands-on look at your market, competitors, website, local search, ads, tracking and lead response, turned into a prioritized 90-day plan and walked through with you on a call. Book a strategy call to see if it's a fit.

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