The marketing audit.

What a marketing audit is

A marketing audit is a diagnosis of a company's whole marketing function, not a channel checkup. It looks at how the company is positioned, how it goes to market, which channels earn their budget, how the operations and tech stack hold together, whether the team is set up to execute, which KPIs actually track to revenue, and where AI can carry real load. The output is a short list of the highest-value fixes, in order, with a dated plan attached.

The distinction that matters: a weak audit describes the current state and stops. A strong audit takes a position. It names the headline finding in one sentence, ranks what to fix first by impact and time-to-result, and hands the buyer something they can act on Monday. Most companies do not have a marketing problem. They have a clarity problem, and the audit is what resolves it.

Should you run a marketing audit?

Run one when the symptoms are loud but the cause is not. The signals: spend is going up and pipeline is not, nobody can say which channels are working, the team is busy but the numbers are flat, a new leader inherited a function they did not build, a board or PE sponsor wants a marketing plan they can trust, or an AI initiative has stalled at "we bought some tools." If two or more of those are true, the diagnosis is worth more than another quarter of guessing.

Skip it if you already know exactly what is broken and simply need hands to fix it. An audit earns its fee when the problem is misdiagnosed or unnamed, not when the work is clear and the only gap is capacity.

What a marketing audit covers

The scope spans the whole function. A full engagement reviews each of these and scores them against what the company is actually trying to achieve.

• Positioning and messaging: what you sell, to whom, against whom, and why you. This is where most B2B marketing problems actually start.
• Go-to-market: the motion, the funnel, and how marketing and sales hand off to each other.
• Channels: which ones are earning their spend, which are habit, and which are missing.
• Marketing operations and tech stack: who owns what, where the leaks are, what is redundant, and what is missing.
• Team and structure: whether the shape of the team matches the work, and where seniority is over- or under-weighted.
• KPIs and reporting: the metrics that tie to revenue versus the ones that just look busy, plus the budget split.
• AI readiness: where the team really sits on the maturity path, and the two or three workflows worth automating first.

The AI readiness audit

The AI readiness audit is the AI-focused slice of the wider audit, and it can also run on its own as a fixed two-week engagement. It answers three questions that most "AI strategy" conversations skip. Where does the team actually sit today, honestly, on the path from one-off prompting to connected systems? Which two or three workflows are worth building first, given the data and the tooling that already exist? And what is safely deployable now versus what needs more guardrails under GDPR and the EU AI Act?

Buying an enterprise AI licence is not an AI strategy. The audit separates the workflows where AI compounds from the ones where it just adds a subscription line, and it produces a 90-day build plan rather than a tool list.

How the marketing audit runs

The engagement moves through six phases over roughly two to three weeks. It starts with a setup phase that locks scope and access, then a collection phase that pulls the data (analytics, search console, CRM, ad accounts, existing reporting). Interviews come next: the CEO or founder, each marketing report, two or three salespeople, and where access allows, two or three customers. The voice of the customer is not optional. Then the analysis phase works through competitors, market, website and SEO, paid channels, materials, tech stack, and the pipeline data. Synthesis turns all of it into findings, priorities, and the dated plan. The last phase delivers and presents it live.

The one variable that moves the timeline is access. The faster the company returns data and grants tool access, the faster the audit ships. Part of the audit's value is naming what the company is not tracking at all, which surfaces the moment collection starts.

Marketing audit vs marketing consulting vs a fractional CMO

These get used interchangeably and they are not the same purchase. The audit is a fixed-scope diagnosis with a defined deliverable. Consulting is open-ended advisory time. A fractional CMO is ongoing leadership that executes the plan. The audit is often the front door: it produces the plan, and then the company decides whether to run it in-house, hire for it, or bring in a fractional CMO to own it.

How much a marketing audit costs

The AI Readiness Audit is a fixed-fee two-week engagement. Bespoke marketing audits run at a day rate starting at 1350 EUR excluding tax, sized to the scope agreed at kickoff. The price reflects what the audit is: not a loss-leader before the real work, but the product itself. The 30/60/90-day plan it produces is exactly what a retainer executes, so the audit doubles as the scoping document for whatever comes next.

What you get at the end

A board-ready deck and a searchable companion document. It leads with the headline finding, groups the diagnosis into four to six themes, and for each theme gives a Continue, Stop, and Start decision plus an Investment, Impact, and Time-to-result score so priorities are not all flagged "high." It includes a competitive review, recommended KPIs and budget split, and a prioritised action plan mapped to 30, 60, and 90 days with named owners. It is built so the buyer can present it upward without the auditor in the room. The audit points to the fix. The fix gets built, not just recommended.