Marketing audit, step by step.
A marketing audit is the review that shows where customers come from, where the company loses sales and what to tackle first. It takes six steps: business numbers, customer sources, funnel, channels, website and competitors. The result fits on one page of priorities.
Fabrício MartinsFounder of Martin Marketing & Design
In short
- What it is: an investigation of marketing and sales numbers, before any new investment.
- What it answers: where customers come from, how much each one costs and where the biggest waste is.
- How long it takes: two to three weeks, with the data in hand.
- What it delivers: three or four priorities in order, each with a goal and a way to measure it.
What a marketing audit is
An audit is the exam before the medicine. In marketing, it is the work of looking at the company’s real numbers before deciding where to invest.
Most companies skip this step. They buy ads because a competitor advertises, rebuild the website because it looks dated, open a profile on a new network because everyone is there. Sometimes it works. Most of the time, the money goes to a problem that was not the main one.
A good audit answers three questions, in this order:
- Where do the customers the company already has come from?
- At which point along the way do most people give up?
- What would change the result the most with the least effort?
When to do one
- Before increasing the budget. More money into a leaky funnel only increases the waste.
- When sales stop growing. And nobody can explain why.
- Before switching providers. To know whether the problem is the execution or the direction.
- When launching a service or entering another city. What used to work may not work in the new setting.
- Once a year, as a routine. The market changes, the channels change and the costs go up.
If your question is who to hire after the audit, read consultancy vs. agency: when to hire each one.
What to gather before you start
The audit moves at the speed of the data. With this in hand, the work goes further:
- A list of new customers from the last twelve months, with date and amount.
- Read access to the site’s analytics and to Search Console.
- Access to the ad accounts, if there are any.
- The spreadsheet or system where leads are recorded.
- How much was invested in marketing per month, adding up media, tools and providers.
- The sales target for the year.
Not having everything is normal, and the gap itself is already a finding. A company that does not know where its last ten customers came from has, as its first priority, to start recording it.
Step 1: the business numbers
Before looking at marketing, look at the cash. Four numbers form the basis of every decision that follows:
| Number | How to calculate it | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| New customers per month | Average of the last twelve months | Shows the current pace and the seasonality |
| Average order value | Revenue divided by the number of sales | Tells you how much each sale is worth |
| Margin | What is left of each sale after direct costs | Defines how much you can invest per customer |
| Cost per customer | Marketing and sales investment divided by new customers | Shows whether growth pays for itself |
With them, one question already has an answer: how much can the company spend to win a customer without losing money? That ceiling will guide everything else. To go deeper into this calculation, see CAC, LTV and payback.
Step 2: where customers come from
It is the most revealing step and the simplest. Take the last thirty or fifty customers and note, next to each one, how they arrived: Google search, referral, Instagram, ad, event, returning customer.
When there is no record, ask. A short message to recent customers does the job: how did you hear about us?
The result is almost always a surprise. It is common for a company to put most of its budget into one channel and find out that most customers come from another. Without this review, each platform’s dashboard tells its own version, and all of them say they made the sale.
Start recording today. A "how did you hear about us" field in the form and in the customer record costs little and changes the quality of every future decision.
Step 3: the funnel, step by step
Now the whole path, from the first contact with the brand to the sale. Find out how many people go through each stage in a typical month. A hypothetical example for a service company:
| Stage | People | Move on to the next |
|---|---|---|
| Website visits | 4,000 | 1.5% |
| Leads | 60 | 50% |
| Proposals sent | 30 | 20% |
| Sales | 6 |
Looking at the table, where is the problem? The common reaction would be to ask for more visits. But the weakest step is the first: out of every hundred visitors, fewer than two get in touch. Taking that rate to 3% would double sales without a single extra visitor.
The second point of attention is the proposal: four out of five do not close. It is worth looking into price, response time and the way it is presented. Often the marketing bottleneck is actually in sales.
Step 4: what each channel delivers
With customer sources and the funnel in hand, build a table by channel. The column that matters is the last one:
| Channel | Investment in the month | Leads | Sales | Cost per sale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic search | R$ 0 | 22 | 3 | R$ 0 |
| Search ads | R$ 2,400 | 18 | 2 | R$ 1,200 |
| Social media | R$ 3,000 | 14 | 0 | no sale |
| Referral | R$ 0 | 6 | 1 | R$ 0 |
The numbers are examples, but the pattern is typical. The channel that receives the most money is not the one that sells the most, and the one that sells the most receives no investment at all. The decision that comes out of this is not to cut social media right away, but to ask what it should deliver and whether that can be measured.
One caution: a channel with zero cost is not a channel with no cost. Organic search depends on a well-built site and on content. Referrals depend on delivering well. The audit records this so nobody cuts what sustains the result.
Step 5: the website and materials
The website is where most channels end up. If it does not convert, every channel looks bad. Evaluate it the way a visitor would:
- In five seconds, can you understand what the company does and for whom?
- Is there a clear way to get in touch on every page?
- Does the site work well on phones?
- Is there proof: testimonials, case studies, numbers, clients served?
- Does each service have its own page, with the questions answered?
- Are leads measured, with the source of each one?
Look also at what happens after the contact: how long the company takes to reply, what the proposal says and whether anyone follows up with those who did not answer.
Step 6: the competition
Choose three direct competitors and walk the customer’s path with each one. Search for the service on Google, visit the site, request a quote.
- Which searches do they show up for and you do not?
- What do they promise in the first sentence of the site?
- How many reviews do they have and what is the rating?
- Do they advertise? With what message?
- What is the service like for someone requesting a quote?
The goal is not to copy. It is to find the empty space: the promise nobody makes, the question nobody answers, the search where nobody shows up well.
From audit to plan: how to prioritize
Six steps produce a long list of problems. The value of the audit lies in choosing a few. For each finding, give two scores: how much it changes the result and how much it costs to fix.
Do first
- High impact and low effort.
- Example: recording the source of leads.
- Example: shortening the website form.
- Example: pausing the campaign with no sales.
Leave for later
- Low impact, however easy it is.
- Uncertain impact and high effort.
- Everything that cannot be measured yet.
The final plan has three or four priorities. Each with an owner, a deadline, a starting number and a target number. More than that becomes a wish list.
A one-page report template
- Where we are. New customers per month, cost per customer and the two channels that sell the most.
- Where we lose. The weakest step of the funnel, with the number.
- What to do. The priorities, in order.
- What not to do now. The ideas left out and the reason.
- How we will measure. The goal for each priority and the date of the next review.
The fourth item is what separates an audit from a list of suggestions. Saying what stays out protects the budget and the team’s focus.
An example from start to finish
Putting the steps together in a hypothetical case: a company that sells services to other companies, with six sales a month and the feeling that marketing does not work.
What the review showed. Half of last year’s customers came from Google search and referrals. Social media, which received the largest budget, had no recorded sale. On the website, fewer than two in every hundred visitors got in touch. And proposals took, on average, four days to go out.
The priorities chosen. First: record the source of every lead, starting now. Second: rebuild the main service page, with proof and a short form. Third: set a deadline for sending the proposal. Fourth: move part of the social media budget to search ads, for three months, as a test.
What was left out. Opening a new channel, redoing the visual identity and switching email tools. Good ideas that did not address the two biggest bottlenecks.
How to measure. Leads per hundred visitors on the site, average proposal turnaround and cost per sale in each channel, read every month.
None of the four priorities required a bigger budget. That is the most common outcome of a good audit: before investing more, stop losing what already arrives.
Common mistakes
- Starting with the solution. Someone who has already decided they need ads will find reasons to advertise.
- Trusting only the platform dashboards. Each one credits the sales to itself.
- Looking at a single month. An unusual month leads to wrong conclusions. Use at least six.
- Ignoring sales. Marketing that generates leads and no sales may have its problem in the follow-up.
- Delivering a long report. A hundred pages nobody reads change nothing.
Frequently asked questions
With the data and access available, two to three weeks. It takes longer when information that was never recorded has to be rebuilt, such as where customers came from.
You can do a good first version by following the six steps. The difficulty is reading your own numbers with distance. Whoever is inside the operation tends to defend the choices already made, and that is where an outside view helps.
A full review once a year is usually enough. In between, a quick look at the numbers every quarter confirms whether the priorities still make sense.
No. The site’s analytics, Search Console, the ad platform dashboards and a spreadsheet cover most of it. A paid tool saves time, but it does not replace recording where each customer came from.
Yes, and that is often where it helps the most. Without ads, customers come from search, referrals and relationships. Knowing which of those paths brings the most sales shows where the first investment should go.
Conclusion
A marketing audit replaces the hunch with a short list of priorities. It does not require expensive tools. It requires opening up the numbers, following the customer’s path and having the courage to say what stays out.
If you would rather do this with someone who runs this process every month, get to know Martin’s marketing consulting. The first audit is free.
