Notes / How we work
What a marketing audit looks like, week by week.
When people hear "audit" they picture sixty slides, a framework with a clever name, and a recommendation to do more of everything. That's not what this is, so here is what actually happens, week by week.
Week 1: access and listening
I get into your analytics, your content calendar (the real one, not the ideal one), and the last quarter of everything you shipped. I also talk to three people: your marketing lead, someone from sales, and a founder or board member.
I'm looking for one thing in those conversations: the gap between what the company says it does and what actually ships. There is always a gap. The size of the gap is most of the diagnosis.
Week 2: the leak hunt
Then I map effort against return, per channel and per content type. Hours in, results out. Almost every team has at least one channel that eats a disproportionate share of the week and produces close to nothing, kept alive purely by habit.
I also sort the work into two piles. Generic work: things that eat time but don't need anyone's judgment. And the human layer: things that badly need judgment and aren't getting it, because everyone is busy with the first pile. Most marketing problems are this sorting problem in disguise.
Week 3: the list
You get a prioritised list. Typically 10 to 15 items, ranked by what they cost you, each one with: what it is, why it matters, who should own it, and whether it's a this-week fix or a this-quarter project. We walk through it together in an hour. Then it's yours, whether you ever hire me again or not.
One example
A company I audited was publishing five times a week on a channel that, when we finally traced it, produced almost none of their pipeline. Nobody had checked since the channel launched, because checking wasn't anyone's job. Cutting the cadence freed up close to a day a week, which went into the channel that actually converted.
That's the whole trick. Not magic. Just looking, properly, with no stake in the answer.
What I need from you
- Analytics access, read-only is fine
- The real content calendar
- Three hours of people's time, spread over three conversations
- No prepared presentations, please. The unprepared version is the useful one.
The audit takes two to three weeks. If the list isn't worth the fee, you don't pay it.
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