Why audit at all
Because "our marketing isn’t working" is not a diagnosis. It could be the identity, the photography, the positioning, the website, the media buying, or the product. Spending on the wrong one is how budgets disappear without anything improving.
You cannot fix an area you have not identified.
The five areas worth scoring
1. Branding
Does your identity work everywhere it has to — signage, packaging, a phone screen, a single-colour stamp? Could someone recognise a post with the logo removed? Do you have written rules, or does "on brand" live in one person’s head?
2. Social media
Does the feed read as one company? Is there a content system, or is each post decided the morning it goes out? Does it do anything beyond announce products?
3. Content
Open your website on a phone, in daylight, and try to want the product. Most founders have never done this — they review images on a calibrated laptop in an office.
4. Website
Is there a phone number above the fold? How many fields does the enquiry form have? Is there a WhatsApp option, in a country that runs on WhatsApp? How long does it take on a mid-range Android on mobile data?
5. Performance
Do you know your cost per enquiry? Can you say which channel produced last month’s best client? If the answer is no, more spend will not help — it will just be harder to explain.
Score each out of 20
Be uncharitable. The point is not to feel good, it is to find the weakest number.
- 16–20 — this is a strength. Leave it alone and spend elsewhere.
- 11–15 — functional but inconsistent. Worth a system, not a rebuild.
- 6–10 — actively costing you. This is probably where to start.
- 0–5 — the thing everything else is being judged against.
The rule that matters
Fix the lowest number first, not the most interesting one. A beautiful rebrand cannot rescue a website that loses the enquiry, and better ads cannot rescue photography that makes a good product look cheap.
And if every area scores 15 or above, the honest answer may be that your marketing is fine and your problem is somewhere else entirely — pricing, product, or sales follow-up. An audit that cannot reach that conclusion is not an audit.
Common questions
How often should a business audit its brand?
Once a year, and any time something significant changes — a new market, a new product line, a funding round, or a jump in team size.
Can I audit my own brand objectively?
Partly. You will be generous about the areas you built yourself. Ask someone outside the business to score the same ten questions and compare.
What if every area scores badly?
Start with whichever one a customer meets first. For most businesses that is the website or the feed, not the logo.
Your product is good.
Your brand should look like it.
Tell us the problem, not the service. We come back within 12 hours.
start a project →read next