Not all marketing audits are created equal. Some dive deep into SEO. Others review your social media footprint. Some are so narrow they miss the forest for the trees.
At Brucey, we start with a different kind of audit — a Strategic Marketing Audit designed to give business owners, marketers, and sales leaders a clear, focused view of what’s really driving (or blocking) growth.
This isn’t about surface-level checks or generic recommendations. It’s about understanding how your marketing efforts align to your goals, how your customer journey performs in reality, and what needs to shift so you’re not just staying busy — but moving forward.
We’ll unpack that below. But first, let’s look at what a "marketing audit" can mean — and why it pays to start with strategy before diving into tactics.
A marketing audit is a structured review of your current marketing activities, assets, channels, systems, and performance — with the goal of identifying gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement.
But here’s the thing: marketing audits vary wildly in scope.
Some are narrowly focused — looking only at your website or email flows. Others go wide but shallow. And few give you the confidence to know what to act on first, what to ignore, and what will actually help you reach your business goals.
That’s why at Brucey, we start with a strategic take on the marketing audit, that has breadth and depth — without drowning in the weeds.
A Strategic Marketing Audit is a business growth diagnostic — built to help business owners, sales leaders and marketing leads see what’s working, what’s missing, and how they can move forward toward their growth goals effectively and confidently.
It’s not just about channel performance or technical setup — it covers six core areas that underpin effective growth:
Where is your future focussed? – What are your goals and ambitions? Where are you heading, in both the short and long-term?
What's the market reality? – Are your above goals in sync with the market, customers, competitors? How well do you know them?
Where do you fit in? – How do you position your brand, your product and services, solve your customers’ needs and deliver value?
How do you go-to-market? – How do you engage the market across the entire customer journey (marketing, sales, customer service)? Where are your resources focussed?
What's your track record? – How effective have you been at achieving your goals in the past? What do you measure and use to make decisions?
How capable are you? – Do you have the right team, skills, systems and resources in place to grow? Do you have clear processes and have you documented them?
Deliverables of a strategic audit include a traffic-light scorecard, prioritised recommendations, and a summary action plan. It can include quick wins too, to keep the momentum up as you're working on developing the strategic plan.
It’s the best place to start before rushing into channel audits or tactical changes.
Once you’ve set the strategic foundation, it can make sense to dive deeper into specific areas. Below are the most common types of marketing audits — with an overview of what they cover, where they help, and how they’re usually approached.
A funnel or journey audit looks at how prospects and customers move from first touch with your brand, to closed deal (and beyond to repeat sales, expanded account growth). It helps identify friction, inefficiencies, and conversion gaps across marketing and sales.
Key focus areas:
Funnel stages and conversion rates
Drop-off points and handoff gaps
Journey consistency across channels
Typical outcomes:
Identify funnel leakage
Visibility into where leads stall or disengage
Specific areas to improve follow-up, nurture, or conversion
Stronger sales and marketing alignment
Helpful tools: Your CRM data (e.g. HubSpot), website data (e.g. Google Analytics), call tracking tools
This audit explores whether your brand identity, messaging, and story clearly express your value and resonate with your audience. It's foundational for effective positioning.
This audit can readily be broken down further into sub-audit e.g. focussing solely on messaging (for continuity, clarity, etc), brand style and codes, etc. Conversely, this audit can end up overlapping with a content or website audit too, as you dig into detailed messaging and brand style implementation.
Key focus areas:
Visual identity and consistency
Message clarity and competitive differentiation
Tone of voice and resonance across touchpoints
Typical outcomes:
Improved clarity and confidence in your message
Adjustments to language or visuals for better market fit
Ideas to refine positioning against competitors
Helpful tools: Message maps, competitor analysis, brand guidelines, customer interviews
A content audit inventories your marketing content (digital and offline) and assesses how well it's performing — and supporting your funnel. It identifies what's working, what's missing, what's out of date and what can be improved or repurposed.
Key focus areas:
Content by format, purpose, topic, and funnel stage
Performance by traffic, engagement, and conversions
Opportunities to consolidate, update, or expand
Typical outcomes:
Clearer content priorities and gaps to fill
Recommendations for repurposing or retiring content
A roadmap for aligning content with customer journey stages
Helpful tools: Build a content database (e.g. Google Sheets), or if you use them already a content library in Canva, Adobe or similar Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools.
This audit examines your site’s organic visibility and search engine performance. It covers technical health, keyword targeting, on-page optimisation, and backlink profile.
Key focus areas:
Indexing, site speed, crawlability, errors
Keyword use and page optimisation
Backlink profile and authority
Typical outcomes:
Priority SEO issues to fix
Keyword opportunities and content gaps
Clear next steps for improving search rankings
Helpful tools: SEMrush, Ahrefs, PageSpeed Insights
Your website is often one of your most important business marketing assets. A website audit assesses how well it’s structured (technically and for usability), how clearly it communicates, and how well it converts visitors (or other goals, where conversion is not the focus).
Key focus areas:
Navigation, structure, usability
Conversion paths
Page performance and load speed
Typical outcomes:
Clear recommendations for UX and content improvements
Prioritised fixes that improve conversions and usability
Alignment with your brand and messaging
Helpful tools: Hotjar, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, manual UX heuristics
A CRM audit checks the health of your contact data, automation setup, and how you’re using the entire platform (e.g. HubSpot has a number of different hubs for sales, marketing, etc). It’s especially valuable for teams that rely on CRM for pipeline visibility and campaign execution, and where automation and reporting relies upon data accuracy and cleanliness.
Key focus areas:
Data usage, health, and completeness
Workflows and automation health
Reporting, properties, and integration usage
Typical outcomes:
Improved data cleanliness and actionable data
Smoother workflows and fewer process gaps
Stronger ROI from your CRM investment
Helpful tools: HubSpot audit reports, internal dashboards
This audit reviews the quality, effectiveness, and performance of your email marketing setup. It helps uncover deliverability issues, messaging misalignment, or missed automation opportunities.
Key focus areas:
List segmentation and quality
Automation flows and nurture logic
Template performance and frequency
Typical outcomes:
Quick fixes to improve opens and clicks
Strategic improvements to automation journeys
Better segmentation and more relevant campaigns
Helpful tools: HubSpot, Mailchimp, Litmus
A social media audit helps assess how well your social presence is supporting your marketing and brand goals. It looks at content mix, performance, consistency, and engagement.
Key focus areas:
Channel selection and audience relevance
Post cadence, engagement, content types
Brand voice and consistency
Typical outcomes:
Recommendations to focus, repurpose or shift effort
Stronger alignment between content and business goals
Competitor insights to sharpen your approach
Helpful tools: Native analytics, Buffer, content calendars
This audit reviews your paid advertising accounts to check efficiency, targeting, creative, and alignment with goals. It’s ideal for identifying and optimising wasted spend, or scaling opportunities.
Key focus areas:
Campaign structure and budget allocation
Ad copy, audience targeting, and bidding strategy
Landing pages and conversion paths
Typical outcomes:
Immediate changes to reduce waste or improve returns
Clear understanding of what’s performing and why
Ideas to scale results or test new tactics
Helpful tools: Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, Looker Studio, Native ad channel analytics
Each audit above can be valuable — but certainly not all at once.
Without a strategic view, it's easy to waste time optimising parts that aren’t the real problem or just getting busy on one of a multitude of things that aren't effectively and sustainably driving your toward your business growth goals. You could pour effort into a new website or a rebrand, when the real issue is unclear targeting or poor product-market fit. Or polish ad creative and ramp up spend, when you've got a badly leaking sales funnel.
That’s why our advice is: start with a Strategic Marketing Audit.
It’s your north star. It gives your team clarity, builds alignment, and helps you focus on what matters most — so that any deeper audit or execution effort has a clear reason behind it.
From there, we can help you:
Prioritise which deep-dive audits are needed (if any)
Build a quarterly roadmap that keeps your team focused and moving