Every engagement we take on starts the same way: no campaigns, no creative, no spending — an audit. Twenty-five points, four sections, and a written report of what we found.

We get asked what is actually in it. This article is the answer. Not a teaser version — the real structure, with the reasoning behind each section. You can run the interactive version yourself in about ten minutes, free.

Why audit before doing anything

Most marketing problems we see are not execution problems. They are "nobody checked" problems. Budget going to a channel because it was set up two years ago. Forms that quietly stopped syncing to the CRM. Ads optimizing for form-fills from people who never buy — a problem common enough that we wrote a whole article about it.

Fixing these costs almost nothing. Finding them requires looking systematically instead of hopefully. That is all an audit is: a forced, systematic look.

Section 1: Your business (7 points)

The audit starts with questions that have nothing to do with marketing tactics — because marketing that ignores the business model is decoration:

  • What you sell, to whom, and at what average deal size
  • How long a deal takes to close, and who is involved in the decision
  • What a customer is worth over their lifetime, not just the first invoice
  • Where revenue actually comes from today — channels, referrals, repeat business

The point of this section: every later judgement depends on it. A RM 200 cost per lead is excellent for a RM 80,000 deal and a disaster for a RM 900 one. Without deal economics, marketing metrics are just numbers.

Section 2: Current performance (7 points)

The uncomfortable one. Rough estimates are fine — the pattern matters more than the precision:

  • Monthly marketing spend, all-in: fees, tools, media, people
  • Leads per month, and — separately — qualified leads per month
  • What a lead costs you today, per channel if you know it
  • Conversion from lead to customer, and where in the funnel deals die
  • Whether you can trace a closed deal back to the marketing that produced it

That last point fails more often than any other item in the whole audit. If you cannot connect deals to channels, you cannot know which half of your spend is working — and neither can any agency you hire. It is why tracking from first click to closed deal is usually the first thing we fix, before touching any campaign.

Section 3: Challenges and constraints (7 points)

What is actually in the way. Honest answers here save months:

  • What you have tried before, and what happened
  • Who does the marketing work today, and how much time they really have
  • Sales capacity — because doubling leads is pointless if follow-up is already the bottleneck
  • Budget reality: what you could sustain for six months, not what you would spend in a good month
  • The internal blockers nobody puts in briefs: approvals, brand sensitivities, past burns

This section exists because the best plan you cannot execute loses to a decent plan you can. An audit that ignores constraints produces a strategy deck for an imaginary company.

Section 4: Goals and priorities (4 points)

Short, and last on purpose — goals stated before the reality check tend to be fiction:

  • The revenue number marketing needs to influence, and by when
  • The one metric that would prove marketing is working, to you
  • What you would consider a failure worth firing over
  • How involved you want to be, week to week

The audit ends here so the goals get set against what the first three sections revealed. "Grow 40% this year" means something different once you know the sales team can handle twelve more deals a quarter and no more.

What happens with the 25 answers

For our clients, the audit output is a written report: what we found, what it costs you today, and — almost always — a kill-list of things to switch off before spending a single new ringgit. Savings fund the growth work. If the numbers say an agency is not the right move yet, the report says that too, and it is yours to keep either way.

The signs the audit most often catches — budget leaking to zombie campaigns, dashboards tracking the wrong numbers, leads nobody follows up — overlap heavily with the signs your marketing isn't working if you want to pattern-match before running anything.

Run it on your own marketing

The interactive version of this exact audit is free at brandondigital.co/marketing-tools/checklist — same 25 points, same four sections, scored as you go, with an optional written report by email at the end.

Or skip straight to the human version: request the free 14-day audit and we will run the full thing on your account ourselves, and send you the findings in writing within two weeks — hire us or not.