A marketing audit for manufacturers that ends in a plan, not a checklist.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors, and lifecycle. For a manufacturer we read them against a long specification cycle and a channel that closes orders, so distributor and rep activity, technical content and gating, trade shows and directories, and the sales handoff are all inside the scope. The output is a findings workbook with evidence and severity, plus a 90-day plan.

A checklist tells you what to look at. An audit produces findings about your business, each with the measured evidence beside it, a severity band, what leaving it alone costs, and the fix. We use a fixed nine-area scope so nothing is skipped, but every line in the workbook comes from your analytics, your ad accounts, your CRM, your invoices and your live site, never from a template. If you want the checklist, run it yourself and call us for the parts it cannot answer.

That is usually the first finding. We test the lead definition against what sales actually accepts, trace live test enquiries from click to CRM record to a named owner, and reconcile marketing's report with opportunities and orders. Where the definition is the problem, the workbook says so and the plan rewrites it with sales in the room. Where the handoff is the problem, we time it and report the delay.

By reading leading indicators and cohorts instead of monthly conversions. We look at opportunities created and their sources over multiple quarters, sales cycle length by product line, win rates by source, and where enquiries stall. Technical buyers spend 62% of the process online before engaging sales, so much of the audit is about whether the evidence they need exists on your site at all, which can be judged today rather than in eighteen months.

Yes, as a channel with its own findings. We check who ranks and advertises on your product names, whether distributor listings compete with your own pages, what co-marketing money buys, how leads are passed and whether they come back, and what the channel is allowed to claim about your products. We give no advice on your distribution agreements themselves.

The audit answers that with your own numbers rather than a rule. The 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers reports 85% of technical buyers will provide their information for content they find valuable, so gating is not automatically wrong, but gating a specification an engineer needs to shortlist you usually is. We test which assets sit at which stage and recommend gate, ungate or partial per asset class.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of brands, product lines and ad accounts in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end, and no retainer is attached, which is what lets the workbook say that a channel we would happily sell is not worth funding for you. Your team, your current agency or another firm can execute the plan. If you later want us to run something, it is scoped and quoted separately.

No. We review the marketing function: data, spend, site, content, channel and competitors. We are not lean, operations or supply chain consultants, we give no engineering, product compliance or export advice, and we will say plainly when a finding is really an operations or capacity issue rather than a marketing one.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the 90-day plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. Industrial marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides segment priority, positioning, channel roles and budget. Many manufacturers buy the audit first because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint on growth wherever it sits, including pricing, product mix and sales capacity. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence and a 90-day plan. If you already know marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

Whoever owns marketing, one sales leader, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, the CRM and invoices. Expect roughly three to four hours of your team's time across the week: a kickoff, short interviews, and the handover call. Everything else is our work on your data.

That is one of the best moments for it. The workbook documents what the current setup actually produced, the plan states what the next partner has to deliver, and the measurement framework gives you a baseline they inherit rather than reset. We hold no media, so nothing in the audit is written to win the retainer that follows.

Your team runs it, and every action has a named owner and an acceptance test. Many manufacturers book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back, and the parent engagement is the marketing audit itself.