A plumbing marketing audit that ends in a plan, not a list of ideas.

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 plumbing business we read them against booked work rather than traffic, so call tracking software, recorded call intake, Google Local Services Ads, Google Business Profile and reviews per service area, the membership base 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 list of marketing ideas tells you what other companies do. 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 call recordings, your invoices and your live site, never from a template.

That is usually the first finding. We reconcile marketing's report with jobs booked and revenue, place live test calls and enquiries, and score recorded calls for booking rate, hold time and missed calls. ServiceTitan's data shows top performers book 62% of inbound lead calls against 39% for the rest, so an intake gap usually explains more of the difference than any channel does. The workbook says which it is, with the recordings referenced.

Yes. Blending markets hides the answer. Spend, booked jobs, cost per customer, local search position, Google Business Profile health and review velocity are all reported branch by branch, so a strong market stops subsidising a weak one in the reporting. Where one branch is genuinely better run, the workbook documents what it does differently so it can be copied.

Both, as audited channels. We check Local Services Ads budget, dispute handling, booking rate and cost per customer against paid search for the same searches, and we review every Google Business Profile listing for categories, service areas, hours, photos, review velocity and response habits. Findings say what to change and who owns it; we do not manage the accounts as part of the audit.

No, and the distinction matters. Coaching works on how the company is run: recruiting, pay plans, targets and accountability. We review the marketing function with evidence: data, spend, site, intake, local visibility and competitors. Where a finding is really an operations or staffing issue, we say so plainly rather than dressing it up as a marketing fix. We are also not M&A advisers.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of brands, branches 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, 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.

As far as they affect what marketing can produce, yes. Top performers present good-better-best options on 57% of residential jobs against 41%, and 87.5% run an active service agreement or membership programme with paying members against 68.7%, and financed jobs carry a median ticket 64% higher, rising to 75% for plumbing. Where those are missing, the workbook records it as an offer finding.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. Plumbing marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides job mix and service area priority, positioning, channel roles and budget. Many operators 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 the price book, job mix and technician 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 operations or dispatch leader, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, call tracking, your field service software 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 operators 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.