A water damage marketing audit built on evidence, not opinions.

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 water damage business we read them at two levels, company and location, so Local Service Ads, Google Ads, map pack and Google Business Profile position, review velocity, emergency intake and cost per booked job per service area are all inside the scope. The output is a findings workbook with evidence and severity, plus a 90-day action plan.

Access and reconstruction on days one and two, measurement testing on days two and three, then spend, website and intake, local search, reviews, referral channels and competitor analysis through day five. Day six is judgement, where each finding is written with its evidence, a severity band and the cost of inaction. Day seven delivers the action plan and the handover call. The scope is fixed so nothing gets skipped when a freeze week arrives.

A free audit is a sales document, and it usually recommends the service the firm offering it sells. Ours is a paid project with no execution attached, so the workbook can conclude that a channel we would happily run is not worth funding for you. Every line in it comes from your analytics, your ad accounts, your call recordings, your job system, your invoices and your live pages, ranked by severity and cost of inaction.

Yes, and it is often the highest-severity finding in the workbook. We place live calls in several service areas at night and at weekends and score answer time, who answered, what was asked, whether an appointment was set and whether the call was attributed to a source. Booked-job rate comes from recordings rather than call volume, so a location with plenty of calls and few jobs stops looking like a marketing problem.

We can tell you what they produced. Shared and aggregator leads are traced from invoice to contact attempt to booked job, with speed to contact measured, because the same lead performs completely differently depending on how fast someone calls it. Where the tracking cannot support that trace, the workbook says so and the plan fixes the measurement before you renew a contract.

By comparing like periods and naming the weather. A freeze event flatters every channel it touches, so we compare equivalent weeks and separate event-driven demand from baseline demand before judging any channel. The Insurance Information Institute puts water damage and freezing claims at about 1.61 per 100 insured homes a year, roughly one in sixty, at an average severity of $13,954, so the baseline is steadier than most dashboards suggest.

Neither, on this engagement. We do not run campaigns, we do not manage listings or social accounts, we perform no restoration work, we are not business coaches and we give no claims or insurance advice. We review the marketing function with evidence and hand you a plan. That independence is the point: an auditor with no media retainer attached can write that a channel is not worth funding.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of locations, service areas 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 roster 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 plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Only where it changes marketing decisions, and it does. The 2026 C&R State of the Industry reports nearly three-quarters of companies waiting 30 days or more to be paid, while Cleanfax found water damage is the most profitable service for 52% of respondents, up from 47%. If a campaign fills the schedule with slow-paying work, that is a finding about job mix, not a compliment about lead volume. We give no claims advice.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced and what is broken. Water damage marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides service lines and segments, positioning and proof, channel roles, budget and measurement. 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 wherever it sits, including job margin and drying discipline, intake capacity and the documentation-to-payment cycle. 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 leader who knows the locations, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, call tracking, the job management system and invoices. A couple of cooperative branch managers help, because their numbers are the reality check. Expect roughly four hours of your team's time across the week: a kickoff, short interviews and the handover call.

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.