"Get your free marketing audit"
You've probably seen similar offers while browsing for tips on how to market your startup. Before you fill out that form, let me explain why free marketing audits are not the generous offer they claim to be.
Why do marketing agencies offer free audits?
Free audits are a lead-generation tool for agencies. They provide you with information (the results of an audit), in exchange for your contact details.
Trading for information isn’t an inherently bad deal, provided the information you receive has value. But therein lies the problem. The information you receive in a free audit is generally not valuable.
A marketing audit is supposed to help you find holes in your marketing strategy, systems, tools, tactics and processes. You can then use the information to create a plan to fix them.
But a thorough marketing audit, one that can genuinely help your business, requires two critical components that are missing in free audits: access and time.
Access is essential
For the results of a marketing audit to be meaningful, the auditor will require access to your team, data, reports, marketing software and so on.
Are you prepared to hand all of your company’s confidential data over to someone you barely know? Hopefully not! But if the auditor can’t access this data, it’s impossible for them to do the job properly. It’s like an electrician walking around the outside of your house and then claiming to know what's wrong with the wiring. Would you trust their assessment?
Yes, you may receive your “free detailed report”. But the information isn’t useful.
Good things take time
A marketing audit isn't supposed to be a quick look-over. It’s a diagnostic process that requires thorough investigation and strategic understanding to provide useful findings.
The process takes time, and much more than an agency can afford to assign to senior strategists who should be busy with paid client work.
So what do they do? They automate the process or delegate it to less-experienced team members. Either way, it’s a shortcut that sacrifices quality for speed – at your expense.
Exceptions that prove the rule
Some agencies claim that specific audits, like an SEO audit, can be partially automated, so they can afford to offer them for free.
That may be true. But if an agency is running an automated audit, you can, too. In the case of SEO, simply use one of the many free tools that are available.
Misaligned incentives
If you do accept an audit, consider the auditor's motivations as you check their list of recommendations. If you’re dealing with a content marketing agency, don’t be surprised to hear that you need to boost your content marketing efforts.
Their analysis may not be wrong, but it's probably one-sided. A comprehensive audit should you help you prioritise your overall marketing strategy, not favour one component of it.
Audits are useful
When working with clients, I generally start the engagement with an audit-like period of research and discovery. The goal is to ensure we can accurately diagnose issues before we start prescribing potential solutions.
I would never claim that this process can be done at no cost or within 24 hours. It digs deep into a company and its products, interviewing the team and analysing strategies, tactics, tools, systems, and processes across marketing, sales, operations, and user experience.
This research takes time, but it allows me to devise holistic strategies tailored to a company’s requirements, and that’s far more useful than a one-size-fits-all report that was generated in minutes.
The true cost of a free marketing audit
If a “free” audit provides you with zero actionable insights, then it wasn’t free. You simply paid with your time.
Don't shortchange your business with surface-level insights. The future of your company is worth the time and attention that only comprehensive, in-depth analysis can provide.
