Why “360”? What makes it different from a website review?
Most marketing reviews look at one thing: the website, or the ads, or the Instagram grid. That’s how you end up fixing the channel that was audited instead of the problem that exists. A 360 audit looks at the whole machine at once, because the failure is almost never where the symptom is. A website that “doesn’t convert” usually has a positioning problem. Social that “doesn’t work” usually has a job-definition problem. You only see that when everything is on the table at the same time.
What exactly gets examined?
Seven areas, every time:
- Website: what a stranger understands in the first ten seconds, where the journey leaks, and whether the site sells or just describes.
- Funnel: the actual path from first touch to enquiry to sale, including the steps nobody owns and the forms nobody finishes.
- Social channels: what each channel is for, whether the content has a job (reach, trust, or sale), and what should stop being posted entirely.
- Past campaigns: what was spent, what came back, and which “wins” were really just seasonality wearing a costume.
- Competitors: who you actually lose to, what they say about themselves, and where they are beatable.
- Audience: who buys, why they say they buy, and the gap between that and who the marketing talks to.
- Your team: interviews with the people doing the work. They usually know what’s wrong. Nobody has asked them in a structured way.
Why do team interviews matter in a marketing audit?
Because numbers tell you what happened, not why. The analytics show a landing page bleeding visitors; the intern knows it’s because sales promised something the page doesn’t say. In-house teams are too close to see the whole picture, but they hold pieces of it that no dashboard shows. An audit that skips the humans produces a very confident, very incomplete diagnosis.
And in many cases I don’t stop at your team: I also talk to your clients. What they say they buy from you is often not what the marketing sells, and that gap is usually where the biggest opportunity hides.
What do you get at the end?
Not a hundred-slide deck that flatters everyone and changes nothing. You get three things:
- A prioritised list of what’s broken and what’s worth keeping, ordered by impact, not by how easy it is to present.
- Quick wins you can act on immediately, before any strategy work starts, so the audit starts paying for itself in week one.
- A KPI baseline: the numbers as they stand today, so that in six months “it’s working” is a measurement, not a mood.
What does a 360 audit not do?
It doesn’t execute anything. It doesn’t redesign your website, write your content, or run your ads. That’s deliberate: diagnosis and treatment are different jobs, and mixing them creates a conflict of interest. An auditor who profits from finding problems will always find problems. My audit is built to stand on its own: worth it even if we stop there.
Who should get one, and who shouldn’t?
Get one if you’re an established company spending on marketing without knowing what’s working, or if your in-house team wants an honest outside read before committing next year’s budget. Skip it if you’re pre-revenue, pre-audience and pre-marketing: there’s nothing to audit yet, and your money is better spent making the first version of things. And skip it if you want to be told you’re doing great. That’s not what the audit is for.
What happens after the audit?
Whatever you want. Some companies take the list and run it in-house. Some come back for the strategy, where the findings turn into positioning, channels and a roadmap. The audit is the front door of my method, not a trap: every stage after it is optional, and the findings are yours either way.