Marketing audits feel like going to the dentist. You know you need one, you keep putting it off, and when you finally do it, you discover problems you didn't know existed.
About a month ago, our marketing team at Sked finally stopped avoiding the inevitable. After months of declining performance and a complete strategic reset, we conducted our most comprehensive marketing audit ever. The results were humbling, eye-opening, and ultimately transformative.
This isn't a story about perfect processes or impressive results. It's about the messy middle of marketing transformation—the uncomfortable but necessary work of understanding what's actually happening before you can fix it.
If your marketing feels broken but you're not sure where to start, this guide will show you what a thorough marketing audit looked like for us and the actionable insights we took away.
Sked’s Marketing Audit Framework: Our Four-Phase Approach
We focused our audit around four phases, each designed to clarify a different aspect of our marketing.
Phase 1: Performance Data Review
We gathered key quantitative metrics from all major channels—website, paid ads, social, email, and more—to identify patterns, strengths, and weaknesses.
Phase 2: Content Inventory and Assessment
We catalogued all content from the previous six months, including blogs, ebooks, social posts, emails, and ads, then evaluated each piece's outcomes and effort required.
Phase 3: Customer Feedback and Language Analysis
Through customer interviews, support tickets, and sales recordings, we took a hard look at how our audience talked about their needs and our solutions—often in very different terms than our marketing materials.
Phase 4: Competitive Benchmarking
We analyzed our top competitors' messaging, content strategies, and social presence to see how we stacked up and where the biggest gaps or opportunities existed. We did part of this with Sked's Competitor Analysis tool (Spoiler alert for next week's episode!).
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Get Started for FREEThe Discoveries That Changed Everything
Our audit surfaced a number of tough truths about where our strategy was falling short. The following three discoveries have shaped the new direction of our marketing.
Discovery 1: Content Performance Was Inconsistent—and We Weren’t Repurposing High-Effort Pieces
One immediate takeaway was that our content performance was all over the place. Some of our best performing pieces were long-form content—think deep-dive ebooks and in-depth reports—but each one ate up a huge chunk of time and budget. Even with that investment, these high-effort pieces rarely got the distribution run they deserved. Too often, we’d finish a major asset, then quickly move on to the next shiny project without repurposing key insights into blog posts, email series, social snippets, or other formats.
At the same time, shorter, “basic” guides performed exceptionally well—sometimes outperforming our most ambitious work. We realized that instead of learning from existing content trends, we simply produced more, without looking for patterns to double down on what worked. The big lesson: For high-value content, finding ways to repurpose and redistribute isn’t optional—otherwise, you’re just burning resources for a single-use impact.
Discovery 2: Falling Well Behind Competitors on Social
As a social media management platform, you’d expect Sked to have an active, powerful social presence. But our audit told a different story. Compared to our competitors, we were posting two or three times a week at most, while they maintained a consistent, high-frequency posting schedule. This was a red flag—not just for brand visibility, but for practicing what we preach to our own audience.
We also uncovered that our competitors leveraged more creative content types, timely engagement, and platform-specific strategies. In comparison, our output wasn’t just less frequent; it was less dynamic. We’ll go deeper into our competitive analysis in a future episode, but the takeaway was immediate: to sell to social media managers, we needed a robust, visible, and relevant social presence, built with our own tool as both a showcase and a testing ground.
Discovery 3: Major Disconnect Between Customer Language and Our Messaging
Perhaps the most eye-opening findings came directly from our customer interviews. There was a significant gap between how we described Sked’s value—“streamlined workflows” and “optimized processes”—and what mattered to our users. Customers talked about saving time, staying organized, feeling less overwhelmed, and using social media management to directly support business growth.
Interestingly, even though we serve a diverse set of customers, nearly all had similar core challenges and needs. Yet our ideal customer profile (ICP) for the last few years had become increasingly narrow and internally focused. This misalignment meant not only was our messaging out of sync, but we were also missing opportunities to connect with the real aspirations and struggles of our broader user base.
The big lesson: if you’re not mirroring your customers’ words and priorities, even the best marketing tactics will fail to resonate. Your ICP should evolve as your customers do—remaining in tune with what they’re actually trying to solve.
Final Thoughts
Conducting this marketing audit was a humbling experience, but it was also the turning point we desperately needed. By uncovering the gaps in our content strategy, social media presence, and customer alignment, we now have a clear path forward to rebuild with purpose and precision.
This is just the beginning of our journey. In Episode 3, we’ll dive deep into the competitive research process, specifically how we used Sked’s social listening tool to analyze our competitors’ strategies and identify opportunities to stand out. If you’ve ever wondered how to leverage social listening for actionable insights, you won’t want to miss it.
Stay tuned, and as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. What’s been your biggest takeaway from your own marketing audits? Let us know in the comments below!
