THE SELF-DIAGNOSIS

Twelve questions before you spend another dollar.

These are the questions I open every Studio Audit with. They take about twenty minutes if you’re honest and about four if you’re not. They’re written for whoever is responsible for the marketing budget — a team of twelve or just you.

The scoring is deliberately simple.

Check the box next to any question you can’t answer confidently right now.

Not the ones you’d need a day to research — the ones where you genuinely don’t know. Most people check three or four, and the pattern in which ones they check is the diagnosis.

MONEY AND ALLOCATION

Can you show twelve months of spend and result by channel — however rough?

Almost everyone can produce the spend. The result column is where this question does its work. If you can’t put a number next to what each channel returned, then every budget decision you’ve made in the last year was made without it.

Is there a channel you’re still paying for that nobody has evaluated in the last twelve months?

Spend rarely gets cancelled; it gets inherited. If you can’t name the last time each line was defended, one of them is a habit rather than a decision.

Do you know which channel produced your last ten customers?

Not your last ten leads — customers. The gap between those two lists is usually the most expensive thing in the business, and it’s usually invisible.

WHO YOU’RE FOR

Can you state the two or three reasons a customer picks you over the alternative — in their words, not yours?

“In their words” is the whole question. If the answer is a list of your strengths rather than sentences you’ve heard customers say, you’re marketing a self-image.

Are you selling to more than one kind of buyer with the same message?

This is the most common finding in this whole list. One message aimed at two buying reasons gets averaged until it isn’t wrong for anybody and isn’t compelling to anybody.

When somebody else makes something for you, does it come back looking and sounding like you?

Whether that somebody is a forty-person marketing department or one freelancer you found last spring. If the work needs fixing every time, the rules are usually the problem rather than the people — and that inconsistency then gets misdiagnosed as needing a rebrand.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY ARRIVE

What percentage of people who reach your most important page do the thing you want?

One page, one number. If you don’t have it, you can’t know whether your problem is traffic or what the traffic meets — and those two problems have opposite fixes.

Which specific ads or campaigns send traffic to that page — and does the page keep the promise they made?

Read the ad, then read the page, in that order, out loud. A surprising number of conversion problems are just a promise that changes between the click and the landing.

How long does a typical deal take to close, and roughly how many touches before it does?

Without this, no attribution claim anyone makes to you is honest — including your own. A ninety-day cycle judged on thirty-day data will make you cancel the thing that was working.

HOW YOU KNOW THINGS, AND HOW MUCH IT COSTS TO KNOW THEM

Of the metrics you review each month, how many have ever changed a decision?

Count them. If the honest answer is one or two, you don’t have a measurement problem — you have eleven metrics doing reassurance work, and the cost is the attention they take.

How does your monthly marketing reporting get made, and how many hours does it take?

Count your own hours here too, if you’re the one doing it. Nobody ever knows this number and it’s always higher than the guess. It’s the single most common place automation genuinely pays for itself, and it stays invisible precisely because it’s somebody’s routine.

Can you name a weekly task nobody has questioned in a year?

There is always one. Finding it is not a technology exercise — it’s just asking, which is why it rarely happens.

YOUR READ

Nothing checked yet

CHECKED

of 12

Work down the list and check anything you cannot answer confidently right now. If you finish with none checked, you are in unusually good shape — and you probably do not need an audit.

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One caution on this result: it tells you where your blind spots are, which is not always where your constraint is. Those two usually overlap — that’s why the exercise works — but a real audit checks rather than assumes.

SECOND OPINION — A MONTHLY EMAIL

Once a month, one email, one engagement, and what the diagnosis actually found.

Including what we recommended against. If these twelve questions were useful, that’s the same thing at longer length — a real problem, the evidence, and the part where the obvious fix was the wrong one.

One email a month. No sequence, no drip, no “just checking in.” Unsubscribe link in every issue and it works.

Not sure which studio you need? That’s the normal place to start.
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