Why Audit Your Marketing?

Brand3 Conversations with Matt Wolfe and Tav Laskauskas

Tav Laskauskas is Director of Marketing Services at Brand3, where she leads strategy for digital marketing engagements. With deep expertise across paid and organic channels, she helps businesses diagnose what’s not working and chart a clear path forward.

Something is off. Your marketing used to work, and now it doesn’t. You’re not sure why. Maybe the leads have dried up, the ads feel expensive, or the website traffic just isn’t converting. You’ve asked around, gotten a dozen different opinions, and still don’t have a clear answer.

That’s exactly the problem Brand3’s audit packages were built to solve. In this conversation, Director of Brand Strategy Matt Wolfe sits down with Director of Marketing Services Tav Laskauskas, one of the architects of these new offerings, to break down the four audit options, who they’re for, and what you can expect to learn from one.

Transcript edited and abbreviated.

Most Marketing Isn’t Broken, It’s Just Not Optimized

Matt Wolfe

Our webpage for these audit packages opens with a line I love: “Most marketing isn’t broken, it’s just not optimized.” How did you arrive at that? What were you seeing with clients?

Tav Laskauskas

So much of the time, clients come to us having done marketing that used to work, and now they’re wondering, did we break it? Is it bad? Do we need to start over? And what’s actually happening could be a handful of things, but we won’t know until we get in there.

With some of the ad platforms, it’s become increasingly difficult to manage them on your own if you’re not doing it all day, every day. AI has played a part in that. Privacy law has played a part in that. Things that used to be easy have gotten a lot harder. Over the past six to nine months, especially, we’ve been hearing a lot of frustration from business owners who feel like their marketing isn’t effective anymore, and they don’t know why. So we built these to help them answer that question.

Matt Wolfe

I think of it like a boat engine. I have a boat, and recently I heard a terrible clunking sound. I went on a forum, got ten different diagnoses, all in languages I don’t speak. I just know I heard a clunk. That’s what we’re doing here, right? You’ve heard a knocking sound. Let’s figure out where it’s coming from.

Tav Laskauskas

That’s a fantastic analogy. Business owners come to us with a symptom. They don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but they know something is off. What these audits allow us to do is get in there, look under the hood, and ask: Is it really the engine? Or is it something else entirely that you never would have thought to check?

And because we’re looking at the big picture, not just the single symptom, we’re in a much better position to offer an accurate diagnosis than someone on a message board who’s only seeing a sliver of what’s going on.

The Four Audits: What’s on the Table

Matt Wolfe

Let’s give people an overview. You built four options. Walk us through them.

Tav Laskauskas

It really depends on what you feel your symptom is. So let’s go through them one by one.

Paid Ad Audit

Tav Laskauskas

This one’s for businesses running on a single ad platform (Google Ads or Meta, for example) that used to perform but now isn’t. We’re asking: have there been platform changes or new tech that you haven’t kept up with? Did something break in your conversion tracking, so the system is no longer getting good data to optimize against? Or has competition in your market increased so much that your costs have skyrocketed and you need to be more efficient?

The pandemic, for example, flooded the digital ad market with buyers. Those buyers mostly stayed. But the captive audience from that era? A lot of them left. So you’re now spending premium dollars to get the same level of attention you were getting two or three years ago.

Matt Wolfe

There could be companies that have been dealing with that for years and don’t even know it.

Tav Laskauskas

Absolutely. For smaller businesses, it’s usually more obvious because it’s hitting them directly. But for larger companies, it’s absolutely worth looking at what inefficiencies might be lurking.

Organic Growth Audit

Matt Wolfe

Tell me about the Organic Growth Audit, because I think this one gets overlooked.

Tav Laskauskas

It does, and I think it’s to people’s detriment. Paid advertising tends to get all the attention because the ROI feels more immediate. You can draw a straight line: this ad delivered this client, and we made this much money. It’s easy to see. Organic is harder to measure, so it gets deprioritized.

But here’s the problem: if you don’t have a strong organic foundation, you’re going to spend way more on paid. Getting your organic platforms working hard makes everything more efficient.

And organic isn’t just social media and SEO anymore. We’re now talking about Answer Engine Optimization, being found when someone asks ChatGPT a question. For businesses that need to be discovered that way, if they don’t have the organic foundation, they simply won’t show up. It’s become more important than ever.

Matt Wolfe

Organic is widely misunderstood. People need help making it actually work.

Tav Laskauskas

Right. Algorithm changes have made it harder for businesses to get noticed organically on social. And search itself is evolving rapidly. You can’t approach it the way you did five years ago.

Cross-Channel Audit

Matt Wolfe

And the Cross-Channel Audit brings both of those together?

Tav Laskauskas

Exactly. This one is for businesses running multiple platforms, paid and organic, or multiple paid platforms, that used to work well together and now don’t. Maybe Google Ads and Meta used to complement each other, and now the combination isn’t getting results. Maybe your email campaigns and your paid ads used to reinforce each other, and now there’s a disconnect. Maybe you’re getting traffic to your site, but it’s not converting.

We dig in to understand how these channels are or are not working together, and what needs to change to get them pulling in the same direction again.

This is also the audit for businesses that are active on three or more platforms and feel like their growth has gone flat despite all that activity. Sometimes the issue is duplication, spending time and budget saying the same thing in multiple places without any real strategy connecting them. Sometimes it’s a gap in the funnel, a leak between platforms that’s costing leads without anyone noticing. The Cross-Channel Audit is built to find both.

Digital Foundations Audit

Matt Wolfe

And then there’s the Digital Foundations Audit, which sounds like it’s for a different kind of starting point.

Tav Laskauskas

This one is for someone who hasn’t done much marketing yet. They have a website, maybe just a single page, and they know they need to do more, but they don’t know where to start. They’re getting advice from people in their network: “Have you tried paid ads?” “Have you thought about this channel?” And they’re overwhelmed.

What this audit does is assess whether what they currently have is enough to support those initiatives. Is your website built in a way that actually lets customers connect with you? Are you on the right social platforms for your ideal customer? Do you have control of your Google Business Profile? These are the foundational questions.

I think of it as a digital readiness audit: I know I need to do something, but I’m worried about wasting money. I don’t know if I’m ready. This answers that question, and it makes sure that when you do start spending, you’re set up to actually see results.

A big part of that readiness is the website itself. A slow site, a confusing user experience, messaging that doesn’t connect — those things will undermine any marketing you layer on top of them. There’s no point in driving traffic somewhere that isn’t ready to receive it. This audit makes sure the foundation is solid before a single dollar goes to ads.

Matt Wolfe

A lot of businesses are at that point. Or they’ve got platforms they half-used, gave up on, or got burned by, and they’re just sitting there. This is the audit that helps them decide how to restart that work on a better footing.

What Makes a Brand3 Audit Different

Matt Wolfe

A lot of agencies offer some version of an audit. What makes ours different?

Tav Laskauskas

Like everything at Brand3, we don’t do anything without a strategy. So when we’re looking at these audits, we’re examining strategy as much as we’re examining data. We’re not just looking at how platforms are set up; we’re looking at the messaging, the visuals, and whether they’re landing with the right people.

We’re asking: are they in the right place for their ideal customer? Are they on platforms that actually make sense? Is the brand showing up in a way that’s compelling and authentic? Or is that ideal customer going to feel a bait-and-switch the moment they click through? Because that erodes trust fast.

Other agencies might just be looking at data. We’re looking at the whole picture.

Matt Wolfe

And when we talk about strategy here, we’re really talking about brand strategy, which, at its simplest, is about telling the right story to the right people. Until that’s figured out, the growth tactics, like paid ads and email campaigns, will underperform. Or in the worst case, won’t perform at all.

There’s also a fundamental question a lot of people don’t think about: Is what you’re selling even searchable? If you’re in B2B services and you have a new approach, something people don’t know to search for yet, then social media is often a stronger bet than search. On social, you get to tell a story. You can introduce yourself to people who don’t know you exist yet. You get to say: there’s a better way, and here we are.

Tav Laskauskas

Absolutely. That’s something we factor into every audit recommendation.

Looking Back to Move Forward

Matt Wolfe

These audits look backward at what’s happened, but really they’re built to help people move forward. Can you talk about what that looks like? What do people walk away with?

Tav Laskauskas

When we look at how things have worked historically, we can usually see where the gaps are, and that lets us make concrete recommendations. Sometimes it’s a roadmap for catching up on tech changes. Sometimes it’s adjustments to the campaign structure. Sometimes it’s going back to look at the brand’s strategic messaging because there are gaps in the story being told.

Often, we find they’re already telling a good story, but they’re just not telling it in the right place. So the recommendation might be to look at other platforms, other channels where their ideal customer actually lives.

The audit tells you where you’ve been. But what’s more valuable is that we tell you how to fix it and where to start.

Matt Wolfe

That’s something I think a lot of people need to hear. When you work with a new marketing agency, the fear is: they’re going to tell me to blow everything up and start over. But it’s not always that. As you said, sometimes the fix is surgical. Sometimes you don’t need a new engine; you just need to tighten a screw.

Tav Laskauskas

These audits help you know the difference, and that alone can save a lot of time and money.

Matt Wolfe

What we’re giving people is the truth about what’s going on, and the hope of what they can do about it. Because this stuff has to work. For the businesses we serve, being able to reach the right people, grow, and scale, that’s not optional. That’s the whole point.

Is Your Marketing Ready for a Second Opinion?

If something in your marketing isn’t working and you’re not sure why, it may be time to stop guessing and start diagnosing.

At Brand3, our audit packages are built to give you a clear picture of what’s happening, why it’s happening, and exactly where to focus next, whether that’s a single paid platform, your organic presence, the way your channels work together, or the digital foundation underneath it all.

Check out the audit options and schedule a conversation with our team today.