New Marketing Manager? Start With This Audit

Starting a new marketing manager role is exciting. It’s also, if we’re being honest, a little bit chaotic.

You’re meeting new people every day, sitting in on calls you don’t yet have context for, being asked questions you’re not ready to answer, and quietly trying to work out where everything actually lives.

The temptation in those first few weeks is to prove your worth quickly. Launch something. Change something. Make your mark. And while that instinct comes from a good place, moving too fast before you truly understand what you’ve inherited is one of the most common and costly mistakes a new marketing manager can make.

The smartest thing you can do in your first 30 days is slow down, look carefully, and audit everything. Not because you’re being cautious, but because a thorough new marketing manager checklist right at the start sets up every good decision you’ll make in the months that follow.

This article walks you through all seven areas you should be auditing, why each one matters, and what to look for when you get there. We’ve also put together a free downloadable checklist you can work through as you go. More on that at the end.

Why Your First 30 Days Are About Auditing, Not Acting

There’s a well-established framework in leadership called the 30/60/90 day plan. The first 30 days are for discovery. The next 30 are for activating on what you’ve found. The final 30 are for optimising and scaling what’s working.

Most marketing managers skip straight to day 31.

The problem with that is you end up building on foundations you don’t understand. You change things that were changed for a reason. You invest in channels that look active but aren’t driving results. You inherit someone else’s mistakes without realising it until much later.

A proper audit in your first 30 days gives you a baseline. It tells you what’s actually working, what’s been quietly broken for months, and where the biggest opportunities are. Critically, it also gives you something concrete to present to leadership. Not gut feelings, but evidence. That kind of credibility is worth its weight in budget conversations.

1. Audit Your Website

This is the first place to start and, in most cases, the most revealing. The website is the single most important marketing asset a business has, and it’s also the one most likely to have been neglected, patched together over time, or built to someone’s personal taste rather than your customer’s needs.

A few questions to work through:

• Does the homepage clearly explain what the business does and who it’s for within a few seconds?
• Is the messaging consistent with how the sales team describes the product or service?
• Are there clear calls to action on the key pages?
• How does it look and function on mobile?
• When was it last properly updated, not just a blog post, but structurally?

On the technical side, load speed is worth checking early. Research consistently shows that 40% of visitors will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load, and a one-second delay can reduce conversions by up to 20%. If the site is slow, that’s not just a technical problem. It’s a revenue problem.

Mobile performance deserves its own look too. 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load, and with mobile now accounting for the majority of web traffic, a poor mobile experience is quietly killing results across every channel you run. We’ve written a more detailed guide on how to optimise your website for mobile if you want to dig into that specifically.

Red flags to look out for:

• No clear conversion points such as contact forms, booking links or sign-ups
• Messaging that’s vague, jargon-heavy or clearly written for internal stakeholders rather than customers
• Pages that haven’t been touched in years
• A website that looks great on desktop but falls apart on a phone

For a more structured look at what to check, our website audit checklist covers this in detail.

2. Audit Your Analytics and Reporting

You’d be surprised how often marketing analytics are either set up incorrectly, not set up at all, or set up in a way that nobody actually uses for decisions. Before you trust any data you’re being shown, it’s worth verifying that the data is actually trustworthy.

Work through these questions:

• Is Google Analytics 4 (GA4) installed and collecting data properly?
• Are conversion goals set up and tracking the right actions?
• Are UTM parameters being used consistently across campaigns and channels?
• Is there an existing reporting dashboard, and if so, does anyone actually look at it?
• What does leadership currently use to measure marketing success?

That last question matters more than it might seem. If leadership is judging marketing performance on a metric that doesn’t reflect real commercial value, say social media followers or total website visits, that’s important context for how you’ll need to frame your own reporting going forward.

The goal of this audit isn’t to overhaul everything immediately. It’s to understand what you can trust and what needs fixing before you start making decisions based on it.

3. Audit Your Content and SEO

Take stock of what content exists and, more importantly, whether it’s doing anything useful. A lot of businesses have been producing content for years with no real strategy behind it. Blog posts written on gut instinct, pages that duplicate each other, and nothing that actually ranks for anything meaningful.

Questions to work through:

• Is the business ranking organically for terms its customers are actually searching for?
• Is there existing content that drives traffic or generates leads?
• Are blog posts optimised with meta titles, descriptions and proper header structure?
• Is there obvious content cannibalisation where multiple pages compete for the same keyword?
• Is there a content strategy at all, or has it been ad hoc?

Look at the content through your customer’s eyes, not the business’s. Content written primarily to talk about how great the company is rarely performs. Content that genuinely answers a question or solves a problem does. Identifying that gap early is one of the most valuable things you can do in your first 30 days.

If you’re looking to understand how AI can help accelerate content planning and production, we’ve covered that in our article on AI tools for marketing managers.

4. Audit Your Channels and Campaigns

This is where you take a proper look at what’s actually running and what’s actually working. Not what the previous marketing manager thought was working. What the data says.

Go through every active channel:

• Paid search and social: what’s the spend, what are the results, and is the targeting current?
• Email marketing: how big is the list, what’s the open rate, and are there automated sequences in place?
• Organic social: what’s being posted, how often, and is it generating any meaningful engagement?
• Partnerships or affiliates: are there any referral relationships, and are they being properly tracked?

For each channel, the key question is whether it’s driving pipeline or just generating activity. There’s a meaningful difference between a channel that feels busy and one that’s genuinely contributing to revenue.

This is also where you’ll likely find your quick wins. There’s almost always something that’s been underinvested, a campaign that was paused before it found its feet, or a channel that’s performing well and could be scaled with a little more resource behind it.

5. Audit Your Brand and Messaging

This one tends to get overlooked in favour of the more measurable stuff, but it’s often where the root cause of underperformance lies. If the business doesn’t have a clear, consistent way of describing what it does and why it matters, no amount of channel optimisation will fix the underlying problem.

Ask around, genuinely. Talk to the sales team, talk to the MD, talk to customer support. Ask everyone the same question: “How would you describe what we do to someone who’d never heard of us?” You’ll almost certainly get different answers from everyone, and the gap between those answers is your brand messaging problem to solve.

Work through these questions during your audit:

• Are there up-to-date brand guidelines covering logo usage, colours, fonts and tone of voice?
• Is the messaging consistent across the website, social profiles, email templates and sales materials?
• Does the value proposition clearly articulate what makes the business different?
• Are the brand guidelines being followed, or is everyone doing their own thing?

Inconsistent messaging doesn’t just look unprofessional. It genuinely erodes trust with potential customers who encounter the brand across multiple touchpoints and get a different impression each time.

6. Audit Your Tech Stack

Marketing teams accumulate tools the way houses accumulate clutter. Gradually, without noticing, until one day you open a drawer and find six things doing the same job. A new marketing manager checklist wouldn’t be complete without a proper look at what’s in the tech stack and whether it’s actually being used.

Map out everything:

• CRM: which one, who owns it, and is it being used consistently by the sales team?
• Email marketing platform: is it integrated with the CRM?
• Marketing automation: is anything automated, or is everything still being done manually?
• Analytics tools: GA4, heatmapping, A/B testing?
• Social scheduling, SEO tools and paid media platforms

For each tool, ask three questions. Is it being used? Is it being used properly? Does it talk to the other tools it needs to talk to?

Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey found that marketing technology utilisation has been declining, with teams paying for tools they’re not using or running them in isolated ways that don’t deliver the value they should. Finding those gaps early gives you a real opportunity to either get more from what’s already there, or make a case for replacing it with something better.

Also worth checking: who holds the logins? There are few things more frustrating than discovering a critical platform is locked behind the personal email of someone who left the company eighteen months ago.

7. Audit Your Team and Agencies

The last piece of the audit is the people doing the work, both internally and externally. You need a clear picture of who’s responsible for what before you can make any sensible decisions about what needs to change.

Internally, work out:

• Who is on the marketing team, what are their core responsibilities, and where do they spend most of their time?
• Where are the skills gaps? What’s being outsourced that could be done in-house, or vice versa?
• Are there capacity issues, with anyone stretched across too many things?

Then look at your external agency relationships. This is worth treating as its own mini-audit:

• What agencies or freelancers are currently engaged, and what’s in scope?
• When do contracts renew, and are there any notice periods to be aware of?
• Is there a clear brief in place for each relationship, and are they performing against it?
• Is there reporting in place that shows you what you’re getting for your investment?

This is also a natural moment to ask honestly whether the right partners are in place. Not every agency relationship that made sense to the previous marketing manager will make sense to you, and starting a new role is one of the few times you have a genuine mandate to reassess.

What to Do With What You’ve Found

Once you’ve worked through all seven areas, resist the urge to send a long email listing everything that’s broken. Nobody will read it, and it won’t win you any friends.

Instead, organise your findings into three buckets:

• Quick wins: things that can be fixed in days or weeks with minimal effort or cost
• Strategic fixes: things that need proper investment of time, budget or resource
• Longer-term opportunities: areas where the business could grow meaningfully with the right approach

Present this to leadership as a clear, prioritised picture. Not a problem list, but a roadmap. Frame it around what it means commercially, specifically what fixing these things will do for pipeline, conversion rates, visibility and revenue. That’s the language that gets budget approved and earns you the trust to get on with the work.

From there, your audit becomes the foundation of your 90-day plan. And the 90-day plan becomes the thing that shows everyone, including yourself, that you know exactly what you’re doing.

Want a Second Pair of Eyes on the Website?

If your website audit has thrown up some concerns, whether that’s performance, messaging, conversion or all three, we’d love to have a conversation. As a web design company that works closely with marketing managers, we build websites that actively support your goals, not undermine them.

Get in touch to book a discovery call and let’s talk about what needs fixing.

Will Smith

Director & Founder

01202 779577 LinkedIn

Founder of Authentic Style, building websites and AI tools that make marketing teams’ lives easier.