The Three Marketing Checks I’d Run Before Spending Another Dollar
- Jeremiah Ajayi
- Aug 6
- 8 min read
Since I discovered Claude Code, I have been building marketing audit tools for the marketing problems I keep hearing in my discussions with c-suite and marketing leads.
The first set covers category visibility, marketing function health and GTM readiness. These are the kinds of problems that show up when a founder is unsure who to hire, when a CMO cannot tell why content is failing to turn into pipeline or when a good product keeps losing attention to competitors with better market presence.
I plan to build more products over time. For now, these are the three I have live: the Category Visibility Audit, the Marketing Function Audit and the GTM Readiness Scorecard. Each tool helps you answer a different question about your marketing before you throw more content, spend or headcount at the problem.
Category Visibility Audit
Is your brand showing up accurately where buyers are looking?
That question shaped the Category Visibility Audit.
Many companies look good on their own website, then become hard to find once a buyer starts researching the category elsewhere. The buyer asks ChatGPT, checks Perplexity, searches Google, reads comparison pages, skims LinkedIn posts and starts forming an opinion from whatever shows up. A useful product can lose ground when the market has little to repeat on its behalf.
The tool scores your company across AI search presence, content and thought leadership, positioning clarity and pipeline distribution. It checks whether your brand appears for category prompts, whether your website answers the questions buyers care about and whether your proof makes the company easy to trust.
Use cases
Use the Category Visibility Audit when:
Competitors appear in AI answers for category prompts tied to your market
Buyers search the problem you solve and find other brands first
Your website explains the product, but the wider market still has weak language for your company
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google describe your company in ways that feel thin or outdated
Your content strategy needs clearer direction from buyer questions
Sales needs better proof, comparison assets, case studies or category education
A market expansion needs more visibility before the team starts selling heavily
How to make the best use of it
Start with the buyer, not your brand name. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, then search the way a buyer would search before they know your company exists. Use prompts like “best [category] platforms for [market],” “how do companies solve [problem] in [region]” and “[your company] vs [closest competitor].” Write down what appears before you touch the score.
Score what you see in front of you. If your company appears in one tool and disappears in another, give yourself a middle score. If the answer mentions your company but explains it poorly, score that as a visibility problem. If competitors show up with clearer proof, stronger pages or better third-party mentions, treat that as useful evidence.
Move through the four sections in order: AI search presence, content and thought leadership, positioning clarity, then pipeline and distribution. The order matters because buyers need to find you before they can trust you, and they need to understand you before they can enter a sales conversation. Your score should show where the buyer journey breaks.
After the audit, pick the lowest section and turn it into one project. A low AI search score may mean you need better category pages, clearer FAQs or more third-party mentions. A low content score may point to founder POVs, case studies or buyer education. A low positioning score means your homepage, proof points and one-line description need work.
Run the same audit again in 30 to 60 days. Category visibility compounds through better pages, stronger proof, more useful content and clearer distribution. The goal is to see whether buyers and AI tools can explain your company with more confidence over time.
Marketing Function Audit
Founders often sense that marketing feels broken before they can name the problem.
One team member asks for more content. Another suggests paid ads. Someone wants TikTok, LinkedIn, SEO, events or a website refresh. The founder then hires from pressure, and that mistake can become expensive.
The Marketing Function Audit helps a founder inspect the function before hiring, spending or changing direction again. It asks 16 questions across strategy, execution, alignment and measurement. The answers show whether the company needs clearer positioning, stronger ownership, better sales collateral, tighter reporting or a senior marketer who can set direction.
Use cases
Use the Marketing Function Audit when:
Hiring a marketer feels urgent, but the role still feels unclear
Content goes out every week and pipeline impact remains hard to explain
Leadership keeps changing marketing priorities
Sales complains about lead quality or weak collateral
The website gets visitors who rarely become qualified conversations
The team disagrees on ICP, positioning, channel focus or success metrics
A fractional head of marketing sounds useful, and you need to know what they would fix first
How to make the best use of it
Fill out the audit as the founder before involving anyone else. For every “Yes,” ask yourself what proof backs it up. If you say you have a documented ICP, there should be a doc your team can open. If you say you know which channels drive pipeline, there should be a number attached to that answer.
Then bring in one person from Sales, Product or Marketing to answer it too. Compare your answers section by section. The gaps will show you where the team is working from different assumptions. That matters because many marketing problems start with people thinking they agree when they have never defined the same thing.
Treat every “Partial” as a warning sign. It means something exists, but it cannot carry the function yet. A partial ICP may mean the team knows job titles but not buying triggers. A partial content cadence may mean posts go out, but no one owns distribution. A partial measurement system may mean traffic is tracked while pipeline stays unclear.
Use the score to decide what kind of help you need. If strategy has the weakest score, the next project should focus on ICP, positioning, channel choices and a 90-day plan. If execution is weakest, the issue may sit in ownership, content cadence, outbound or website conversion. If alignment breaks down, start with sales collateral, lead quality and product feedback loops.
The tool also gives recommended next steps, so do not stop at the score. Pick one recommendation from the results and turn it into a 30-day fix. For example, create a better ICP document, define what a qualified lead means, build the sales assets your team keeps asking for or choose one weekly metric tied to pipeline.
After 30 days, run the audit again. The point is to see whether the function has improved in a way your team can feel. If the score stays the same, the issue may need a deeper fix than another task on the marketing calendar.
GTM Readiness Scorecard
The GTM Readiness Scorecard is my favourite of the three because it speaks to a problem I hear often from founders and CMOs: the company wants to scale a GTM motion that still feels shaky.
The product works, early customers exist and the team has momentum. Then cracks start showing up in the places that carry growth. Positioning feels unclear. Sales ignores marketing assets. Product ships before Marketing has enough context. Content gets traffic, but nobody can trace it to pipeline.
The scorecard grills you across five areas: positioning clarity, sales and marketing alignment, content-to-pipeline connection, launch readiness and team capability. It asks whether your team can explain the product in one sentence, whether Sales uses marketing assets in live conversations, whether content has influenced pipeline, whether launches follow a process and whether someone owns marketing strategy with enough authority. Once you answer, you get a readiness score and next steps that point to the weakest part of the GTM system.
Use cases
Use the GTM Readiness Scorecard when:
A new product, feature or campaign is about to launch
The company wants to enter a new market
Sales complains about lead quality or unclear positioning
Content gets traffic and pipeline remains hard to trace
Product ships before Marketing has enough context to prepare
Sales and Marketing define qualified leads differently
The team has many marketing tasks and no clear strategy owner
Spend, headcount or campaign activity is about to increase
How to make the best use of it
Pick one GTM motion to score. This could be your next product launch, a new market push, an ICP shift, a product line or one campaign that matters this quarter. Do not score the whole company in a vague way because the results will become too broad to act on.
Run the scorecard with the people closest to the work. Sales will know the objections buyers keep raising. Product will know what is being built and what customers are asking for. Marketing will know which messages, assets and channels are already in play. Leadership should be part of the conversation because many GTM gaps need decisions, not more tasks.
After you get the score, choose the lowest area as your first fix. A low positioning score means you should review the homepage, pitch deck, sales narrative and one-line product description. A low sales and marketing alignment score means you need to agree on the ICP, lead quality, buyer objections and which assets Sales should use. A low content-to-pipeline score means you should identify which content assets support revenue and which ones only create surface-level attention.
Turn the result into a 30-day action plan. Pick one gap, assign one owner and define what “fixed” looks like. For example, “create a launch brief before the next feature release,” “rewrite the homepage hero section,” “build two sales battlecards” or “map content to the buyer journey.”
Then run the scorecard again after the fix. The point is to see whether the GTM system is getting stronger, not to collect a one-time score and forget about it.
The thread across all three tools
These tools are built around questions because most marketing problems become clearer once the team answers the right ones. Weak answers lead to weak recommendations. Honest answers make the gap easier to see. The issue may sit in visibility, positioning, hiring, content, sales alignment, launches, measurement or team capacity.
That clarity saves time. B2B teams waste weeks fixing the wrong thing. They publish more content when the homepage needs work, hire junior execution when the company needs senior direction, or chase AI visibility when the product story still sounds unclear. A good diagnostic helps the team see what deserves attention first.
I wrote about this same mindset in my piece on turning a content audit from a spreadsheet into a growth lever. The idea is similar here. An audit should help you decide what to fix, what to improve and what to leave alone.
Want to talk through your marketing problem?
Use the tool that matches the problem in front of you.
Start with the Category Visibility Audit if buyers struggle to find or understand your brand across search, AI tools and category conversations. Use the Marketing Function Audit if the company needs to diagnose what is broken before hiring or increasing spend. Use the GTM Readiness Scorecard if you are preparing to scale a launch, market push, campaign or product story.
After you run the audit, book a call with me to discuss the results or talk through your marketing problems further. I’ll help you make sense of the gaps and decide what needs to happen next.
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