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A marketing strategy sense-check covers business goals, audience, positioning, channel mix, budget, KPIs and measurement. It runs as a short, ordered checklist.
A marketing strategy sense-check is a structured review of the strategy you already have. It tests your goals, positioning, channel mix, budget and KPIs against what the business needs now, and it flags the gaps before you commit more budget.
It is a review. Not a rebrand, and not a rebuild. We are not here to throw out what you have. We are here to find out whether it still holds up.
Quick answer: A marketing strategy sense-check covers business goals, audience, positioning, channel mix, budget, KPIs and measurement. It runs as a short, ordered checklist. The gaps it is built to expose are a missing or unused positioning statement, a channel mix nobody has tested, KPIs with no named owner, and measurement that stops at the click.
If you run marketing in a growing business, you probably know the feeling. The plan was right when it was written. Since then the market has moved, and the budget has been questioned twice.
The hard part is rarely spotting that something's off. It's knowing which part, and what to do about it.
What a marketing strategy sense-check actually covers
A marketing strategy audit is a structured review of existing plans, channel mix and KPIs against business goals. A sense-check is the lighter version of the same thing: it validates direction before you commit budget.
Our own Marketing Strategy work runs in four stages: Understand, Prioritise, Plan, Deliver and measure. A sense-check sits in the first two. It tells you which opportunities connect to commercial goals and which can wait, before anyone writes a new plan.
That makes it a natural first step for growing businesses scaling past ad hoc marketing, where activity has grown faster than the thinking behind it.
The checklist: what we audit, step by step
Run these in order. Each step depends on the one before it, so a gap early on explains problems further down.
- Business goals. Write down the commercial targets for the next 12 months. If marketing cannot name them, stop here and fix that first.
- Audience and ICP. Check who actually buys and who signs off, then compare it with the ICP written into the plan.
- Positioning statement. Find it, then check whether your website, sales decks, proposals and ads say the same thing.
- Offer and GTM strategy. List which offers go to which markets and by which route, and look for any offer with no route to market at all.
- Channel mix. Record every channel, its share of spend and what it is expected to deliver. Mark which ones were tested and which were inherited.
- Budget versus plan. Compare where money and team time actually went with where the plan said they would go.
- KPIs and ownership. Tie each KPI to a business goal and a named person.
- Measurement. Trace one enquiry back from the CRM to its first touch. If you can't, your reporting is guessing.
- Priorities. List what is planned for the next two quarters, then decide which of it should stop.
In our view, one of the most valuable things a strategy can tell you is what not to do.
If you're an in-house marketing team that needs this signed off internally, the written answers to steps 1, 7 and 9 are what your leadership will ask to see.
The gaps a sense-check usually finds
Unclear goals are a common root cause. In the Content Marketing Institute's B2B research for 2025, 42% of marketers who rated their content strategy moderately effective or worse said a lack of clear goals was a reason (980 B2B respondents, surveyed June to August 2024).
No positioning statement, or one nobody uses
A positioning statement is the one-line articulation of who a brand serves and why it wins. A positioning line in a brand document does nothing on its own. The test is whether it's applied. If the website, the sales deck, the proposal template and the LinkedIn ads describe different businesses, the gap is positioning, whatever the channel reports say.
An untested channel mix
Channels are often inherited, so last year's split quietly becomes this year's split. The question is simple: what evidence put each channel in the mix, and when was it last checked?
KPIs with no named owner
A dashboard full of metrics is easy to build, but ownership is much harder to agree. When a KPI misses and nobody is accountable for it, nothing changes the following month.
Goals that never became marketing targets
The business wants revenue growth in a new sector, while marketing is still measured on website traffic. The two never meet, so good marketing results sit next to a missed business target.
Measurement that stops at the click
Reporting covers impressions, clicks, page views and form fills, then stops. Without a route from enquiry to revenue, there is no way to say which activity is worth more budget.
Deciding in advance when to change course
A channel can underperform for six months simply because nobody agreed what "underperforming" meant.
A sense-check should leave you with change-of-course triggers, set before the results come in. For example:
- If cost per qualified enquiry from a channel stays above your agreed ceiling for two consecutive months, move part of its budget to the next-best channel.
- If a new offer produces no qualified pipeline by the end of its first quarter, pause the campaign and revisit the positioning before spending more.
- If one KPI owner leaves, reassign the KPI that week, not at the next planning cycle.
Agreeing the fallback early turns a difficult conversation into a planned one.
Aligning priorities, KPIs and budget after the audit
Budgets are tight. In Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, 56% of CMOs said they lacked the budget to deliver their 2026 strategies (401 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe, mostly at companies with over $1 billion in revenue).
So the job after a sense-check is alignment, and it starts with KPIs. The same Content Marketing Institute study found 44% of B2B marketers named an inability to tie performance to business goals as a measurement challenge.
A simple alignment table closes that gap:
Then split priorities by horizon. Short-term priorities fix what the audit found broken, such as tracking or an untested channel. Long-term priorities build what takes quarters to pay back, such as positioning and content.
Budget follows the priorities, quarter by quarter. Our view is that a limited budget should be concentrated. A business spending £3,000 a month should not necessarily divide it across six different channels. Fund the channels with evidence first, then test one new one at a time.
Benchmarking performance once the gaps are fixed
Benchmarks only help if they measure something the business cares about. Dave Sheppard, Founder and Digital Strategist at Big Bear Creative, puts it plainly: more clicks, more traffic and improved rankings don't matter much on their own. A metric is worth reporting if it contributes to the commercial outcome.
For marketing mix optimisation, track these after a new strategy rollout:
- Cost per qualified enquiry, by channel
- Pipeline value sourced or influenced, by channel
- Enquiry-to-client conversion rate
- Payback period on acquisition spend
If AI search is part of your mix, add AI referral traffic to the set. Measurement is one of the stages in our Search & AI Visibility work.
For a peer view of spend, the same Gartner survey puts average marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up from 7.7% in 2025. Treat it as context rather than a target. Its sample skews towards very large companies, so a growing business is better off benchmarking against its own last four quarters first.
Frequently asked questions
How often should you sense-check a marketing strategy?
Once a year at minimum, ideally before annual budget planning. Also run one when something material changes: a new offer, a new market, a missed quarter or a change of marketing lead. Those moments are when an old plan is most likely to be out of date.
Can you run a marketing strategy sense-check yourself?
Yes, the checklist above works as a self-serve first pass. The limit is objectivity. An outside reviewer has no stake in past decisions, which matters most on positioning and channel mix.
Do you need a fractional CMO for a sense-check?
No. A fractional CMO is a part-time senior marketing leader, and suits businesses that need that leadership every month. A sense-check is a one-off review, so an agency strategy team or an experienced adviser can run it without an ongoing hire.
What should you prepare before a sense-check?
Bring the current marketing plan, the business goals for the year, the last two quarters of spend by channel and any recent client feedback. Add whatever reporting you have, even if it is incomplete. Gaps in the data are findings in their own right.
When to bring in a second pair of eyes
If you worked through the checklist and recognised two or more of the gaps, it's worth getting an outside view before the next budget round.
We run this as a paid engagement. If you want to talk it through, let's have a conversation about a marketing strategy sense-check with our strategy team.
