Why "Where Are We Now?" Should Be Your First Marketing Question, Not Your Last

Most advisers only look properly at their marketing when it's already too late to matter, a prospect's gone quiet, a website looks tired next to a competitor's, or someone mentions their firm doesn't come up on Google.

I did the same thing to myself. When I scored my own digital footprint using the audit framework I now use with IFA firms, I came out at 62 out of 100. Not a disaster. Not good either. And I built the thing.

That's the bit nobody tells you about marketing plans: they're not supposed to start with what you're going to do. They're supposed to start with an honest look at where you actually are, right now.

In strategic planning terms, this is the audit phase, and it really should come before strategy, before tactics, before anything gets written on a content calendar. You can't set a sensible direction if you don't know your starting point. It feels like I’m stating the obvious here, but almost nobody does it properly.  Why? Because it means looking very hard at the gap between what you think your firm looks like online and what it actually looks like to someone Googling you at 9pm on a Tuesday. *Spoiler alert, ignorance is a lovely place to live!

If you're anything like most of the advisers I speak to, marketing isn't the thing that's neglected because you don't care. It's neglected because nothing forces it the way a compliance deadline does. There's no regulator asking to see your website audit. So it waits. And it keeps waiting.

Here's what changes when you audit first: you stop guessing. You're not randomly posting on LinkedIn because you read somewhere that you should. You're not redesigning a website because it "feels old." You know, specifically, where the gaps are, compliance signals, trust signals, whether your Google Business Profile is even claimed properly, and you can put your limited time against two or three things that will actually move the needle.

I went from 62 to 81 by working through my own gaps in that order. Not everything at once. Just the highest-impact fixes first.

What this looks like for your firm:

Start with six areas: your compliance signals, your messaging, your content and engagement evidence, your website's technical health, your trust signals, and your social presence. Score yourself honestly against each one, or better, get someone outside your business to do it (hi, it’s me), because you're too close to see what's actually missing.

Then don't try to fix all six. Pick the two doing the most damage. For most firms I look at, that's usually trust signals (an outdated Google Business Profile, no recent reviews) and content evidence (a website that hasn't been touched since before Consumer Duty came in).

You don't need a marketing degree to do this. You need forty-five minutes and the willingness to look at your own digital presence the way a prospective client would, not the way you remember building it three years ago.

And if that time is hard to come by, then I can help with that.

Know where you're starting. Everything after that gets easier.