Service vii
Marketing Team & Agency Audit
An outside read on what your structure, spend, tools and agency roster are actually returning — delivered as a written assessment with a prioritised action plan.
A marketing audit is an outside assessment of whether a hospital's marketing function is capable of delivering what is being asked of it. It examines team structure and capability, how the budget is spent, what the agency roster is returning, the tools in use, and whether the reporting reflects reality.
It is usually the right first engagement when leadership suspects the marketing spend is not working but cannot establish where the problem sits — in the strategy, the people, the agencies, or the measurement.
The problem this solves
Leadership can nearly always tell that marketing is not producing what it should. What is far harder is establishing why.
The information available does not settle it. The marketing team reports campaign metrics that look reasonable. The agency reports against the brief it was given. Finance can see the spend but not what it bought. Everyone is working from a different view, all of them partial, and none of them wrong exactly.
So the decision defaults to the visible option: change the agency. It happens roughly every eighteen months across the sector, it feels decisive, and it frequently changes nothing — because the constraint was never the agency.
Changing the agency is the most visible decision available. It is rarely the one the evidence supports.
What guessing costs
Acting without a clear diagnosis is expensive in ways that are hard to attribute afterwards:
- An agency is replaced, the relationship restarts, and eighteen months of accumulated context is lost
- A capable marketing head is blamed for a structural problem and leaves
- New tools are bought to solve what is actually a process or ownership problem
- Budget is cut from the one thing that was working, because it was the least well reported
- Headcount is added to a team that needed direction rather than more people
- Nothing changes at all, because no option is clearly right, and another year passes
An audit is comparatively cheap against any one of those. It is the only engagement here I would recommend to an organisation that is not yet sure it wants to work with me at all.
What the work covers
Team structure and capability
Whether the function is organised for what it is being asked to deliver, where the genuine capability gaps are, and where people are being asked to do work outside their remit.
Where the money goes
How the budget is actually distributed across channels, agencies, tools and people — and how that compares with the priorities leadership believes it is funding.
Agency performance
What each agency is delivering against what it is paid, how well it has been briefed, and whether the relationship is worth rebuilding or replacing.
Tools and systems
What is in use, what is paid for and unused, and whether the systems can produce the numbers leadership needs.
Reporting quality
Whether the reporting reflects reality and supports decisions, or produces activity metrics that are accurate and unhelpful.
What to do about it
A prioritised set of recommendations, ordered by impact and difficulty, distinguishing what to fix now from what needs a longer decision.
What you get
A written assessment, not a slide deck of observations:
- An assessment of team structure, capability and workload
- A spend analysis showing where the budget actually goes
- An agency-by-agency review against cost and contribution
- A view on tools, systems and reporting quality
- A prioritised action plan separating immediate fixes from structural decisions
- A clear statement of what is working, which is usually more than expected
Working together
You work with me directly. There are no juniors, no account managers and no hand-off once the engagement begins — which puts a real ceiling on how many of these I take on at a time.
An audit requires candour from people who may reasonably feel they are being assessed. I am explicit with teams that the work examines the structure they are working within rather than their individual performance — and that framing is honest, because the constraint is structural far more often than it is personal.
An audit typically runs four to six weeks, making it the shortest engagement on this site. Scope, duration and commercials are agreed in writing before anything starts, after a first conversation — there are no packages, because no two healthcare organisations are structured the same way.
Why me for this
I have been on the receiving end of this. I have run hospital marketing functions under review, built and led a sixty-plus person in-house team, and made the agency, tooling and structural decisions this work examines. That matters for accuracy — knowing which constraints are real and which are excuses is difficult from outside — and it matters for the tone, because a team that feels audited defensively will not tell you anything useful.
A 60+ person team
India's largest in-house hospital digital marketing team, built and led.
Six hospital groups
In-house marketing leadership across Manipal, Columbia Asia, Sakra, Yashoda, Apollo and Gleneagles.
CMO of the Year
Healthcare Management Awards, presented by HyBizTV.
Common questions
How long does a marketing audit take?
Typically four to six weeks, depending on the size of the function and the number of agencies and units involved. It is the shortest engagement offered here, and often the most useful starting point when the problem has not yet been diagnosed.
Is this a prelude to firing people?
No, and an audit conducted that way would produce poor information anyway, because nobody would speak candidly. The work assesses whether the structure, spend and relationships are right for what is being asked. In practice the finding is more often that capable people are working without direction than that the wrong people are in place.
Will you speak to our agencies?
Usually yes, with your agreement. An agency's side of the relationship is genuinely informative — how they were briefed, what they were measured on, what they raised and what happened to it. A one-sided review of an agency relationship tends to confirm what the client already believed.
What exactly do we receive?
A written assessment covering team structure and capability, spend distribution, agency performance, tools and reporting quality, followed by a prioritised action plan that separates immediate fixes from decisions needing more time. It includes what is working, not only what is not.
Do we have to work with you afterwards?
No. The audit is deliberately self-contained, and it is the one engagement here I would suggest to an organisation unsure about consulting at all. If the recommendation is that you need nothing further, that is a legitimate finding and I will say so.
Related services
Not sure where the problem sits?
That is the most common reason people start here. Four to six weeks, and you will know. Book a free 30-minute call.