A 10-day strategic audit of your marketing, delivered as a written report and a 30-minute walkthrough.
This is the deep one. The free Growth Audit shows you what is structurally broken on your site. The Marketing Audit goes after the harder question: what should your business actually be doing differently. You pay, you submit access, ten days later you have a prioritized strategy and clarity on the next 90 days. No retainer attached, no obligation after delivery.
Who this is for
Founder-led businesses where marketing has stalled and the path forward is not obvious.
Founder-led businesses earning $500,000 to $10 million per year, where marketing has stalled and the path forward is not obvious.
You have tried freelancers. You have tried agencies. You have gotten execution without strategic depth and you can feel the difference. You are considering hiring a fractional CMO, signing an agency retainer, or pulling marketing fully in-house. Before any of those decisions, you want a clear-eyed read on what is actually broken, what is working, and where the next dollar should go.
You do not need another tactic. You need someone to look at the whole picture, including the parts a technical site audit cannot see, and write down what they find.
Free vs paid
How this differs from the free Growth Audit
The free Growth Audit is structural and technical. It scores your site across nine categories and hands you a prioritized list of fixable issues. It runs on the public surface of your site, without access to your analytics, and it answers the question what is wrong with my site.
The Marketing Audit is strategic. It pulls in your real performance data, your positioning, your messaging, your conversion paths, and your competitive context, then produces a 90-day action plan built around your business, not just your website. It answers the harder question: what should my business be doing differently.
Most clients run the free audit first and engage for the Marketing Audit when they are ready to address the strategic layer above the structural one. Some skip straight to the Marketing Audit because they already know the technical issues and want the strategy. Either path works.
What you get
Six named deliverables, written into a single strategic report.
Positioning analysis
A read on whether your positioning is clear, differentiated, and aimed at the right buyer. Most marketing that underperforms is carrying a positioning problem the founder has not named yet. We identify whether the message is the issue before we touch the channels.
Messaging audit
What your homepage, service pages, and key touchpoints actually say, and whether it sounds like you, filters the right buyers, and resolves the questions a real prospect arrives with. We compare the language you use against the language your market uses.
Conversion-path review
The path from visitor to lead. Where prospects land, how they move through the site, where they drop off, and what the friction looks like at each step. Forms, pricing pages, CTAs, and the analytics gaps hiding the real conversion picture from you.
Customer research synthesis
We pull signal from what your existing customers and your market are telling you. Reviews, sales conversations you can share, support themes, and search behavior. The goal is to ground the strategy in evidence about your buyers instead of assumptions.
Full keyword and search strategy
Keyword research with intent mapping, not a raw volume dump. Which terms your buyers actually search, which ones you can realistically win, and how they map to the stages of a buying decision. This is the search layer the free audit only touches at baseline.
90-day action plan
The most important deliverable. Every finding above gets ranked by impact and effort and sequenced into a plan: what to fix this month, what to build this quarter, what to ignore. Written so you can hand it to an in-house marketer, an agency, or a freelancer and they will know exactly what to do.
What’s reviewed
Depth, not coverage for its own sake.
The audit pulls in your Google Search Console data, your GA4 data, your homepage and service-page copy, your positioning and messaging across key touchpoints, your conversion paths and form behavior, your top competitors’ positioning and search presence, your existing customer signal, and your keyword landscape with intent mapping. We also review any agency or freelancer work you have commissioned in the last twelve months, so we can tell you whether you have been getting your money’s worth.
The point is depth, not coverage for its own sake. We are looking for the two or three places where strategic changes produce disproportionate returns, and the two or three places where you are spending money on things that do not matter.
Process
Three steps, ten days, no status calls.
You book.
You pay $2,500 through the booking page. You submit your URL, GSC and GA4 access, and a one-paragraph framing of what is stuck. Total time: about ten minutes.
We work for ten days.
No status calls. No “let us hop on a quick call to align.” We review, analyze, and write. If we have a clarifying question, we email it to you, and we ask all of them at once.
You receive the report and the walkthrough.
The report arrives as a Google Doc. We schedule the 30-minute walkthrough at a time that works for you. After the walkthrough, you have everything you need to act.
What happens after
Three paths after delivery. All of them are normal.
You receive the report and the walkthrough. From there, three things can happen.
You implement the plan internally with the report as your guide. Most of our findings are actionable by an in-house marketer, a competent freelancer, or a small agency. The plan is written so it can travel.
You engage Lantern Row on a follow-on. The natural next steps are Brand Positioning, Content Strategy, or Monthly Marketing Strategy. The audit usually clarifies which one fits, and we will say so directly in the report.
You do nothing. The audit is yours regardless. There is no pressure to continue, no follow-up sales call, and no obligation. Some buyers leave with the plan and execute it on their own timeline, and that is a perfectly legitimate outcome.
Why this works
Most marketing problems are decision problems, not effort problems.
You do not need more posts, more campaigns, or more channels. You need clarity on which of the things you are already doing actually matter, which ones to stop, and what the next 90 days should look like.
A $2,500 audit gives you that answer faster and cheaper than a $50,000 agency retainer that turns into a six-week discovery process before any work starts. It also gives us a clear read on whether deeper engagement is the right shape for your business. Pricing the audit means we do not waste either side’s time on bad-fit prospects, and you get something real whether or not we ever work together again.
The audit is also self-qualifying. Founders who pay $2,500 for a strategic diagnostic are demonstrating that they understand strategy as an investment. That is the buyer profile this practice is built for.
Common questions
FAQs
How is this different from the free Growth Audit?
The free Growth Audit is structural and technical. It scores your site and gives you a prioritized list of fixable issues, and it runs without access to your analytics. The Marketing Audit is strategic. It pulls in your real performance data, your positioning, your messaging, and your competitive context, then produces a 90-day action plan. The free one tells you what is wrong with your site. The paid one tells you what your business should do differently.
Do I need to run the free audit first?
No, but most clients do. The free Growth Audit is a low-risk way to see how we think and confirm the diagnostic depth is real before committing to the paid engagement. If you already know your structural issues and want the strategic layer, you can book the Marketing Audit directly.
What if I already had an audit somewhere else?
That depends on what kind of audit it was. Most “marketing audits” sold by agencies are sales documents. They identify enough problems to justify a retainer and stop short of telling you what to actually do. If yours fits that pattern, send it over and we will factor it in. If you have had a genuinely useful strategic audit recently, this engagement may not be additive, and we will tell you that before you pay.
Can my agency be involved in the audit?
Yes. If you have an agency or in-house marketer running execution, looping them in for the access submission and the walkthrough makes the deliverable more useful. We are not auditing your agency. We are auditing your marketing, which means we are often telling you whether your agency is working on the right things.
Do I have to commit to ongoing work after the audit?
No. The audit is complete in itself. You can leave with the plan, implement it internally, and never engage Lantern Row again. That is a normal outcome, and the report is written for it.
What if you do not find anything worth fixing?
This almost never happens. Every business at this stage has at least a few strategic moves worth making, and the audit is built to find them. But if your foundation is genuinely sound and we do not find meaningful improvements to recommend, you will have written confirmation of that, which is its own form of value when you are deciding whether to invest more in marketing or focus elsewhere.