Last month, I met a European tech investor at the Liquidity Summit.
He's one of the most recognised names in his country’s tech ecosystem and came to us wanting to build a media company around his brand.
Before we scope a single piece of work, we always run a brand audit first.
It's the only way to find where the real leaks are before you start pouring more into it.
In this edition, I'm sharing the 9-step audit system we ran on his brand. If we ever worked together, this is exactly what we'd do for you.
By the end of this, you’ll walk away with:
our two-phase process for mapping and diagnosing your funnel
the exact questions we ask at each step
prompt we use to check how the internet perceives your brand
Phase 1: The Investigation (Mapping the "As-Is")
1/ we map your top of funnel
We start by documenting:
Which platforms you're on
How big each following is
Where each one sends your audience when they click
Our goal is to find out whether all your traffic flows toward a single owned asset (like a newsletter or a lead magnet) or whether it's scattered across platforms you don't control (like LinkedIn, Instagram, or a Linktree with five different destinations).
2/ we audit your landing pages
We look at every page your traffic lands on as a cold lead seeing it for the first time.
The one thing we're checking: if someone looks at this page for five seconds, do they know exactly what they're signing up for?
Is the offer tangible, or is it vague?
Does it tell you what you're getting?
How does it look on mobile?
We find a problem here on almost every audit we run.
3/ we go through your funnel as a cold lead
We sign up for your newsletter, download your lead magnet, and even book a call.
Then we watch what happens:
Did a welcome email arrive?
Did you actually send the asset you promised?
If someone started booking a call and didn't finish, did they ever hear from you again?
This is where the leaks usually show up.
4/ we run an LLM perception check
This is a step we've added recently, and it's become one of the most revealing parts of the whole audit.
We feed your name into Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity and ask:
"What is [name] publicly known for? How are they perceived in their industry? What do people associate them with?"
We look for:
What words and associations come up across all LLMs
What you want to be known for that isn't showing up
Anything negative or polarising the internet has already decided about you
The gap between what the LLMs say and what you want to be known for is your content brief.
Phase 2: The Audit (Finding the Leaks)
5/ we check your content delivery
Your leads are the warmest the moment they sign up. That's the best window to introduce yourself, talk about your offer, and make the connection.
So the first thing we do is sign up and start a stopwatch.
Did the welcome email arrive instantly? Five minutes later? Not at all?
6/ we check your segmentation logic
If you have a quiz/survey/any kind of opt-in form, we check whether your emails actually reflect what people told you.
Does the first email feel personalised to that specific person?
Does it speak to their problem, or is it a generic welcome blast?
Or does it treat a $10M SaaS founder and a first-time entrepreneur exactly the same way?
Every subscriber who gets the wrong email is a relationship that starts on the wrong foot.
7/ we audit the content itself
We pull up your last 10 emails and run them through our internal Newsletter Checklist.
It’s the same one we use before sending any client emails out.
8/ we watch for ghosting
Every time you go quiet after a touchpoint, you burn trust you already earned.
You send a PDF and then nothing for three weeks. That's ghosting.
Someone fills in your survey to book a call, doesn't book, and never hears from you again. That's ghosting.
A subscriber opens your emails for a month and then gets a hard sell with no warmup. Also ghosting.
You worked hard to get that person on your list.
Ghosting them is the fastest way to make sure they never buy from you.
9/ we identify the unpublished asset
This is the step that surprises people most.
We ask what you know, or have access to, that nobody else does.
Client results that have never been turned into a case study
Deal data or proprietary research sitting unused
Patterns you've noticed across years of work that nobody else has documented
For the investor we met at the Liquidity Summit, it was a decade of fund data on a European venture pattern nobody was writing about. So we're building a Deep Dive around it, a flagship research report that turns his proprietary portfolio data.
Anyway -
If you want us to run this audit on your brand, hit reply with "audit" and we'll be in touch.
/Nils