You will list every marketing activity you run and judge each against a named customer and a business goal.
Most owners can't say what their marketing costs each month. They know roughly what the boosted posts came to, but not the hours spent on captions, the flyers printed in March, the market stall that ate two Saturdays, or the listing fee on a platform they stopped checking. Until it is written down in one place, you can't decide what to keep.
This exercise is that list. It takes about twenty-five minutes, and you will come back to it at the end of the course. You need the marketing audit template below this lesson, your phone, and if you have them, your bank or card statements for the last two or three months.
Write down every activity that is meant to bring in customers or keep them. Go channel by channel so nothing hides: social media accounts, search and map listings, marketplace stores, your website, email or WhatsApp broadcasts, paid ads, flyers, events, partnerships, referral deals, and anything a friend or relative does for you.
Include the things you stopped. An Instagram account last updated in January still carries your name, and a Carousell listing you forgot about still answers for you. Mark them as paused, but list them.
For each item, note two costs per month: the hours, and the dollars. Be honest about the hours. Writing a caption takes five minutes. Taking the photo, editing it, writing the caption, replying to comments and checking how it did takes much longer. If a cost is yearly, such as a website domain, divide it by twelve.
Beside each activity, write the customer it is aimed at. Use the kind of description you started in lesson 1.1: a person you could picture, such as office workers near the stall who want lunch in under ten minutes, or parents in Sengkang with a child starting Primary 5.
If you find yourself writing "everyone" or "anyone who likes cakes", write that down too. It is a real answer, and it tells you something.
Next, write what each activity should produce. Pick the nearest real result: an enquiry, an order, a booking, a repeat purchase, a review, a referral. "Awareness" and "engagement" are allowed only if you can say what the awareness is meant to lead to later.
If you have numbers, add them. A promo code you can track, a count of messages that say they found you on Google Maps, orders through a particular link. If you don't have numbers, write your best guess and mark it as a guess. Module 6 covers which numbers to track and how.
Now read down the list. Any activity that has no named customer and no named result fails both questions. Mark it as a candidate to pause while you work through this course.
Pausing is not deleting. You are freeing the hours and money so that, by module 5, you can put them into the two channels you choose on purpose. Activities that fail only one question stay for now, with a note on what is missing.
Here is the audit for Mei Ling's home bakery in Punggol, the business from lesson 1.2. All the figures are examples.
Instagram posts: about 8 hours and S$0 a month. For "anyone who likes cakes". Meant to lead to "more followers". Fails both questions. Boosted posts: about 1 hour and S$120 a month. Aimed at women aged 25 to 45 in Singapore, the default she picked. Meant to bring orders, but she cannot tell whether any came from it. Fails both. WhatsApp replies and catalogue: about 10 hours and S$0 a month. For parents planning a child's party. Leads to orders. Passes. Google Maps listing: about 30 minutes, S$0. For people searching for a cake shop nearby. Leads to enquiries, and three customers said they found her there. Passes, though she has never added photos. Weekend market stall, stopped in May: 12 hours and S$80 in fees when it ran. For passers-by. Meant to lead to custom orders, and two came from it. Fails on customer, passes on result. Facebook page, last post a year ago: no cost now. Paused, listed anyway.
The activities still running came to about 20 hours and S$120 a month, roughly twice the hours she had guessed. Mei Ling marked the boosted posts and the Instagram routine to pause. She kept the WhatsApp work and the Maps listing, which brought in the customers she could actually trace. She added a note to update the Maps photos, which cost almost nothing.
Notice what the audit didn't tell her. It didn't say Instagram is a bad channel. It said she was using it with no customer and no result in mind. Once she has chosen her customer in module 3, Instagram might come back with a job to do.
Save the audit where you can find it again. In module 7 you will put your finished one-page plan beside it and compare the two: what you were doing, what you now plan to do, and where the hours went. The gap between them is the most honest measure of what this course changed for you.
Open the template now and work through it with your statements beside you, while the last few months are still fresh.
Fill in the marketing audit template with every current activity, its monthly cost in hours and dollars, its intended customer and its intended result.
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