Marketing Function Health Check
Free marketing diagnostic
Marketing can be busy, expensive and apparently productive while still being surprisingly difficult to connect to commercial performance. Campaigns may be running, agencies may be reporting and teams may be delivering plenty of activity, yet the leadership team can still struggle to answer a fairly basic question: what is marketing actually contributing to the business?
The free Hiddn Marketing Function Health Check is designed to help answer that question by looking beyond individual channels and assessing how well the wider marketing function is led, structured, measured and connected to the business. This is a five-minute self-assessment rather than the evidence-based Marketing Function Review I carry out with leadership teams.
You will answer 24 questions across eight areas of the marketing function, covering leadership, strategy, reporting, people, agencies, CRM and data, sales alignment and marketing operations. At the end, you will receive an immediate Marketing Function Health Score showing where the strongest foundations sit and where weaknesses may be restricting performance.
Is your marketing function actually working as well as it should?
Most established businesses do not have a shortage of marketing activity. Campaigns are running, content is being produced, agencies are reporting, paid media is generating leads, and the CRM may contain thousands of contacts. People are attending meetings, reports are being circulated, and marketing can appear extremely busy.
The harder question is whether all of that activity is working together in a way that supports the wider business.
Leadership may not completely trust the numbers being reported. Sales and marketing may have different definitions of a good lead. Agencies may be optimising their own channels without anyone taking responsibility for the overall outcome. Customer data may be inconsistent or unreliable. The founder, CEO or senior leadership team may still be spending more time than they should resolving marketing decisions that ought to be owned elsewhere.
Those problems rarely show up neatly in a monthly campaign report. A paid media dashboard can show an improving cost per lead while saying nothing about whether sales can convert those leads. An SEO report can show increased visibility without explaining whether the traffic is commercially useful. A CRM can contain thousands of records while still being incapable of producing reliable reporting.
The Marketing Function Health Check is designed to look beyond the activity itself and assess the structure that sits around it.
What the Marketing Function Health Check assesses
A marketing function is more than the campaigns it produces. Its performance is influenced by leadership, decision making, people, suppliers, systems, data and the way marketing connects with the rest of the organisation. The assessment therefore looks across eight areas rather than concentrating on individual marketing channels.
Marketing leadership
The assessment looks at whether there is clear senior ownership of marketing performance, priorities and decision making. It considers whether the function has enough authority to operate effectively and whether founders or senior leaders are still being pulled into decisions that should sit within marketing.
Strategy and priorities
Marketing activity should ultimately support the priorities of the business. The Health Check assesses whether there is a clear marketing plan, whether teams and suppliers are working towards the same objectives and whether the business is prepared to stop activity that no longer supports those priorities.
Reporting and measurement
Marketing reporting is only useful if leadership can trust it and use it to make decisions. The assessment considers whether reporting connects activity to revenue, pipeline, conversion and other meaningful commercial outcomes rather than relying heavily on traffic, impressions, engagement and other measures that provide limited context on their own.
People and capability
Strong marketing performance depends on having the right capability in the right places. The assessment looks at whether roles, responsibilities and decision making authority are clear, whether the existing team has the skills required by the business and whether the structure remains appropriate as the organisation grows or changes.
Agency management
Many businesses use several agencies and specialist suppliers, particularly across paid media, SEO, website development, content and digital delivery. The Health Check looks at whether those suppliers are working towards shared business priorities and whether somebody inside the organisation is responsible for joining their work together and holding them accountable for their contribution.
CRM and customer data
CRM and customer data sit underneath an increasing proportion of modern marketing. The assessment considers whether that information is sufficiently accurate and complete to support segmentation, automation, reporting and sales follow up, as well as whether lifecycle stages, integrations and ownership are properly defined.
Sales and marketing alignment
Marketing can generate substantial activity without producing meaningful commercial value if sales and marketing are working towards different definitions of success. The Health Check therefore considers whether both teams agree on lead quality, handover, follow up, feedback and what constitutes a valuable commercial opportunity.
Marketing operations and governance
The final area looks at the infrastructure that allows marketing to operate consistently. This includes processes, approvals, systems, account ownership, access, responsibilities and other areas where excessive dependence on individual employees or suppliers can create operational and commercial risk.
Assess your marketing function
The Health Check contains 24 questions and should take around five minutes to complete. Answer each question according to how the business genuinely operates today rather than how processes are intended to work or how you would like the function to operate.
There are no deliberately right answers and the assessment is not intended to reward businesses simply for having more people, more systems or more marketing activity. The purpose is to identify patterns across the function and highlight areas where weaknesses in leadership, structure, data, reporting or ownership may be limiting performance.
Your headline Marketing Function Health Score is shown immediately when you finish the assessment, before you provide any contact details. If you choose to unlock the full diagnostic, you will also receive scores across all eight areas, your strongest and weakest parts of the function, three priorities based on your answers and an indication of the next step I would consider.
Take the Marketing Function Health Check
The assessment looks at the marketing function as a connected system rather than a collection of individual channels. Across 24 questions, it considers whether the leadership, strategy, people, agencies, CRM, customer data, reporting and operating structure around marketing are creating the conditions required for the function to make a measurable contribution.
The Health Check takes around five minutes to complete. Your headline score is shown immediately, with no requirement to provide your details first.
Hiddn Marketing diagnostic
How healthy is your marketing function?
Twenty four questions will assess how well your marketing function is led, structured, measured and connected to the wider business. The aim is not to judge how busy marketing is. It is to identify whether the function is set up to make a measurable contribution.
Answer based on how the business operates today, rather than how you would like it to operate.
Leadership
Choose the answer that most accurately reflects the business today.
Your Marketing Function Health Score
Initial finding
Get the full diagnostic
See what may be holding marketing back
Enter your details below to unlock the full result. I will also send a copy of the diagnostic to the email address you provide.
Your eight diagnostic areas
Where the function is strongest and weakest
Where I would look first
Three priorities from your answers
My view of the result
Likely next step
A lower score does not mean you need more marketing
A weaker Marketing Function Health Score does not automatically mean the answer is another campaign, a larger advertising budget, a new agency or another person joining the marketing team. In established businesses, the underlying issue is often structural rather than a shortage of activity.
There may already be significant marketing capability and investment inside the organisation. The problem can be that leadership, priorities, people, agencies, systems, data and reporting are not operating as one joined up function. Individual parts of marketing may even be performing reasonably well while the overall function remains difficult to control, measure or improve.
This is why increasing activity before addressing the underlying weaknesses can make the situation worse. More campaigns create more data. More agencies create more reporting. More technology creates additional integrations and processes. More people create further dependencies and management requirements. If the foundations are already fragmented, additional investment can simply increase cost and complexity.
The Health Check is therefore designed to identify where I would look first rather than recommend more marketing by default. Your full diagnostic shows how each part of the function scored, highlights the areas most likely to be restricting performance and provides an indication of the most appropriate next step.
Most marketing problems develop gradually
Marketing functions rarely become complicated because somebody deliberately designed them that way. They usually evolve over time as the business responds to individual needs and opportunities.
The business needs more leads, so paid advertising increases. Organic visibility is weak, so an SEO agency is appointed. The website needs improving, so another supplier becomes involved. Customer information is scattered across spreadsheets and inboxes, so a CRM is introduced. Email marketing requires more sophistication, so another platform is added. A new marketer joins, sales purchases its own prospecting software and reporting gradually spreads across several systems.
None of those decisions is necessarily wrong. In isolation, many of them may have been entirely sensible responses to a genuine business need.
The difficulty appears when each decision becomes another layer of the marketing operation without somebody periodically stepping back and asking how the whole function now fits together. Different systems begin storing different versions of the same information. Agencies optimise their own channels. Teams develop separate processes. Reporting becomes fragmented and ownership becomes increasingly difficult to establish.
The result can be a marketing operation that looks sophisticated from the outside but is increasingly difficult to lead, measure and improve. The business may be spending considerably more on marketing than it was several years ago while having less confidence in what that investment is actually producing.
That is why this assessment focuses on the marketing function rather than individual marketing channels. The question is not simply whether SEO, paid media, content or email are performing. It is whether the leadership, people, agencies, systems, data and decision making around those channels are allowing marketing to operate as one coherent part of the business.
Particularly useful when marketing feels harder to control
The Marketing Function Health Check is designed primarily for founders, CEOs, managing directors, boards and senior leaders within established businesses. It is particularly useful where marketing has grown in cost or complexity but leadership confidence has not grown with it.
You may recognise a situation where the business now uses several agencies or specialist suppliers, reporting contains plenty of numbers but few clear commercial conclusions, the CRM or customer data is difficult to trust, or sales and marketing continue to disagree about lead quality. The business may have grown significantly while the marketing structure has remained largely unchanged, or a senior marketer may have left and the leadership team is trying to decide what level of capability is actually required next.
It is also relevant where the founder or leadership team remains heavily involved in day to day marketing decisions despite having a team in place, or where acquisitions, restructuring or rapid growth have created a much more complicated marketing environment than the business had several years ago.
The common thread is not that marketing has stopped working completely. It is that the organisation knows something needs to improve but cannot yet see clearly whether the underlying issue sits with leadership, strategy, people, agencies, data, systems, reporting or the relationship between them.
Marketing performance is rarely just a marketing channel problem
I have spent more than 20 years leading marketing across businesses where performance, reputation, technology, data and commercial priorities all had to work together. That has included senior marketing leadership across financial services, investment, property, technology, ecommerce and hospitality, including complex and regulated environments.
One pattern appears repeatedly. When marketing underperforms, the most visible problem is not always the real one.
A lead generation problem may actually begin with CRM data, qualification or follow up. An agency problem may really be a leadership problem because nobody inside the business owns the overall outcome. Poor reporting may start with inconsistent sales processes rather than the dashboard itself. A recruitment problem may begin with a role that was never properly defined. A website project can quickly expose much bigger weaknesses in positioning, customer journeys, CRM integration or measurement.
That is why I rarely begin by asking which marketing channel needs fixing. I want to understand how the wider function operates and what is preventing the different parts from working together properly.
The Marketing Function Health Check is designed to help leadership teams identify those connections before committing more money to isolated fixes.
The recommendation depends on what your answers show
The assessment is not designed to conclude that every business needs a Fractional CMO, nor is every lower score evidence that a large transformation project is required. The recommendation is based on the pattern across the different areas of the marketing function.
Marketing Function Review
Where weaknesses appear across several parts of the marketing function, the sensible next step may be an independent Marketing Function Review. This provides a broader diagnosis across leadership, strategy, people, agencies, systems, CRM, data, reporting and performance before the business commits more money to individual solutions.
Fractional CMO support
Where capable people, agencies and marketing activity are already in place but the business lacks sufficiently senior marketing leadership, Fractional CMO support may be more appropriate. The focus is then on providing clearer direction, stronger ownership, better reporting and one senior point of responsibility across the function.
CRM and Marketing Data Audit
Where CRM, customer data, automation, lifecycle management or reporting emerges as the main constraint, a focused CRM and Marketing Data Audit may provide a more useful starting point than reviewing the entire marketing operation.
Strategic Marketing Consultation
Where the overall function appears reasonably healthy, but one particular decision or issue needs examining, a Strategic Marketing Consultation may be enough. This provides an independent senior view without creating a larger engagement where one is not required.
No immediate external intervention
If the marketing function appears well-structured and the remaining weaknesses are relatively minor, I will say so. There is little value in recommending outside support simply because somebody has completed a diagnostic.
You should not pay somebody to invent a problem you do not have.
Practical marketing judgement for complex businesses
I am Simon Larkin, founder of Hiddn Marketing. I am a Chartered Marketer and Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, with more than 20 years of experience across marketing leadership, digital transformation, CRM, customer data, brand, performance marketing and marketing operations.
I have worked in senior marketing positions across complex and highly regulated environments, leading teams, agencies, technology, customer journeys and commercial marketing activity across both UK and international markets.
Through Hiddn Marketing, I work with founders, CEOs and leadership teams when marketing is busy and expensive but its contribution is difficult to see, responsibility is unclear or the business needs a more experienced level of marketing leadership.
My work ranges from independent Marketing Function Reviews and focused strategic advisory work through to ongoing Fractional CMO leadership and defined marketing transformation projects.
The objective is not to create more marketing activity for the sake of it. It is to build a marketing function that supports better decisions, clearer responsibility and stronger commercial performance.
Talk through your Marketing Function Health Check
If your score highlights problems across leadership, reporting, CRM, agencies, people, sales alignment or marketing operations, I can help you understand what may be sitting behind them.
A discovery call is an opportunity to discuss what is happening inside the business, what you have already tried and whether there is a sensible reason for us to work together. There is no obligation to turn the conversation into a project, and if I do not think external support is necessary, I will say so.
Frequently asked questions
What is a marketing function health check?
A marketing function health check is a structured assessment of how effectively marketing is led, organised, measured and connected to the wider business. Unlike a channel audit, it looks across areas such as leadership, strategy, people, agencies, CRM, reporting, sales alignment and governance to identify whether the wider operating structure is supporting or restricting performance.
Is this the same as a marketing audit?
Not quite. A traditional marketing audit may focus heavily on campaigns, channels, competitors and current marketing activity. This Health Check looks more broadly at the operating structure around marketing and the conditions that allow that activity to perform.
If the result identifies concerns across several parts of the function, a detailed Marketing Function Review may be the appropriate next step.
How long does the Marketing Function Health Check take?
Most people should complete the 24 questions in around five minutes. The questions are designed to be answered quickly based on your current understanding of how the business operates rather than requiring detailed research or preparation.
Do I need to provide my details?
Your headline Marketing Function Health Score is shown before you provide any contact details.
If you want the full diagnostic, including all eight category scores, your priority areas and the recommended next step, you can provide your details to unlock the detailed result and receive a copy by email.
Is the result a definitive assessment of my marketing function?
No. The Health Check is an indicative diagnostic based on the answers provided. It is designed to identify patterns and highlight areas worth examining rather than provide a definitive judgement on marketing performance.
A detailed assessment would also require access to the underlying marketing strategy, budgets, people, agencies, systems, customer data, reporting and commercial evidence.
Who is Hiddn Marketing?
Hiddn Marketing is led by Simon Larkin, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing with more than 20 years of senior marketing experience.
I provide Fractional CMO leadership, Marketing Function Reviews, strategic marketing advice and strategically led marketing transformation support to established businesses across the UK.
Can you help if the Health Check identifies a problem?
Yes, where the issue falls within my experience, and there is a sensible fit. The appropriate starting point may be a discovery call, a focused Strategic Marketing Consultation, a Marketing Function Review, specialist CRM and data work or ongoing Fractional CMO support.
Sometimes the right answer will be to fix something internally, recruit differently or leave the marketing function alone. The purpose of the assessment is to help identify the most sensible next decision, not manufacture a larger piece of work.