A marketing skills audit: what your team can and cannot do

The gap that hurts is never the one on the training plan. It's the thing everybody assumes somebody else can do, which nobody has ever actually done, and which you find out about three weeks into a campaign that depends on it. A skills audit takes two hours, and it finds those gaps before they cost you a quarter.

Do it against the plan you have, not against a list of marketing skills in general. Half the things on a generic list will be irrelevant to you, and auditing against them manufactures gaps you don't need to fill.

Our interest, stated first. One honest outcome of this exercise is "buy this in", and we sell marketing work. The other outcomes are hire, train and stop doing it, and this piece treats all four as real.

Start with the work, not the skills

Write down the eight to twelve things your team actually has to do over the next two quarters. I mean jobs, not categories: "Rebuild the three service pages." "Run the Christmas email sequence." "Get the tracking to a state where we trust the enquiry numbers."

Then ask what each one needs. You'll find the same handful of skills repeating, which is the list to audit against, and a couple of one-offs, which are usually the things to buy rather than build.

Rate each skill three ways

For every skill on that list, fill in three columns, and have the person do their own first:

• Can we do it? Has someone in the team genuinely done this, start to finish, recently?
• Can we do it well enough that it's worth doing? That's a different question. Plenty of teams can technically run a paid search account and would get more from paying someone who does it all week.
• Can we do it without one person? If the answer is no, you don't have a skill. You have a dependency.

That third column is the one people skip, and it's the one that bites, usually when somebody leaves.

The four honest outcomes

Each gap gets one of four answers, decided out loud:

1. Train. This is right when the skill is needed often, the person is willing, and the floor is low. Give it a real deadline and a real piece of work to practise on, or it won't happen.
2. Hire. This is right when it's a full job, every week, for the foreseeable future, and the next decision is generalist or specialist.
3. Buy it in. This is right when the work is periodic, specialised, or risky if done badly. Then the choice is between an agency, a consultant, a freelancer or a fractional lead, and what marketing costs in the UK gives you the prices.
4. Stop doing it. This is the most under-used answer. If nobody can do it, nobody wants to learn it, and you can't afford to buy it, then it isn't happening anyway, and deleting it from the plan is more honest than leaving it there to fail quietly.

The three gaps most teams have

This isn't from a survey. It's what we see in the work:

• Measurement. Teams can make things and still not be able to say what happened. It's the gap that makes every other conversation harder, and the five GA4 reports you need are the cheapest place to start closing it.
• Writing. I don't mean copywriting as a craft, but the plainer skill of saying what a thing is in a sentence somebody can repeat. Explaining what you do in one sentence is that skill in its smallest form. Where the knowledge sits with people who won't write, getting content out of people who don't want to write is the way round it.
• Saying no. It's a capability, not a personality trait, and how to say no to another department treats it as one.

Write it down and look at it twice a year

Keep it to a page: the skill, who has it, how deep, and the decision. Read it again when you plan the next quarter and when somebody resigns, because those are the two moments it earns its keep.

The audit usually turns up a tool nobody is using, too, and choosing marketing tools without ending up with twelve subscriptions is the matching exercise. One rule matters above the rest: don't turn the audit into a performance review. The moment it affects someone's standing, the ratings become optimistic and the document becomes useless. It's about what the team can do, not about who is good.

If you'd like somebody from outside to run it, which makes the honest answers easier to give, that's a day of our fractional and part-time marketing leadership.