Auditing your brand means reading everything customer-facing you've published (website, emails, one-pagers, ads) and checking it against two questions: are you naming the customer's real problem before your solution, and are you telling a story where the customer is the hero? The two free templates below walk you through both, and this guide explains how to use them.
Start here: run your messaging through the Marketing Audit and CMO Readiness Checklist.
Why Audit Your Brand Messaging?
When was the last time you read all your marketing in one sitting? For most companies, it's been a while. Messaging drifts as a company grows: new pages, new campaigns, and new offers, each written at a different time by a different person. The result is a brand that says slightly different things in slightly different places, and customers who can't quite tell what you do. We see this often in the companies we work with: the product is fine, but the words around it are doing half the job they could. An audit catches that drift before it costs you sales.
When messaging drift keeps costing deals, the deeper fix is often senior sales leadership. See our guide to fractional sales leadership.
The Brain Audit: the 7 "Bags" Every Customer Needs
The first template is built on Sean D'Souza's book The Brain Audit. His analogy: your customer is standing at the baggage carousel waiting for seven bags, and they won't leave (won't buy) until all seven arrive. Miss even one and the sale stalls. The seven bags, in order:
- The problem: name the customer's real problem first, before you mention your solution.
- The solution: presented as the mirror image of that problem.
- The target profile: one real, named person, not a vague "audience."
- Objections: surface and defuse them before the customer raises them.
- Testimonials: the proof that answers each objection (D'Souza's "reverse testimonials" start with the doubt, then resolve it).
- Risk reversal: move the risk off the customer and onto you.
- Your uniqueness: the one factor that makes you the obvious choice.
Storybrand: Make the Customer the Hero
The second template uses Donald Miller's StoryBrand framework. The core move: your customer is the hero and your company is the guide, never the other way around. The seven elements:
- A character who wants something.
- A conflict they have to overcome.
- A guide who understands their problem (that's you, through empathy and authority).
- A plan with a few clear steps.
- A call to action.
- The stakes of failure: what they lose by not acting.
- A vision of success: what life looks like once they do.
Run your homepage through it. If most of your copy doesn't map to one of these seven, that extra copy is noise that confuses the customer.
How Do You Run the Audit?
- Gather everything customer-facing in one place: site pages, emails, one-pagers, ads, social.
- Fill in the Brain Audit checklist for your core offer, then check that each piece presents the 7 bags in order, problem before solution.
- Fill in the StoryBrand worksheet, then circle every line in your existing copy that maps to one of the 7 elements. Whatever isn't circled is a candidate to cut.
- Rewrite so the problem leads, the customer is the hero, and one clear call to action closes each page.
Get the Templates
Make a copy of the Brain Audit Checklist and the StoryBrand 7-element worksheet, both with Malloy's filled-in examples inside, and run your messaging through them this week.
The Brain Audit checklist is based on Sean D'Souza's "The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't)." The 7-element worksheet is based on Donald Miller's StoryBrand messaging framework.
Related Malloy resources