When I begin a new advisory engagement with a CRE developer, operator, or mixed-use destination brand, the first thing I do before any strategy work, before any recommendations, before any agency conversations is audit what exists. Not the marketing spend. Not the agency roster. The fundamentals.

I've done this enough times to know that the answer to "why is our marketing underperforming?" is almost always visible in the first few conversations and the first few documents I review. The gaps are consistent across organizations. And the questions that reveal them are the same ones I ask every time.

I'm sharing them here because I believe most CRE organizations can run this diagnostic themselves. The questions are not complicated. The answers are often uncomfortable. But knowing the truth about where your marketing is is the prerequisite for knowing where to take it.

"The question I ask every new client is the same: if you stopped all your marketing spend tomorrow, what would keep working? The answer tells me everything about whether the marketing is building something or just renting attention."

Leslie Himley, Founder, LH Strategic Advisory

The Six-Area CMO Audit

These are the six areas I examine in sequence. In each area, there are two or three questions that cut to the core of what is working and what isn't. Run through each honestly. The patterns will be apparent.

1 Brand Strategy Foundation
Do you have a documented brand strategy: positioning statement, audience definition, competitive differentiation, and messaging framework, that every person on your team would describe the same way? If not, every other marketing decision is being made without a foundation.
If I asked your leasing director, your marketing manager, and your CEO to each describe your development's identity and audience in three sentences, would the answers match? Inconsistency here is the single most reliable indicator of a brand strategy gap.
When did you last audit your brand against the competitive landscape in your trade area? A positioning that was distinctive two years ago may be generic today.
2 Owned Audience
How large is your email list, and what is the open rate? An engaged email list is the most durable owned marketing asset available. If it is small or disengaged, your marketing is renting attention rather than building it.
If you needed to reach 5,000 people who are genuinely interested in your destination tomorrow with no paid media spend, could you? The answer to this question defines your owned audience capability.
What percentage of your marketing spend is building owned assets versus buying rented reach? The ratio tells you whether marketing is compounding or cycling.
3 Marketing and Business Connection
Can you draw a direct line from your marketing activities to your business outcomes: leasing velocity, foot traffic, tenant sales, sponsorship revenue? If marketing activity and business outcomes are measured in separate conversations, they are probably not connected strategically.
What would change in your marketing plan if leasing velocity dropped by 30%? If the answer is "nothing immediately," the marketing plan is not connected to the leasing plan.
Are your agencies and vendors accountable to business outcomes or to activity metrics? Impressions, posts, and open rates are not business outcomes. Leasing velocity and foot traffic are.
4 Channel Coherence
Does your brand feel like the same entity across your website, your social channels, your email communications, your leasing materials, and your physical signage? Fragmentation across channels is almost always a brand strategy gap expressed visually.
Which channel is generating the most qualified leasing leads or first-time visitors? Is it receiving proportional investment? Most organizations over-invest in channels that feel active and under-invest in channels that actually convert.
What does your website do for a visitor who is ready to take an action today: sign a lease, schedule a visit, join the email list? A website without clear calls to action is a brochure that no one picked up.
5 Agency and Vendor Alignment
Could your agencies articulate your brand positioning, target audience, and business objectives without prompting? An agency executing without strategic alignment is producing activity, not progress.
How many marketing vendors are you currently working with, and do they know about each other? Vendor fragmentation is one of the most reliable predictors of brand incoherence and budget inefficiency.
When did you last evaluate whether your agency and vendor roster is right for where your organization is today versus where it was when those relationships started? Most organizations outgrow vendor relationships before they recognize it.
6 Leadership and Accountability
Who in your organization owns the brand? Not the marketing execution, but the strategic brand decisions about positioning, tone, audience, and identity. If the answer is unclear or shared across multiple people with no single decision-maker, the brand will drift.
Who presents marketing performance to leadership, and what metrics do they report? The metrics that get reported to leadership are the metrics the team optimizes for. If those metrics are not business outcomes, the team is not optimizing for the right things.
Is there a senior marketing leader who attends the leasing, operations, and investor conversations, or does marketing happen in its own silo? Marketing that is not in the room where business decisions are made is marketing that reacts rather than informs.

What the Patterns Tell You

Most organizations running this audit honestly will find the same three or four gaps appearing across multiple areas. A brand strategy that was never documented showing up as inconsistency in the brand-foundation questions, in the channel coherence questions, and in the agency alignment questions. An owned audience deficit showing up in the owned audience questions and in the business connection questions. A leadership gap showing up in the accountability questions and in the channel coherence questions.

The gaps cluster. And they cluster around the same root causes: a brand strategy that lives in someone's head rather than a document, marketing that measures activity rather than outcomes, and a marketing function that operates separately from the business decisions it should be informing.

Most marketing problems are not execution problems. They are architecture problems. The teams are working hard in the wrong direction because no one built the system that points them the right way.

What to do with what you find

If you run through these questions and find that the gaps are concentrated in the brand strategy foundation and the business connection areas, that is a strategic leadership problem that requires strategic leadership to solve. More execution will not close it. If the gaps are concentrated in channel coherence and vendor alignment, those are execution problems that a capable marketing manager or agency review can address. Knowing which kind of problem you have determines what kind of help you need. And the most common mistake CRE organizations make is hiring execution capacity when what they actually need is strategic architecture.

If you run this audit and want to talk through what you find, LH Strategic Advisory would be glad to help interpret the results and identify the highest-leverage next steps. Reach out at leslie@lhstrategicadvisory.com.

Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most common finding in a CRE marketing audit?

The most consistent finding is that marketing activity and business outcomes are measured in separate conversations and are not connected strategically. Teams are producing content, running campaigns, and managing social channels without a clear line to leasing velocity, foot traffic, or tenant sales. This is almost always a leadership gap rather than an execution gap, and it requires strategic architecture to solve, not more activity.

How long does a CMO-level marketing audit take?

A preliminary diagnostic using the questions in this framework can be completed in one to two weeks with access to the right people and materials. A full audit, including competitive analysis, brand assessment, channel performance review, and vendor evaluation, typically takes three to four weeks. The audit is the foundation for any strategic recommendation, not a substitute for it.

What should happen after a marketing audit?

The audit should produce a clear diagnosis of where the gaps are and a prioritized set of recommendations for closing them. The highest-priority gaps, typically in brand strategy foundation and business connection, should be addressed before any investment in execution capacity or agency changes. Fixing execution before fixing strategy produces better execution of the wrong things.

Who should run a marketing audit: an internal team or an outside advisor?

Both approaches have merit. An internal team will have context that an outside advisor lacks. An outside advisor will see patterns that internal teams have normalized. The most effective audits combine both: internal teams gather the materials and data, and an outside advisor brings the objective lens and the pattern recognition from working across multiple organizations. The questions in this framework are designed to work in both contexts.