Marketing Audit of Multi-Billion-Dollar Life Science Enterprise

A multi-billion-dollar global life science company partners with Marzipan to run a full-stack independent marketing audit across web content and search, marketing operations, sales operations, attribution and data analytics, advertising, conversion rate optimization, and utilization of automation. The partnership is the first phase of a two-year strategic deployment to improve performance across all digital channels, optimize digital marketing infrastructure to reduce operational bloat and costs, and prepare for further integration of AI enablement throughout each commercial function.

Industry: Life Science Instruments, Reagents, and Diagnostics

Services: Digital Marketing Audit, Web Performance Audit, Search and AI Visibility (SEO/GEO) Audit, Marketing Operations Audit, CRM Audit, Advertising Management (PPC) Audit, Implementation and Consulting, Data and Analytics, Compliance and Cookie Consent Review

Technologies: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Marketo, Magento, Salesforce (SFDC), Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Analytics 4

The opportunity

Our client is a multi-billion-dollar global life science company with a multi-brand digital footprint spanning a corporate website, a major ecommerce platform, and a number of product-line sister sites. The business operates across many product groups, with separate departments and teams running individual product priorities, making cross-functional collaboration both complex and critical to the success of any change management or improvement process.

From initial discussions, several areas for improvement were identified, all stemming from how the content strategy has been executed:

• Keyword and content overlap across multiple sites and pages is diluting the customer journey and reducing the optimal path to conversions.
• When multiple teams produce content targeting the same audiences alongside pages being bloated with non-critical information to serve every scenario, you confuse the visitor, and ultimately lose them, returning to search and AI to help them continue their research.
• Understanding how to reconfigure existing content, and then implement a process for future, long-term content etiquette, all while keeping inbound traffic and conversions at the center of everyone’s minds is where the investigation starts.

The full scope is much broader than above, but it shows how everything is interconnected; a full audit across search and inbound performance, website and conversion performance, marketing operations and CRM performance, and paid media performance, accompanied by an executive summary and action plan for implementing remedial and strategic changes will be the phase 1 deliverable, before moving into a more practical implementation support, strategy, and delivery team to help complete all approved work from the audit alongside the existing agency partners.

How the engagement came about

The leadership team considered expanding the scope of their existing agencies, as well as approaching several specialist auditors with narrower scopes, before choosing Marzipan.

Marzipan’s combination of technical expertise and experience in enterprise change management and digital strategy gave the client confidence that we can support their pursuit of critical, pragmatic action items to improve their digital performance, as well as support with implementation of changes, and managing change across multiple integrated teams, systems, and processes (web, sales ops, marketing ops, digital marketing, product marketing, content, legal, IT, CRM).

The leadership team has granted full platform-level access to the Marzipan audit team, allowing us to identify immediate gaps and problems to solve, as well as communicating their downstream impact on lead processes, pipeline, attribution, and revenue. It also prepares the team to transition into implementation projects with immediate access to the tools and teams where the work will be completed.

“Most of the underlying challenges within an enterprise marketing stack don’t surface in the dashboards. Cookie consent misconfigurations distort the analytics. Keyword cannibalization splits search authority across the product sites. Bidding strategies, daily budgets, and poorly optimized conversion tracking can absorb budget before it ever has a chance to be effective. When you work with a partner with the expertise to work directly within your CMS, marketing operations platform, advertising accounts, CRM, and analytics tools, you can find the patterns in hours instead of quarters, and you can provide actionable change management that must cascade throughout all systems to be successful.”

Thomas Thornton, Head of Advertising, Data & Analytics, Marzipan

The scope

Marzipan is assigning a team of three consultants to support the client over a three-month initial auditing phase. Marzipan is granted access to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) for content and web infrastructure, Adobe Marketo for marketing automation, Salesforce for the CRM system, and the full advertising account portfolio (Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft Ads, Meta Advertising).

Search and inbound traffic performance

The first audit workstream covers search and inbound. With a multi-brand digital footprint at this scale, the questions that matter are: where the brands are competing with each other in organic search, where content authority is being diluted by overlap, where the answer engines are surfacing the corporate site versus the product sites, and where inbound demand is arriving but failing to convert.

The initial audit identified extensive keyword cannibalization across all websites, with multiple pages on multiple properties competing for the same terms. Search engines, faced with that competition, struggle to identify which page should rank as the canonical answer, and overall search performance for the brand’s most important terms suffers as a result.

Website and conversion performance

The second workstream covers the websites themselves. The business operates a corporate site, an ecommerce platform, and a number of product-line sister sites, each with its own internal owner, its own roadmap, and its own conversion logic. The path from arrival to conversion is, across many user journeys, longer than it needs to be.

Marketing operations and customer relationship management performance

The third workstream covers the operations layer. Marketo and Salesforce, at enterprise scale, accumulate two kinds of waste over time: data leakage where customer information is lost, duplicated, or inconsistently captured across systems, and process leakage where leads fall out of automation flows or sit in queues that no one owns. The audit will explore all aspects of Marketo-SFDC integration and Marketo Smart Campaign and Program configuration, with a particular focus on form performance and triggered automation gaps.

Paid media performance and spend efficiency

The fourth workstream covers advertising. Enterprise advertising budgets can hide a lot of wasted spend, and small improvements can have a significant impact on cost per lead, and as a result, net leads, pipeline, and ROI generated from advertising channels. Marzipan will audit all advertising channels, campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, bidding strategies, and the pipeline and revenue linked to advertising spend, before making recommendations to improve the entire advertising infrastructure so the client can continue spending at current levels or higher, with greater confidence that spend isn’t wasted.

The deliverable and what happens next

The audit will be delivered as a written report and presentation, accompanied by an executive summary aimed at the leadership team with an itemized action plan and recommended timelines. The action plan will be delivered so the client can take it and complete all work independently, or approve tasks for Marzipan to complete as we transition from digital marketing auditors to implementation service providers.

Why the client chose Marzipan as the independent auditor

The client chose Marzipan based on our integrated, unlimited scope services model. That gave the leadership team technical depth across web, search, paid media, marketing automation, and CRM under one team, the operational discipline to deliver a remediation roadmap with sequencing, dependencies, and a credible path to execution, and the continuity to support implementation alongside the existing agencies once the recommendations were in.

The alternative, splitting the audit across multiple specialists and handing the implementation to a separate supplier after the report landed, would have meant repeated context-loading, multiple contracts, additional time and resources to coordinate across providers, and the loss of audit-to-implementation continuity that absorbs most of the value of an audit at this scale. Keeping the audit and the implementation under one integrated team carries the context directly into execution, with no hidden operational cost slowing down time-to-results. This was especially critical in an organization with many teams, stakeholders, and processes that would be slow to change without an agile partner working cross-functionally.

If you are preparing for an enterprise-scale marketing audit or want an independent read on your digital performance, we would welcome the conversation.