Marketing That Survives Due Diligence: What Investors Actually Look For
- Laura Derbyshire
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Most founders think marketing due diligence is about channels, spend, and performance dashboards.
It isn’t.
What investors are really testing is whether growth is repeatable, intelligible, and governable. They’re not looking for clever campaigns. They’re looking for evidence that growth can be trusted.
Because at the point of investment, marketing stops being a creative function and becomes a risk function.
This is where many scaleups get caught out.
Marketing due diligence for investors: what are they really asking?
During diligence, investors are rarely asking, “Is this marketing good?”
They’re asking:
Do we understand how this company grows?
Can growth be forecast, not just hoped for?
If we inject capital, will it amplify something sound or expose something fragile?
Marketing is simply the lens through which those questions get answered.
Founders who treat marketing as a set of tactics tend to struggle here. Investors aren’t impressed by activity. They’re assessing decision quality.
The Four Things Investors Look For in Marketing
Across venture, growth equity, and private capital, the same patterns keep appearing.
1> A Coherent Growth Narrative
Investors want a clear explanation of why customers buy, not just how they’re reached.
They look for alignment between:
the problem being solved
the commercial model
the customer journey
the go-to-market strategy
If the story changes depending on who’s in the room, confidence drops fast.
A strong narrative doesn’t oversell; it connects the dots
2> Evidence of Learning, Not Just Results
Great metrics don’t impress investors if there’s no explanation behind them.
What they care about is:
what’s been tested
what’s been learned
what’s been stopped
how decisions have evolved
A business that can explain why something worked (or didn’t) feels fundable. One that can’t feels lucky, and luck doesn’t scale.
3 > Growth That Isn’t Founder-Dependent
This is the quiet red flag many founders underestimate.
If marketing decisions live in one person’s head, investors see risk. If growth relies on instinct rather than process, scale becomes questionable.
They want to see:
clarity of ownership
decision frameworks
documented thinking
leadership maturity
Founder-led momentum is powerful early on. But at scale, investors want systems.
4> Metrics That Inform Decisions, Not Just Reports
Dashboards are everywhere; insight is not.
Investors trust metrics when they:
link directly to commercial outcomes
are used to make real decisions
are understood beyond the marketing team
CAC without a payback context means very little, and growth without quality means even less.
What matters is whether leadership knows which levers to pull and when.
Why “Good Marketing” Often Fails Due Diligence
The most common issue we see isn’t underperformance; it’s misalignment.
Marketing activity isn’t clearly connected to:
revenue logic
sales cycles
investor expectations
future growth scenarios
So when marketing due diligence for investors begins, founders scramble to translate output into meaning.
But by then, it’s often too late.
Marketing that survives due diligence is built with scrutiny in mind, not retrofitted under pressure.
What Investor-Ready Marketing Actually Looks Like
Investor-ready marketing is characterised by:
strategic clarity over volume
learning over activity
judgment over tools
confidence over hype
When boards and investors can interrogate marketing without it falling apart, trust follows. And trust is what unlocks capital.
Where OSER Works
At OSER, we sit at the intersection of investor logic and growth reality.
We help founders, leadership teams, and investors to clarify how growth really works, turn marketing into a board-level discipline and build confidence that stands up in diligence rooms
If you’re preparing for funding, board scrutiny, or portfolio acceleration, this is where the work starts.
