Marketing due diligence before you close
Four marketing assets decide whether an acquired company keeps its customer flow after close: the domain, the Google Business Profile, the advertising accounts, and the customer list. Each one tends to sit with a person rather than with the company, which is why they rarely appear in a data room.
What to ask for during diligence
Request administrative access to each asset in writing, along with the name of whoever holds it today. The answer to the second half is usually more informative than the first.
The domain is the straightforward one. Registrar login, the account email, and the transfer authorisation code cover it.
The Google Business Profile deserves attention early, because profiles carry a single primary owner and that owner is frequently a founder's personal Google account. Google's recovery path assumes the current owner replies. A request notifies them and gives them three days to respond, and the option to claim a profile without their cooperation is not always offered.
Advertising accounts turn on one distinction. An account the company owns and an agency merely manages unlinks cleanly and keeps its conversion history and bidding data. An account the agency created under its own manager account belongs to the agency. Where ownership sits correctly, Google publishes a formal transfer process between manager accounts.
Three things worth a closer look
Channel concentration. Ask what share of new business came from a single channel over the past twenty-four months. A company at seventy percent from one source carries a different risk profile than one spread across four, and the figure is usually straightforward to pull from the CRM.
How the rankings were built. A backlink export shows whether referring domains look editorial and accumulated gradually, or arrived in concentrated bursts. Positions built on rented links hold for as long as the payments continue, so the answer changes what the traffic is worth in the model.
Relationships held by the seller. Trade association memberships, personal referrals, and long-standing customer contacts often belong to the founder rather than to the business. Where the model treats that revenue as recurring, confirm which relationships convey and which leave with the person.
The first week after close
Add-on acquisitions accounted for 72.9% of all US buyouts in 2025, according to PitchBook data published by Cherry Bekaert, so this is a sequence worth running identically every time.
- Take over the registrar and DNS logins.
- Add a company-owned Google account as primary owner of the Business Profile.
- Confirm advertising account ownership, then export the full history before changing anything.
- Export the customer list, the email platform data, and the review history.
- Point analytics and call tracking at accounts the company controls.
An hour spent here in week one holds the customer flow steady while everything else changes.
Where we fit. Ironcliff runs marketing for companies in their first year under new ownership. We advise the sponsor and do the work inside the business, at a flat fee.
If you want a brand workshop or a social media presence, we are the wrong call. If you have just closed on a company whose marketing is a founder's phone number, we are the right one.