Conduct a Brand Audit Starting With These Key Steps
The word “audit” is not a word most people like to hear, especially when it comes to their finances and the IRS. However, in the business world, conducting regular “audits” of your brand is a positive, pro-growth move that will only help your brand moving forward. An ideal time to conduct them is at the end of the year when you can reflect on the past year’s results and create a better gameplan for the coming one.
A brand audit is a comprehensive review of a brand’s performance, market position, tactics, and more, in order to identify opportunities for improvement and increasing ROI. By assessing your brand’s current strengths and weaknesses, you can tweak or overhaul your branding and marketing strategies accordingly. While you can do a first-party brand audit, using your own resources, time, and expertise, bringing in outside marketing specialists, such as M:7 Agency, allows for a neutral party assessment that avoids the blind spots and biases your team may have that can limit your progress.
Covering both internal branding (i.e. mission, values, and culture) and external branding (i.e. digital and traditional advertising) as well as the overall customer experience, a brand audit involves looking at all verbal, visual, and strategy that make up your brand and their alignment with your business goals. So what exactly does it entail?
Here are some key steps to performing an effective brand audit:
Define Objectives
Before you search for data and insight, you should know just why you’re doing it and what you’re searching for. Before beginning your audit, you should define its purpose and clarify what you hope to achieve — whether it’s greater brand awareness and engagement or increased traffic and revenue. This not only saves time and money but also helps you narrow your focus and know what to measure. Your results may guide you to rebrand, eliminate or replace certain tactics, retune the customer experience, redefine your target audience, or take other action to eventually get the results you want. Define your objectives as well as a reasonable timeline for completing the audit (usually a few weeks or months).
Assess Brand Performance
With clear objectives in place to guide your audit, you can look back at the numbers and results of the past year(s). For better revenue, you’ll want to examine and work on ways to improve sales and growth metrics, getting to the bottom of what is contributing positively or negatively to your bottom. For greater engagement or awareness, you’ll want to measure brand recognition and traffic in areas such as search engine rankings, survey results, and social media likes, comments, and shares. This can also help you evaluate the intangible value of your brand, including loyalty and trust from customers.
Review Your Marketing Assets
A brand audit involves taking a look at your existing and potential messaging collateral, including:
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- Websites
- Social media accounts
- Emails
- Digital ads (banner, search, etc.)
- Broadcast (TV, radio, streaming, etc.)
- Print (brochures, mailers, etc.)
- Out-of-home (signage, billboards, etc.)
- Mobile (texts, phone, etc.)
- Product packaging
- Letterhead
- Business cards
- Promotional merch
- Presentations/proposals
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It’s also time to review your current branding elements and guidelines to check if they’re being used in your collateral and if they’re as impactful and persuasive as they can be. This includes:
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- Logos
- Color palette
- Typography/fonts
- Unique value proposition
- Brand personality
- Graphics
- Imagery
- Taglines/slogans
- Copy voice/tone
- Mission statement
- Core values
- Target audience
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From your collateral to your branding elements, ask yourself the right questions: Are they getting the response I want? Are they right for the target audience? Do they align with my company’s goals and values? Are they clear, relevant, and consistent across channels? Evaluate your brand’s visual and verbal elements to ensure their combination will have maximum impact for maximum results. At the same time, you’ll want to assess your customers’ experience at each touchpoint along their journey so that it’s as satisfying, quick, and easy as possible.
It’s also essential that your branding and strategies are modern and relevant, especially when it comes to your digital footprint. Does your webpage load quickly and is it mobile friendly? Are you utilizing the best social platforms? Are you taking advantage of the latest technologies such as AI?
Do SWOT Analysis
Originating in the 1960s academic world, SWOT analysis is a proven strategic-planning technique that focuses on Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Focusing not just on the negatives but also the positives, it’s one of the most important things to do in a brand audit.
Uncovering your brand’s weaknesses, like incorrect targeting, failures in the customer experience, or outdated tactics, and filling in these gaps will only strengthen your brand. Meanwhile, identifying threats, such as rising competition and troubling market trends, will allow you to get ahead of and mitigate them. Knowing your strengths will help you reveal new opportunities to expand your brand, including new markets, targets, partnerships, or trends to leverage.
Seek Stakeholder Feedback
Not everyone sees your brand from the same perspective, which makes it important to find out how different stakeholders view it, from employees and management to customers, suppliers, partners, and the community overall. Your goal is for all stakeholders to have a high opinion of your brand, and the best way to know if they do, and what you can do if they don’t, is to ask.
Conducting in-depth surveys of your stakeholders is a valuable tool to understand how your brand is perceived, both the positives and negatives. Use a variety of channels, such as email, phone surveys, customer reviews, and social media polls, to collect insight into how your brand makes your stakeholders feel, how they use your product or service, and how you can improve upon it and the overall customer, partner, supplier, or employee experience.
Examine Your Competitors’ Branding
Think of the sports world, where a team has to study their opponents in order to outperform them come game time. By knowing your competitors’ brands, you can emulate their strengths and attack their weaknesses through your own branding and marketing tactics. What are they doing right and wrong with their internal and external branding? How do stakeholders view them? What is their marketing footprint like? How effective are their marketing materials? Thorough competitor analysis helps you identify your key competitors and pinpoint opportunities for differentiation between your brand and theirs.
Align With Market Trends
To keep up with the competition, it’s also important to keep up to date on the marketplace, how consumers behave, and how, when, and where they like to interact with brands. Analyze market trends and consumer tendencies that could impact your brand to make sure your company and tactics are aligned with them.
Synthesize Your Findings
You’ll need to convey all you’ve discovered to your team so that you can work together toward a successful strategy. The best way to do this is to create a report that summarizes your findings in a clear, actionable way. Include relevant data, insight, visual examples, and recommendations to show the current state of your brand and what needs to be done to produce meaningful change.
Adjust Your Strategy
After going over the findings with your team, it’s time to work together to develop an action plan to capitalize on new insights. From revisiting visual elements to finessing your messaging, this is the time to make strategic recommendations for improvement and create a list of actions to implement key changes. Also, be sure to set clear measurable goals and solidify timelines for when these actions should take hold.
Helping you gain a deeper understanding of how your brand is performing, how it’s perceived, and where opportunities for growth and improvement exist, a brand audit is a critical process for evaluating the current state of your brand and identifying areas for improvement. By assessing both internal and external factors, you can gain valuable, actionable insights to direct you on a path toward better results in the future.
Need expert assistance conducting a comprehensive brand audit and helping you develop a more effective strategy for the coming years? Connect with us at M:7 Agency today to discuss your unique marketing and communications goals.