How To Conduct A Brand Audit For Your Business
Research from Emerald Insight shows that a brand has a significant impact on a company's overall performance. What is your brand position in the market? Does your company stand out from the competition? Are you attracting your target customers? These questions are pointers to whether your brand is making progress and supporting your business objectives. In this case, it is best to do a brand audit and determine the strength of your brand. Here is everything you need to know about a brand audit.
Brand auditing should cover the following elements
Internal branding- This includes your company culture, mission, and values.
External branding- Includes print, website, social media, email, business logo, and content marketing.
Customer experience- It involves customer service, sales, and marketing processes.
What is a Brand Audit?
A brand audit is a process where an organization analyzes the brand's performance in the market. An organization identifies its strengths and weaknesses and finds creative ways to make the brand better defined and more impactful.
Why Should You Conduct a Brand Audit?
A brand audit is a crucial consideration that helps you know how your customers perceive your business. Here are the benefits.
Measure Brand Performance
Auditing your brand gives you an idea of your overall business operations. An extensive brand analysis brings out the ideal position of your business culture, voice, and infrastructure.
Determine Strengths and Weaknesses
A brand audit helps you analyze areas where your business is doing well and determine areas the company needs improvement or a new approach.
Understand Customer Pain Points
Customers often open up to their experiences with your brand during a brand audit. It gives you first-hand information and opens your mind to provide better services.
Learn From Your Competitors
Through a brand audit, you will know what and why your competitors are doing better than you. You could be losing customers because of small mistakes that you could easily rectify.
Timely Decision Making
After conducting a brand audit, you will have concrete feedback that can help you determine the future of your business. You will devise creative solutions and strategies to boost your brand based on actionable information.
Step-By-Step Guide to Conducting a Brand Audit
Now that you know what a brand audit is and its benefits, it is time to audit your brand. But it is imperative to learn various tips to make your auditing a success. Here is a guide to brand auditing.
Step 1: Understand the Purpose of Your Brand Audit
First, you need to have an open mind towards auditing your brand. Know what you want to measure and your purpose for doing it. You want to determine things like your website and social media performance. Or maybe it's the overall brand performance. Here are other pointing elements to audit.
Performance of your main competitors.
Product strengths and weaknesses.
Product niche and target audience.
Website and social media use and goals.
Current and future industry trends.
Driving factors such as pricing, customer support, and turnaround time.
Narrow down the above elements and proceed with what directly affects your business. This is to help you avoid focusing on things that will not add value at the end of your audit.
Step 2: Write Down Your Brand Audit Goals
Define the main objective of your brand audit depending on what you want to achieve, then separate long-term and short-term goals to have a smooth process.
Determining your goals enables you to stay focused on the main reason for conducting a brand audit. It is also imperative to write down the questions that you're going to use. These questions can be used to interview or survey your existing customers and your target audience.
Step 3: Review Your Website and Social Media Pages
Analytics are vital elements that help you determine the strength of your brand. This is where your web traffic goes, and you want to be sure that your site is attracting the right audience.
If you continue getting web visitors who aren't interested in your services, your brand will continue to lose value.
When analyzing your website and social media pages, check your bounce rate, reviews, conversation rate, traffic quality, and quantity. Conduct a SWOT analysis using the acquired data to help you determine your weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities.
Step 4: Talk to Your Customers
Now that you have analytics from your website, it is time to approach your customers and learn how they perceive your brand. You can do this online or physically, depending on your preferences.
The most effective way is to start by conducting an online survey with a questionnaire. Send out the questionnaires and request feedback. Here are several questions to send to your customers.
Does this brand solve your needs?
Would you recommend it to your family, friends, and colleagues?
How can you describe this brand?
On what scale can you rate our customer service?
Do you enjoy using this brand?
What can we do to make your experience with our brand better?
How will you rate our website's performance?
What do you like about our brand?
Why did you choose us over our competitors?
You can send out one question to several customers and see if the responses vary. It is also possible to send out several questions to each customer and compare the responses. This will guide you in determining the overall image and impact of your brand on your customers.
Step 5: Analyze Your External Marketing Materials
Some branding materials add value to your brand, while others many no longer be effective as your business priorities evolve.
Conducting an assessment of your marketing materials will help you determine whether to continue using them or not.
Check the impact of your brochures, business logo, business cards, and product packing and ask customers about your quality of brand.
Some customers may not like the brand's color, tone, and design. In this case, ask them what they'd want to see and what that means to them.
Step 6: Compile and Review Your Results
Since you have vital information at your figure tips, it is now time to document the feedback, review the results, and create an action plan.
Break down the data in an easily digestible format and find solutions that align with your company's mission and vision.
You can have a brainstorming session with your team and develop concrete solutions that will boost your brand.
Step 7: Implement the Ideas and Monitor Your Progress
Since you have the solutions, create a timeline and begin the implementation.
Monitor the progress by asking for feedback from your customers and team. For instance, if you do not have a user-friendly website, change it and ask your customers to rate the improvement.
Maybe your social media profiles do not speak about your brand. Change the profiles and ask for feedback too. Remember, it is best to continue auditing your brand after a few years because brands become stale after a while.