It's not easy to step back, look at your brand and ask, "Where do I start?"
But here are some reasons why you should consider doing a brand audit.
What is a brand audit?
A brand audit is basically a process to review the effectiveness of your brand. It helps you see what your brand is doing well and what needs refinement. Properly implemented, this process can lead us to discover important optimization opportunities.
While hiring a professional will ensure a detailed and objective analysis, a quick brand audit can be helpful for identifying areas that need improvement. To get started, you'll want to ask yourself the following questions:
What does my brand mean? How would I describe it in one sentence?
What are my values as a company and how do those translate into customer experience?
Who do we serve (customers, employees, suppliers)? Why are they important to us?
Where do I want my business to be in five years?
For this type of evaluation process to be effective at improving businesses' results over time, it must be ongoing; there should never be just one point where everything gets checked off once and done forevermore.
How to run a quick, in-house, brand audit
Here's a list of steps to follow:
Step 1: Examine your audience.
Step 2: Review your brand purpose and general statements
Step 3: Search for your brand online.
Step 4: Evaluate your existing content.
Step 5: Compare it all.
Step 1: Evaluate your audience.
Identify your target audience. What’s the demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral makeup of your ideal customer?
Define how you want to talk to them. Are there any common threads that tie all of this information together? Do some research on other brands in your space and see how they do it.
Now measure the gap between how you are doing it and the direction you want to go in.
Step 2: Review your brand purpose and general statements
Look at your mission statement, vision, and values.
Examine your brand's visuals, such as logo, typography, colors, fonts, and other elements.
Review your products or services portfolio.
Look at customer service tickets or issues that may have occurred in the past year.
Consider pricing and marketing strategies and how they align with the number of customers acquired over time
Step 3: Search for your brand online.
Search for your brand name and URL on Google, as well as other search engines. To find other sites that share content about your business, search for mentions on social media platforms. Also, look for reviews of your products and services on review sites such as Yelp, Google Reviews or TrustPilot.
Step 4: Examine your existing content.
You’ve your brand analyzed and you know what your audience is looking for. Now it’s time to examine all the content you currently have on your website, social media channels, and other online platforms. Is there anything missing? Are there gaps in your content that could be filled by creating something new? Take a look at what you already have, then think about ways to improve it or expand upon it. This could mean adding more information in one area or creating entirely new areas of content altogether.
Step 5: Compare it all.
Now that you’ve all the data gathered, it’s time to take a look at the information and data found during the process and check if they are in alignment with your brand strategy (or business plan). Of course, in most cases, you will find some disparities, but that is why you decided to run this process, to have actionable insights that enable you to correct the course of your brand.
Bonus
Now that you've done your brand audit, it's time to put it into action. We have created a Brand Audit Checklist to help you keep track of all your findings so that you can refer back when making decisions about how to improve your business. You can download it by clicking the button below.
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