A brand audit is the process of thoroughly examining every part of your brand to assess where it stands on the market and identify areas for improvement. This includes evaluating its history, products, vision, mission, and more. Essentially, a brand audit helps build a long-term strategy to ensure the survival and success of your brand.
In this article, we’ll guide you through the intricacies of brand auditing and provide actionable steps on how to conduct a thorough brand audit.
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What Is a Brand Audit?
A brand audit is a thorough assessment of your brand's success in achieving set goals against the competition. It is a study that shows how your brand is positioned in the market, what you're doing well, and which areas need improvement.
By conducting brand audits, branding specialists can examine different aspects of your business strategies, such as:
- Brand messaging and values
- Brand archetypes or the way brand values and messages are presented to your customers
- The products and services you're offering
- Branding elements
- Website and social media profiles
- Content marketing
- Advertising
- Search engine optimization
- Customer service
3 Parts of Brand Auditing
A brand audit will help you adjust your business strategies to match your customers' expectations. However, a good brand audit must cover three sections:
- External branding: This involves how your brand is presented to the public. It encompasses elements such as your logo, slogan, overall brand message, websites, social media presence, and more. Assessing external branding can also gauge how effective your marketing is using these elements.
- Internal branding: This refers to how the branding is established within the company. This includes educating your team on the company values and mission and fostering a cohesive culture. Usually, most companies do this by conducting annual anonymous surveys, team-building exercises, and educational conferences.
- Customer experience (CX): This part of the audit checks how you communicate with customers. It involves evaluating customer service across all channels (social media, email, live chat, etc.) and analyzing content engagement to identify areas for improvement in both your content and interactions with clients.
When Should You Audit Your Brand?
You may need a brand audit if you feel your brand is stuck "in the middle." In other words, if:
- You're having average results in meeting your objectives
- Aspects you're focusing on are not valued by your customers
- You're struggling to innovate or keep up with current trends
...you might need a brand audit.
This kind of assessment provides insight into where you should redirect the focus of your business and equip you with the tools to do so. In other words, if you're looking to further develop your brand in the future, a brand audit should be a cornerstone of your strategy.
Additionally, a brand audit can be crucial if your brand is recovering from a damaged reputation. It could help save your brand image by identifying what contributed to your brand’s decline. It could be anything from poor customer service and problematic marketing materials to negative brand mentions on social media or other issues.
You could also benefit from brand audits if they reveal inconsistencies in your brand messaging. Cohesive and reliable brands appear more trustworthy to the customers, whereas a lack of brand cohesion can lead to a loss of customer loyalty.
How To Do a Brand Audit in 5 Steps
Here’s how to perform a brand audit in five easy steps:
- Brainstorm the Topics That Require Analysis
- Use Insights from Analysis To Set Objectives
- Review Your Marketing Materials and Online Presence
- Conduct Surveys
- Assess Your Competition
1. Brainstorm the Topics That Require Analysis
To identify your market position and areas needing extra work, you must determine what to analyze. We recommend considering both the internal and external factors of your brand.
One helpful approach in creating a brand audit framework is using flowcharts or mind maps. Here are some aspects you should include in them:
- Business purpose
- Objectives
- Competition and what makes your brand stand against it
- Consumer's perception of your brand
- Target audience and what their user intent is
- Website performance
- Unique value your brand promises
- Products and services you're offering, their strengths and weaknesses, and pricing
- Sales success rates
- Your brand marketing strategy
- What your customer and employee satisfaction levels are
2. Use Insights from Analysis To Set Objectives
Now that you've identified areas that need improvement, you need to set specific goals and formulate a plan on how to achieve them. For this purpose, you might consider creating a customized brand audit checklist and filling it out with your objectives.
But first, you need to figure out how to use the insights from your analysis to set your objectives. This step in your auditing process will depend on several things, including your:
- Target audience
- Their pain and gain
- Brand visibility and perception
- Market share
Another great way to set your goals and decide which ones should take priority is to ask yourself: Which goals will have the biggest impact on your business? Once you have the answer, create a step-by-step plan on how to achieve your goals.
You might find it helpful to break this plan into smaller, individual tasks and assign team members responsible for each task.
Lastly, you'll need to set metrics and deadlines to track your progress. This ensures that your plan is being realized as intended.
3. Review Your Marketing Materials and Online Presence
Think about what marketing materials your customers find valuable, and which influence them to put their trust in your brand. It could be anything from the logo and brand colors to a brochure, letterhead, or print advertisement.
Once you have that figured out, ensure that the marketing materials your brand uses are consistent, both visually and in their messaging. You can hire a creative agency to help create a cohesive brand image that appeals to audiences across all your marketing materials.
To assess the effectiveness of your marketing materials, examine how your target audience engages with them. This includes reviewing your online presence, such as your website and social media profiles.
Here’s what to look for:
- Where's your audience coming from? If they are from different regions, consider if you need global branding.
- Is the audience you're attracting your target audience?
- How long are visitors staying on your website? What are they clicking on, and what is causing them to leave?
- Are visitors buying your products or services? At what point in the purchase process do they drop off?
- Which influencers are linking to your website?
- What is the public opinion surrounding your brand and its products?
- How effective is your social media branding? Are users interacting with your posts, and what kind of comments are they leaving?
Use this insight to improve your social media marketing strategy or hire SEO specialists to work on your SEO plan.
4. Conduct Surveys
Surveys are great assets in strategizing new releases. This helps identify the market and the ideal target audience for your new products.
The first people you should survey are your customers. Reach out to them through your website, social media pools, or emails to gain insight into:
- Their brand perception
- Whether they'd recommend your brand to their loved ones
- How satisfied they are with your customer service, and
- Which areas need improvement
For example, you might learn that your customers' perception of your brand logo doesn't match your intention. This kind of information can help you improve your branding strategies and brand books.
Next, talk to your potential customers — people who haven't heard of or used your brand. See how they'd describe your brand and how it makes them feel. This is important for creating a strategy to attract new customers.
Finally, talk to your employees. They're the ones representing your brand, so you want to make sure they understand the brand's vision and unique selling proposition. And not just that — they usually have great ideas on how to improve the brand's image, so they're worth listening to.
5. Assess Your Competition
Competitive monitoring is important if you want to understand why consumers in your target market might prefer your competitors. Is it their products? Their price? Their marketing strategy?
Identify their strengths to learn from them, and their weaknesses to take advantage of them. Survey your customers and employees about your brand and ask them what they think about your competition as well. Finally, compare your findings about your competition with those about your brand, and make the necessary changes to improve your brand strategy.
Statistics show that only 59.9% of businesses use their data for business innovation, which hasn’t changed from 2019; this is problematic as this kind of comparative analysis is essential in identifying threats and new opportunities.
What Are the 4 Main Benefits of Doing a Brand Audit?
There are many benefits associated with a brand audit:
- Provides Insights Into Your Brand Performance
- Boosts Brand Awareness
- Shows You the Weaknesses of Your Brand Identity
- Increases the Company’s Value
1. Provides Insights Into Your Brand Performance
By identifying what isn’t working, you can develop corrective strategies. For example, if you have a lot of unopened emails, a brand audit can help uncover the reasons. Perhaps your subject lines are ineffective. Maybe your email newsletter is not specific or personalized enough. Or maybe your target audience has changed over time, and content has become completely irrelevant to them.
A good brand audit example of this is the Brand Audit Report, which identified several companies as the top plastic polluters in 2023. This kind of insight allows businesses to address specific issues and improve their strategies.
2. Boosts Brand Awareness
Brand audits can tell you how well your brand and products are recognized by customers and how they are perceived in the market. By interacting with your customers through surveys and understanding their consumer perceptions, you'll be able to identify the opportunities and challenges for your market position.
This knowledge allows you to refine your marketing efforts to increase brand awareness through different strategies, all while spending less money on attracting new consumers.
3. Shows You the Weaknesses of Your Brand Identity
Whether it's your website design, logo, colors, or images, a brand audit reveals the necessary steps to better communicate what your brand stands for. Essentially, you’ll learn your brand’s unique propositions and how to improve them.
4. Increases the Company’s Value
Brand audits provide insights into your brand's market position, business structure, target audience intent, customer satisfaction, and so much more. This will help you identify your unique selling propositions and strengths, ultimately helping you increase your brand’s value.
Brand Audit Summary
A brand audit is a necessity if you want your business to stand out. It helps you figure out what you’ve done wrong and how you can improve it. A brand audit strategy can also help you learn from the competition, see how your target audience and the general public perceive your brand, and overall learn more about your brand’s standing.
Given its importance, we advise hiring one of the professional branding agencies. These experts provide this type of service for companies of all sizes and profiles, helping them enhance their brand identity and build a solid brand positioning.
Brand Audit FAQs
1. What are the biggest challenges in conducting a brand audit?
One of the biggest challenges in conducting a brand audit is obtaining comprehensive and accurate data. It requires gathering and synthesizing data from various internal and external sources, which can be time-consuming and requires access to reliable sources.
It can also be challenging to align internal stakeholders; conducting a brand audit often involves engaging with multiple internal stakeholders, such as marketing teams, executives, employees, and brand custodians. Different perspectives, conflicting priorities, and organizational silos may hinder the smooth coordination and collaboration needed for a successful brand audit.
2. What happens after a brand audit?
Take proactive steps to implement the improvements needed. Begin by comprehensively analyzing the data you've collected to identify your brand's strengths and weaknesses.
However, always keep in mind that the marketplace is a dynamic environment. Your competition will be doing these audits too, and they'll be innovating to stay at the top of the game. That's why you need to consistently monitor the effects of your implemented changes, review the results, and periodically revisit the brand audit process to ensure your strategies are still relevant and effective.
3. Why is a brand audit important?
With a brand audit, you can gain comprehensive insights about your brand, from its strengths you can leverage to areas that need improving. This process enables you to build a brand that’s trustworthy, customer-oriented, and operates efficiently.
4. Can I use brand audit tools to streamline the process?
Of course, brand audit tools can help automate the process, saving you a lot of valuable time. Some good options include Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and SEOmator.
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