10 Steps to Conduct a Successful Brand Audit 

Sometimes it seems as if the bigger brands did all the groundwork at the beginning and are now sitting pretty years later. In fact, the opposite is usually true, with long-standing businesses having difficulty maintaining a culture of constant innovation and nimble response to market changes. Indeed, this is why conducting a brand audit is so crucial.

With every upstart aiming to seize your brand, maintaining your position at the pinnacle requires enormous effort. Regular reporting and analysis can help monitor progress toward goals and results.

You may get a bird’s-eye view of your brand and use that to guide your long-term strategy by conducting an audit.

If you want to see how you stack up against the competition, are thinking about rebranding, or just want a bird’s-eye view of your performance and positioning, an audit is a good idea.

Measures to Take to Conduct a Thorough Brand Audit

1. You must define your terms

Review your marketing strategy to determine your company’s positioning, unique selling proposition, and vision. Is there a certain demographic you’re trying to reach, and what benefits does your brand offer them? Before you gauge other people’s opinions about your brand, be sure you know the meaning you attribute to it.

 2. Evaluate any external advertising you’ve done

Check the company’s stationary, including its logo, brochures, sales sheets, product packaging, letterhead, and business cards. Examine how they stack up against your internet profiles, blogs, social media pages, and other content marketing materials. 

Is there harmony amongst the many components in terms of style, color scheme, and voice? To what extent do you feel like each element is reaching your target demographic?

3. Have a look at your company’s website

Analyze the following with the use of web metrics:

• From what countries do the majority of visitors to a website originate? It’s a good idea to spread your traffic around rather than relying on just one or two sources.
• How well do you think your website doing at luring in your ideal customers? Increased traffic must include potential buyers if it is to be profitable.
• In other words, how high is your percentage of people that leave immediately after seeing your site? Your site isn’t doing its job if most viewers bounce immediately off.
• Just how high is your rate of success? Is it increasing or decreasing?

4. Examine the info gathered from social media

Take a look at the data collected from your social media analytics to see how well your social media strategy is faring. 

What are the people who interact with your business on social media, and what do they want from you? Do you really want them as customers? Where does your brand stand in the eyes of the public?

5. Conduct a client satisfaction survey

Get customer input on issues like these using a mix of customer focus groups, email surveys, social media polls, phone surveys, and internet surveys.

• Please explain this brand using as few words as possible.
• If there’s an issue, what exactly does this brand fix?
• Please describe your emotional reaction to this product and brand.
• Do you think this is a product that you would recommend to your loved ones?
• What associations do you have with the brand when you see its logo?
• Can you tell me about this company’s quality of service to its customers?
• How could this company do a better job of serving its customers?

6. Take a survey of potential non-customers

This will be used to evaluate the visibility of your product. Ask questions like this using the survey techniques described above.

• Does this name sound familiar to you?
• Did you ever try this brand before?
• Where did you hear about this product line?
• What kind of adjectives best characterize this product line?
• For what issue have you found our product to be the solution?
• Please describe your emotional reaction to this product and brand.

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7. Ask your staff some questions

The quality of the experience your customers get is entirely in the hands of your staff. They won’t be able to represent your brand effectively if they don’t grasp its essence. Ask questions like these in confidential surveys:

• Exactly how would you characterize our company’s name?
• Where does this company hope to take its name in the future?
• For whom does our brand provide a solution?
• What methods do you employ to ensure that our brand consistently lives up to its claims? What is preventing you from following through on your assurance?
• How would you change our brand’s image in one word?

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 8. Examine the brands of your rivals

Analyze your major competitors’ marketing strategies, websites, social media, and customer service. The same questions you asked about your brand can be applied to your competitors by polling customers, target market members, and even your own staff.

9. Reevaluate your findings 

Make a list of your brand’s strengths, areas for improvement, and outright failures based on the data you’ve collected. Developing a modernization strategy for your brand will help better represent your company’s objectives.

10. Keep tabs on your development

If you want to be sure your brand refresh has the right effect, check in on it as you go along and see how things are shaping up. Over time, all brands experience a natural staleness. Your brand will always feel new and exciting if you do an audit every few years.