7 Steps to Conduct a Brand Audit
It’s easy to get caught in the daily churn and burn and overlook the health of your brand (guilty!). Whether you’re planning a business shift or expansion, considering a rebrand, or simply doing some benchmarking, undergoing an audit can be an extremely valuable exercise.
What does that even mean? Listen up.
A brand audit is a comprehensive examination of a company's branding and marketing activities to establish its performance, discover strengths and weaknesses, recalibrate strategic alignment, and assess its current market position. It’s a detailed analysis of a company's brand identity, messaging, visual elements, and customer experience across all touchpoints.
Conducting an audit allows companies to identify areas of improvement, ensure consistency, stay competitive, and increase brand equity. Follow these steps to develop the framework for your audit.
Step 1: Define Objectives
Before you get started, it’s important to determine your goals. What is your business hoping to achieve by completing this exercise? The answer to this question will likely drive your evaluation focus and methodology.
Step 2: Research & Gather Data
Collect and analyze all available data relevant to the brand – web analytics, social media metrics, campaign performance, sales data, customer interviews/surveys, etc. There is a wide range of metrics you can measure, but they will vary based on the company and audit objectives.
Step 3: Analyze Brand Identity
Evaluate the brand's identity including the logo, color palette, typography, tone, messaging, and imagery. Assess how effectively they communicate the company's unique value proposition and how relevant they are to target audiences. Make sure to review internal and external examples of advertising and marketing for consistency as well.
Step 4: Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Identify key competitors and gather available data and samples to evaluate your relative market position. Assess how well the brand is performing in terms of sales, market share, and customer loyalty. Leverage your legwork to outline the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Step 5: Evaluate Brand Strategy
Review the company's overall brand strategy and its alignment with business objectives. Identify any gaps between the brand's current performance and its desired positioning in the market. Determine what changes need to be made to address these gaps.
Step 6: Plan & Execute
Based on the findings of the audit, develop actionable recommendations for improving positioning and overall performance. These recommendations may include updating the brand identity, refining the messaging, or improving the customer experience. Whatever the updates may be, ensure they are consistently incorporated across all applications.
Step 7: Check Your Work
Following implementation, monitor the brand performance over time to confirm the changes are effective in achieving the desired outcome. Update and adjust executions as necessary.
Your work doesn’t end here! Conduct regular audits to monitor your brand's health, identify new trends and opportunities, and ensure that your business remains relevant and competitive in the market.
