11 Simple Tips You Need To Know When Carrying Out Your Brand Audit

Last Updated on Tue-Sep-2024 by Robert Bogere

Ready to find out your brand areas of improvement? Need a rebrand? Or Tired of trading stagnantly? No more worries! Carry out a brand audit now.

With a brand audit, you’ll be able to find out and know your brand differentiators, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats around your brand.

Need to know how to develop your brand strategy? Check out this!

Knowing the above, you ensure that your consistent brand messaging, product and service development, and customer outreach are in line with your customers’ needs and wants.

The goal is to make sure your brand is growing in the right direction and grabbing the right lucrative opportunities and customers so to avoid being static.

Let’s know what’s needed in finding out your brand’s areas of improvement. Having brand issues, you’ll end up attracting unqualified leads and customers in the pipeline.

Before you get started, let’s know what a brand audit is.

A brand audit is a check-up that evaluates your brand’s position in the marketplace, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to strengthen it — Score

Simply, a brand audit is a process that assesses how your brand or company is strategically positioned in the marketplace.

What is the main purpose of a brand audit?

It’ll help you determine how to position your brand in the marketplace hence developing improvement approaches.

It’ll enable you to know your brand health, and how the brand is perceived by your customers.

It’ll enable you to know your brand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats around your brand.

It’ll help to align your products and services in regard with your customers’ expectations.

It’ll help you to work on your brand differentiators, tone of voice, and personality.

Who needs a brand audit?

• Individual brands
• Start-ups
• Small and medium enterprises
• Multinational entities

Even though your brand is maximizing its return on investment (ROI) and attracting the right audience, it also requires a brand audit to know its health. Stagnant brands are not the only ones to carry out brand audits, but also strong brands.

Why?

Because they need to know if it’s time to rebrand. If there’s clarity regarding your brand visual identity, marketing, and communication efforts.

The main role of a brand audit is to develop a meaningful and purposeful brand that creates higher revenue for the business and attracts ultimate opportunities.

A brand audit can be carried out by you or your team like for start-ups, and SME brands.

For multinationals because of their nature, they may need to hire brand specialists to carry out their brand audit to avoid issues like internal bias from the internal staff.

Or You may opt to partner with an external specialist to avoid biases.

At times, it’s better to hire a third party to find out and explain your brand challenges that may be difficult to be observed by your internal team.

How to carry out a brand audit of your brand

What are those crucial steps when carrying out a brand audit? How can you or your team carry out a brand audit? Below is what’s involved in carrying out a proper brand audit;

Develop a proper structure

In case you’ve done the audit alone or used your team, you need to start with developing an ultimate foundation of your brand’s purpose — your why, vision, mission, core values, and objectives.

Discover: How to develop a brand essence for your brand

Think of what your brand wants to achieve. What are you planning to achieve? You need to clearly state your vision, mission statement, and core values that will drive your brand’s why.

Always key decisions are driven by your vision, mission, and values. You need to be strategic intent when developing such statements.

If your brand vision and mission statements aren’t clearly defined, at the end a properly done brand audit will help you to develop them.

Things to think of;

• Area scope of your entity operations
• Your target audience
• Your brand core values
• Your likely products and services to offer to your target audience

The structure may go on and on like pricing, marketing and communications channels, distribution channels, and social media channels. If you’re a multinational, don’t limit yourself to the above.

Obtain customer responses

Knowing your customers is one of the crucial elements of finding out brand gaps. When you carry out a customer survey, it not only shows you’re caring and monitoring your customers, but you get hands-on information on the brand areas of improvement.

The above can be done by carrying out customer surveys on platforms like survey monkey, making direct customer calls, assessing reviews and ratings on your website, carrying out polls on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, and reviewing comments from your social media pages.

Surveys will help you to get first-hand information to know where your brand is weak and strong in the marketplace.

Evaluate your marketing efforts

Many start-ups and SMEs tend to say — we don’t advert and market because of resources, but no any entity doesn’t market.

Think of your marketing items. That way you’re marketing your brand. Review your social media posts, business cards, company profile, packaging and labels, brochures, flyers, pull-up banners, backdrop banners, sales funnels, e-mails, newsletters, e-mail signatures, signposts and many other items.

What’s their level of consistency? Are they well aligned? Is the logo always well applied by your designers and developers?

Things to think of;

• Do your designers apply the logo properly?
• Is your work in line with color palettes and schemes?
• Do the designs align with your brand vision, mission, and core values?
• Does your creative team apply a rightful call to action?
• Is your tone of voice consistent across all channels?

The above calls you to review other touch points and their effectiveness like if you use out-of-home (OOH) strategies, you need to review your billboards and other stuff.

Discover: How you can work on your brand positioning statement

Audit your social media platforms

Auditing such pages, you want to know the quality of your social media. How’s your brand using this kind of media? Did you choose the right channels for your brand?

Many owners think their brands should be on all social media platforms which is not the case. What are you posting on such pages? Are your posts in line with your brand values and work?

Observe the response and engagement rates. Such will provide you with data about the sentiment of your brand. Things like;

• Likes
• Comments
• Re-posts
• Shares

Assess your website

In this era, every brand should have a website. But, having a website isn’t enough. What’s on your website?

Is your content well aligned with the rightful search engine optimization — keywords?

Is it attracting reasonable traffic? Are you getting leads off your website? What acquisition tactic do you use?

Does it have a blog where you share your insights? Are your insights in line with your products and services? Are those 2 linked together?

To know if your copy aligns with SEO, they’re numerous tools you can use to analyze such like Semrush, Yoast tool, Google analytics, and many others.

With this kind of analysis, you’ll observe the most visited pages, bounce rate, and many other things.

A brand audit will help you know whether your website needs a re-design and re-alignment.

Review your customer journey

How long is your customer journey map? Try to make it as short as possible. Having a long journey, customers may end up getting off track in making purchases.

Think of the crucial steps customers take to purchase your products and services.

Knowing how your customers find your company, search for your products and services, and make their purchase decisions will help you know the step at which your customers are not committing to your brand.

With such a handful of information, you’ll also know what pulls customers to purchase your stuff.

Is it the knowledge you share with them? Is it the help you offer? You can know all this when you carry out a brand audit.

Assess your competitors

Make research on your direct and indirect competitors. Examine their websites, social media accounts, and marketing materials to know how they create their copy, messages, and other stuff.

Observe what’s on their blogs, and how they align their content, reviews, and ratings.

Audit your employees

Remember, these are your internal customers. The thing is they need to know your brand in and out. Such customers should be passionate working with your brand.

Things to think of;

• Do they know your brand vision and mission?
• Do they know what kind of problem your brand is solving in the community?
• Can they describe your brand?
• What are their feelings about your brand?

Put together your results and data

Examine all the information collected to see whether they’re common themes and trends.

Noticing these, you’ll know where your brand is performing well, what you should stop doing, and what to improve.

Before moving to the action plan, below Kody Nordquist a brand strategist expert mentioned some of the mistakes done by brands when carrying out a brand audit.

Develop an action plan

With the findings, develop a well-detailed plan to work on the brand improvement. For instance, if your brand had no brand manuals in place, create ways of acquiring it. Don’t forget the timeline.

Start with setting proper goals and timelines to achieve what you want. I propose you begin with the most crucial parts. Set proper metrics and key performance indicators for your goals to track your plan.

Monitor and control

Monitor your progress as you implement your plan. For instance, if your goal was to improve the content on your blog in two months, try to put in place a proper content plan and set up a team to do this. If you’re to hire experts, do it in timely manner.

If you’re to use freelancers, search for reputable ones who’ll write your meaningful blogs, and share with them topics you want to be covered and the deadlines.

Putting that in place, track your data to review how your content is performing on your website.

Are the visitors subscribing to your newsletter or e-mail list? If yes, note that. How was it before?

Remember, a brand audit isn’t something done once. It should be an ongoing process that has to be done every after like 1-2 years. It helps to keep your brand always fresh and health.

In case you need some help in auditing your brand, look no further. I’m the right person to engage with. Get time and we discuss this together.

Rapping up brand audit tips

Brand audit is a complex task which needs enough time and resources to be performed.

With specialist’s help like mine, It’s easier for brands like yours to interpret such brand reports, set new brand targets, and work on the next growth plans to gain ultimate brand equity.

How much does such process cost? It depends on the size of your organization. Review more what Chris Fulmer, a brand strategist said about the same.