How To Conduct A Brand Audit (Comprehensive Guide)

As you’re aware, your brand holds immense value, and it’s imperative to maintain its excellence to distinguish yourself in the market.

A brand performance audit serves as a health check for your brand, enabling you to evaluate its well-being and pinpoint areas for enhancement.

At The Branded Agency, we firmly advocate for making brand audits an integral part of your business routine, akin to your daily caffeine fix (which we all know is essential!). In today’s rapidly evolving market landscape, staying attuned to your company culture, external branding efforts, and overall strategy is paramount to staying competitive.

In this article, we’ll unveil the ultimate guide to conducting a comprehensive brand audit for optimal success.

We’ll delve into why brand audits are indispensable, explore the essential components of a brand audit, and provide a step-by-step roadmap for execution.

What Is It A Brand Audit

A brand audit involves a thorough analysis of your brand’s performance to pinpoint its strengths, areas needing improvement, and its competitive position in the market. It comprises examining two key aspects: external and internal branding.

External branding entails conveying your company’s promise to your customers and target audience. Meanwhile, internal branding equips your employees with the necessary tools and resources to uphold that promise, leading to enhanced customer service and experiences.

Ensuring that your brand’s message resonates with your employees is crucial. A fully aligned team makes it easier to deliver on your brand promise. Ideally, your employees can evolve into brand ambassadors, promoting your brand with genuine enthusiasm.

Brand development is an ongoing process, and a brand audit serves as a means to analyze data and strategize ways to enhance your business image and expand brand recognition.

Consider it akin to a routine health check that every business should undergo at least once. It’s essential for evaluating whether the efforts invested in building your brand are yielding the desired results.

When To Conduct A Brand Audit

Although a brand audit may be a significant task, the benefits are substantial.

A brand audit offers insightful information in a variety of circumstances.

Actually, without doing an audit of any current brands, you shouldn’t take any big steps in your brand strategy.

Thus, when is the requirement for a brand audit?

When thinking about updating your brand or rebranding

If evidence is required for a branding

When deciding on a rebrand’s direction

While entering a new market

When trying to come up with a unique selling point for a business

When changing the intended audience

If going through an acquisition or merger

It isn’t complicated science.

When we get right down to it, it really comes down to comprehending the surroundings and circumstances before making any plans for the future.

Before engaging in a new conflict, every military strategist would carefully evaluate the circumstances, including the strengths and vulnerabilities of the opposition and how to best exploit them.

Brand choices made by businesses may also be compared to this.

As guardians of the brand, you wouldn’t want to decide on a course of action without solid information to guide you.

The proof might be used to persuade decision-makers to make the necessary changes, such as a simple identity makeover or a complete rebranding.

The findings from a brand audit assist you in identifying a gap in the market or in better understanding your target market or new market.

Why Do Brand Audits Work So Well?

Brand audits work well because they provide a company with several observable advantages.

Once again, the key to successful branding is obtaining data and applying it to the creation of a brand expression strategy.

You may assess your brand identity, brand values, and internal corporate culture by gathering data from a variety of sources.

Developing a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s strategy, including positioning and internal branding, will facilitate the communication of impactful messages to customers.

Let’s take a closer look at the advantages and objectives of a brand audit.

Any brand strategy must be consistent in order to guarantee that the main message is conveyed via all marketing channels.

Any instances of contradictory messaging that might mislead the target audience will be exposed by a thorough brand audit.

A brand strategist, like a competent physician, is able to spot a negative element inside a brand, isolate it, and seek to address the issue.

Discover A Way To Obtain A Competitive Edge

It’s important to keep in mind that raising a company’s visibility, building its brand, and eventually increasing sales are the ultimate goals of any branding plan.

One would think that a lucrative and successful brand would equate to a successful company.

Among all the interrelated components of a successful brand, identifying a competitive advantage has the potential to change everything.

Through the brand audit process, strategists may reevaluate the competitive environment, see things from a different angle, and identify a more potent advantage.

By starting an action plan to deliver a value proposition based on actual uniqueness, whether based on price, customer experience, or another factor, audits often give companies a new viewpoint to appeal to the target market.

Boost Conversion and Acquisition Rates for Customers

This is an instance of a trickle-down effect.

It would be simpler to make your brand consistent for all stakeholders if you could develop a clearer notion for it.

Let’s continue this reasoning to its logical end.

Developing brand messaging and marketing collateral to reach your target audience is made simpler when your brand position and brand promise are well-defined.

These communication solutions may improve client loyalty as well as the acquisition of new ones.

Naturally, success is never guaranteed by a brand audit.

However, it’s simpler to move your brand into a position that promotes client happiness when you have clarity on every facet of it.

Evaluate Brand Equity and Value

Brand equity is a factor in a company’s valuation.

That is the significance of the market’s propensity to choose your brand over rivals.

You may see your brand’s value more clearly after doing a thorough brand audit.

As is common to this discussion, once you have a better understanding of your brand equity based on its advantages and disadvantages, you can focus on opportunities to raise brand equity and, therefore, the value of the company.

Steps For Conducting A Brand Audit

Alright, now that the possible advantages of a brand audit have been identified.

However such advantages are only attainable if you can conduct a brand audit effectively.

If you get the fundamentals of the process wrong, it all becomes a meaningless exercise.

The foundation of a brand audit is a plethora of unanswered questions. Excellent responses need a methodical approach.

Let’s keep things simple and go through the brand audit procedure step-by-step, covering the metrics that are necessary to monitor.

Establish A Structure

Spend some time going over some of the brand’s and company’s guiding values.

Examine your strategic goals and purpose. Reexamine your buyer personas and target clients, as well as the fundamentals of your current marketing strategy. You should also develop a broad overview of the competition environment.

Examine the value propositions that each of your products offers.

assemble all of your marketing materials and evaluate their coherence. You’ll examine them to discover how they contribute to the overall image of your verbal, visual, and brand message.

The tone of voice that is conveyed to the audience by the language choices used in the content is known as a brand’s verbal identity. Predictably, visual identity serves the same purpose for each and every one of the content’s visual components.

What do your logos, font choices, iconography, and picture placement say about your company? Do they convey the qualities your brand strategy aims to convey?

You’re well-positioned for the remainder of the process with this refresher of the essentials.

Make Surveys

A significant portion of the information gathered from a brand audit will be quantitative, ranging from website traffic to conversion rates.

These figures are often useful in illustrating how well the brand converts prospects into consumers.

But it’s as important to pay attention to the human element.

Ask your consumers via surveys about their experiences with the brand at each touchpoint. Anecdotal evidence may frequently provide valuable insights into the consumer experience, since statistics alone may not always capture the whole picture.

Developing a positive audience impression of a brand is the goal of branding.

No awards for figuring out how to determine audience perspective, however.

Consult them!

An extensive brand audit will evaluate workers’ attitudes as well.

What is their brand perception? They cannot effectively represent the company as brand ambassadors if they do not have a thorough understanding of the brand.

The following list of sample survey questions:

In your own words, what would you say about the brand?

What is the value proposition of the company?

What issue does the company help clients with?

Is there anything about the present brand that you would change?

Which qualities are shown in our brand communication?

Examine data from social media

Make use of your social media analytics to evaluate the success of your social media marketing.

Which demographics are involved with your brand?

Are they the clients you want to reach out to?

What do they have to say about your business?

Do they grasp what you’re putting down?

Brand awareness on social media may be determined by looking at engagement and reach data.

Dive Into Internet Analytics

Web analytics do provide you with some insight into your customers’ and followers’ activity in your environment, but not much into their minds.

Among many other things, different metrics may help you understand the kind of visitors to your website, if SEO tactics need to be optimized, whether content marketing materials are acceptable, and whether ad campaigns are effective.

How many visitors are remaining and what is your bounce rate?

Since conversion rates have an impact on a company’s bottom line, they are also essential to a brand audit.

You can determine if your brand is doing online as you would expect by analyzing these measures. Are you drawing the appropriate visitors to your website? What kinds of materials are most effective? etc.

Assess Competitors

One of the most significant and crucial steps in the brand audit process is evaluating Competitors.

You would make a list of your nearest rivals as part of your brand assessment.

A brand must be seen as a component of the larger market since it does not exist in a vacuum. Therefore, consider rivals that provide products that are at least comparable to yours, even if you believe that yours is a rather specialized offering.

Collect as much data as you can from their websites, social media accounts, promotional materials, and customer care encounters.

Analyze their verbal, visual, and brand voice in the same way that you evaluated your own.

You can examine a lot of their social data online as well; it’s much more accessible than, say, their sales statistics.

You may also find out via your workers’ surveys what they think of the brands of your rivals.

After obtaining all of this data, you need to try to assess the brand positions of your rivals. Attempt to respond to the following inquiries:

Which market niche does each rival want to capture?

What sets them apart from one another?

What value propositions do they offer?

Are they advantaged in any other ways?

What makes them so appealing to their clientele?

What aspects of them are disliked by their clientele?

You may evaluate the strategic objectives of all the players in the market for your product or service by taking these questions into consideration.

What is their point of view?

What do they hope will happen with their brand?

Following these procedures, you must draft a brand audit report that summarizes your results and offers suggestions for your next branding initiatives.

Let’s take a closer look at the information included in your brand audit report.

What Should Be Included in a Brand Audit Report?

You will need to compile your results into a neat, compact package, just like with any other data-collection project.

If not, some of the company’s most important decision-makers may not read your ideas!

Based on the information you’ve acquired, your brand audit report should identify the aspects of the brand that are working well, those that may require some tweaking, and those that are wholly off-target.

On the other hand, you should also include rivals in your brand audit report so that they may be compared.

It would contain a strategy for redesigning your brand to better fit the company’s goal.

Present your results with the template found here:

Audience Analysis

Competitors Analysis

Brand Positioning

Brand Personality

Communication: Voice and Language of a Brand

Messaging

Visual Branding

Prospects

Summary

The many sections of your analysis may be categorized with the use of these headings.

Still, a brand audit report’s final summary can be its most important part.

A skilled brand strategist will condense a high-level assessment of the brand’s position into this.

It will provide a clear and insightful summary of the brand’s advantages and disadvantages in relation to the competition.

And never forget how important the context is!

Experts in brand building will advise how best to maximize upcoming branding initiatives to capitalize on gaps in the current market while taking the competitive environment into account.

The next phases in the branding process should be guided by this overview of the most important lessons learned and suggestions, which will also help you identify the brand’s distinctive positioning and position the company for future success.

Final Thoughts

With any luck, you now have a better understanding of what a brand audit is, when to utilize one, its advantages, and how to go about doing one.

Brand builders and their clients may benefit greatly from brand audits.

Therefore, take into consideration doing a brand assessment before rebranding your company or providing your services to other companies.

You’ll learn a great deal about the state of your brand in relation to the market by thoroughly examining all facets of it as well as the brands of your rivals.

Because you leave the process with useful information, a brand audit is thus a very beneficial activity.

All you need to do to succeed after that is to put them into action.