The 9 Step Guide To Performing A Brand Audit
If you find yourself struggling to locate where your brand is going wrong, or if you just want to elevate your overall success, you should conduct your own brand audit.
New to all this? Don't worry. The team here at PicStudio have thoughtfully created this detailed guide to help you conduct a successful brand audit so that you may figure out how to improve your brand and optimise your success.
What Is The Purpose Of A Brand Audit?
Most brands will conduct an audit to assess what they need to do in order to outperform their competitors. A brand audit is one of the most effective ways that you can evaluate your brand's market position, in order to support your business's growth.
It is essentially an analysis tool that will help you to identify your brand's weaknesses and strengths so that you can figure out how to improve your business.
Key Areas Of Focus:
There are three core elements of branding that you must focus on when conducting a brand audit:
Internal Branding: This covers your mission, core brand values, and company culture.
External Branding: This involves marketing materials, your brand's logo, advertising channels, such as online and print, and overall message.
Customer Satisfaction: This concerns how a customer experiences your brand. Here, you will identify how your brand offers customer support, the process of your sales, and the policies you have in place for your target customers.
It is essential that you are mindful of these factors when performing a brand audit, so that you can successfully assess your company's current position.
9 Steps For A Successful Brand Audit:
The way you decide to analyse your brand is entirely up to you. We highly recommend using this step-by-step list as a framework when auditing your business, especially if you are new to the world of brand marketing.
1. Revise Your Business Plan
Before you begin your brand audit process, you should revise your existing business plan. This will help you to familiarise with your aims, brand promise, unique selling point, and target audience.
Once you look at these factors that make up your brand, you can begin fine-tuning specific areas which will help you undergo a brand refresh. To help you further prepare for the steps that follow, we suggest you consider these useful aims:
Identify your brand's performance
Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses
Understand your market position in comparison with competitor brands
Adjust your brand strategy to meet the expectations of your target market
2. Evaluate Marketing Materials
The key to a successful marketing campaign involves how consistent your brand image is throughout. The marketing materials that you use for your brand should always be cohesive with your brand's image. Here are a few common types of marketing materials:
Logo
Social Media Presence
Website
Customer Services
Product Packaging
Business Cards & Brochures
When evaluating your marketing materials, you should always assess them against each other to determine whether the colours, designs and language used all fit in line with your brand identity, and assess whether your materials are suited to your target demographic.
3. Analyse Sales Data
Sales data provides a qualitative insight into how your customers interact with your products and services.
Review your company's sales data so that you can locate any areas of concern, and identify which of your products/services are successful. This will encourage you to focus on improvements and create stronger marketing strategies in the future.
4. Seek Feedback From Your Customers
Sales data alone will not identify how your customers feel about your brand, as this is quantitative data. However, combining quantitative and qualitative data will paint a clearer picture of your brand's services.
Customer feedback is a significantly effective way of understanding how well you are reaching your target audience, and pinpointing areas that need improving. Here are some terrifically cost-effective ways of understanding how customers experience your brand:
Conducting a survey via telephone, email, or through an external website
Customer focus groups
Social Media polls
5. Communicate With Your Employees
Your employees are part of that infrastructure that holds your brand together, so it is important that you acknowledge their thoughts and perceptions of your business.
Because your employees are responsible for communicating your products and services to your target audience, it is vital that they are 100% on board with your brand's overall plan and intentions.
Conducting an anonymous survey will encourage your employees to answer questions honestly and fully. Here are some useful questions to incorporate into your survey:
"How would you describe our brand's purpose?"
"How do we ensure a suitable customer experience, and do you think these methods need improving?"
"How do you suggest we improve our brand's current market position?"
6. Review Web Analytics
This step is not as daunting as it may sound. Website analytics simply involves how much attention your brand's site receives. Here's a breakdown of web analytics you should look into:
Conversion Rate: This refers to the number of visitors who become consumers by purchasing from your site.
Website Traffic: 'Traffic' means the amount of people visiting your site. Reviewing your website's traffic can show you where customers are coming from (i.e. through social media links, referral codes, etc).
Bounce Rate: This concerns the visitors that leave your site. A high bounce rate means that you need to improve the engagement of your website.
7. Assess Social Media Presence
Social media is one of the most used tools in marketing. How you portray your brand on social media will impact your engagement and general success. Platforms such as Instagram offer business accounts the option to review their analytics, which will allow you to identify various factors such as traffic, discoverability and audience interactions.
8. Observe Your Competitors’ Brands
Identify your greatest competitors in order to uncover their most successful marketing methods (such as their social media presence and websites). This will help you learn new ways of optimising your brand.
9. Reflect Upon Your Results And Create A Plan
Now that you have carried out the imperative steps of a brand audit, you can begin moving forward with a refined plan. Take action by laying out all of your existing strengths and weaknesses in order to fortify an effective plan that will ensure your brand flourishes.
Discover Our Bespoke Marketing Services
We sincerely hope that this article has helped you understand how to conduct a successful brand audit. If you feel you require further guidance with regard to your brand's marketing, discover our full range of boutique marketing services, here at PicStudio.
We offer expert services for beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands, such as visual storytelling, product manufacturing, strategy and branding, and much more. Feel free to get in touch today, so that we can begin to help your brand grow.
