With the market constantly having more brands enter it, there is cut-throat competition to get a good share of the market. Therefore, evaluating your business from time to time is compulsory so you can understand how you perform when compared to other businesses in the same industry.
What is a Brand Audit?
A brand audit analyses your company’s position in the market. This analysis will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and focus on the opportunities it has to stand out from the competition. This audit is helpful in understanding how your brand is viewed by the market.
There are three main areas that a brand audit must cover:
- Internal Branding – This covers the company culture, mission, and core values.
- External Branding – Here, the website, social media platforms, logo, print, and online advertising strategies are evaluated.
- Customer Experience – In this section, the sales process and customer satisfaction areas are analysed.
These areas must be thoroughly evaluated so your brand’s personality gets a good review. When you know the problems in your brand’s personality, you can take measures to fix them. Resolving these issues will build trust and credibility with your customers as you let them know you understand their problems and will also take the responsibility to fix them.
An important factor to consider when auditing your brand is to keep your customers in mind and ensure that it is what your customers want.
The Brand Audit Checklist
Create a set of Goals
You need to first know what is the purpose behind doing a brand audit for your company. You have to create a plan based on what you want to accomplish. When you set goals, you will be able to get back and review them to understand if you have found feasible solutions for all your goals.
Analyse your Brand’s Marketing Material
Analysing the marketing material that makes up external marketing will give you insight into how you are performing in the marketplace. You need to check if your logo personifies your brand values. Examine the design, colours, and typography. Get an idea of your potential customers’ thoughts when they see your logo.
The digital and print material must also be reviewed. See if all your marketing material has consistency across all the elements that form your branding such as newsletters, business cards, flyers and brochures, stationery, uniforms, digital and print ads, and more.
Check your Website
You must scrutinise the website content to check how your visitors interact with your website. Inspecting website analytics will help you modify your website’s content to suit your customer’s needs. When you are checking your website content, you should also come up with solutions to increase the traffic to your website and the number of conversions.
Modifying the content of your website could be as simple as asking the following questions:
- What kind of images and creatives can you put up that will convey your brand values to the visitors?
- What type of copy will better communicate your brand personality?
- How is my customer’s journey on my website? You can analyse heat maps to understand your customer’s preferences.
- What do you want your visitors to do? Do you want them to give you a call, fill out a form, or simply direct them to buy your products?
Social Media Analysis
Auditing your social media platforms will help you gain important analytics on your visitors. It will help you understand who engages with your brand and the frequency with which they do so. You can inspect why certain posts are performing better than others. This will help you gain an understanding of what kind of posts and videos are preferred by your potential followers.
Review the Sales Data
The sales data will give you an understanding of how well the business is performing. Which products are the favourite of your customers? Analysing this data will help you improve upon the underperforming products and services. You can also evaluate the trends of your brands’ marketing initiatives.
You need to evaluate the steps in the sales process. How do you get your leads? How do you follow up? Is the tracking system you use efficient?
Competitor Analysis
You need to evaluate your competitors. Understand how their brand is performing and if they are functioning better than your brand, you need to gain an insight into why they are performing better than yours. This assessment should be done by scrutinising the competitors’ logos, marketing copies, websites, and social media accounts.
Internal Brand Audit
As much as evaluating external marketing is important, you need to do an internal brand audit. Surveys must be conducted among employees to know if they have a good understanding of the brand values. You can circulate a questionnaire and ask the employees what they believe is the vision and mission of the business, what are the problems the product/solution solves, and the strengths and weaknesses of the brand. You should also ask your employees about their opinions on how to make the internal branding better.
This evaluation will help you understand the problematic areas and make an informed decision on improving the brand image and messaging among employees.
Must Check Out: Brand Audit Services
Comprehensive Brand Audit Done by The Bumblebee Branding Company
The Bumblebee Branding Company, a branding agency in Chennai, provides brand auditing services that help boost your brand’s image in the market. Before they become your branding partner, they first send a proposal for your brand. This proposal is nothing but a brand audit of your business. Once you come on board, their brand marketing services assist in making your business one of the top brands in the market. The brand audit doesn’t stop at the proposal stage. They do frequent brand audits while providing their services to ensure your brand’s problems are weeded out.
If you need to market your brand or build it, reach out to The Bumblebee Branding Company, a branding company in Chennai who offers excellent branding services that improves your business in no time.
