The value of completing a brand audit: the how and why

What is a brand audit?

A brand audit is doing a detailed analysis of your current brand’s position and brand equity in the market. It reviews the brand’s effectiveness. It can help to identify the brand’s strengths and weaknesses. We’ll look at aspects from your content marketing and sales processes to social media presence and key metrics such as SEO and website analytics to get a full picture of performance.

Areas for improvement will be highlighted, as well as potential new opportunities. You may uncover ways to make the most of your marketing efforts, reach new customers within your target market, build customer loyalty, increase conversion rates or simply improve brand awareness.

As part of our brand audit process we take an in-depth look at the following areas:

• Your current brand; your proposition, key messages, visual and verbal identity, brand elements
• The market you operate within and competitor analysis
• The demographics of your target audience
• Your marketing plan, web analytics and the strategies and channels you use to reach your target audience

How do you conduct a brand audit?

Every audit is slightly different depending on the type of business model you operate. Some may include doing multiple site visits nationwide and meeting key stakeholders. Others may involve taking part in the day-to-day running of a company, whether that’s working in the shop or shadowing a member of your team.

Familiarity with the customer experience is invaluable. It can give us instrumental insights into how your company operates. That could mean being a secret shopper, eating in your restaurant at different points throughout the day, doing a yoga class with your customers or going through an online ordering process.

Interviewing key stakeholders, employees and clients and undertaking customer telephone interviews and online surveys can be a great way to gain a holistic view of your brand. That provides constructive and crucial insights into motives behind customer and client buying processes and company culture.

Why you should do a brand audit?

As your business grows over time, it can deviate from its points of differentiation in the market. Areas of the business can suffer as a result. Doing a brand audit allows you to take a step back and analyse every aspect of your brand and make positive steps to improving your external branding and internal branding.

A brand audit allows you to:

• Gain valuable insights that allow you to restructure your marketing strategies, messaging and your brand identity accordingly
• Identify a change in demographic and target customers, helping you to rebrand or adapt your product or service
• Identify any new environmental factors that will enable you to seize new opportunities that otherwise would have been missed
• Ensure that you are consistently communicating your offering, brand values and messages across multiple platforms and channels including social media, website and offline media
• Have quantitative data to back up any changes in strategy
• Have an accurate take on your client’s or customer’s perception (positive or negative) and make positive changes accordingly.

How we can help with your brand audit?

Brand audits are an integral part of our brand strategy process. We also complete them as standalone projects too. We’ve worked with an array of businesses, from startups and small business owners to established and global organisations.

If you’d like to arrange a brand audit to enable you to create an action plan for your business, get in touch to discuss how we can help.