What is a brand audit? It is an assessment of the health of your brand. It helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and using this information, the different parts of your brand can then be strengthened and improved on.
When to do a brand audit?
You feel like your brand is not connecting with its intended target audience, or anyone. You may not be getting the results you were hoping for or something just doesn’t seem to be working. Then it’s time to do a brand audit to try and identify what is going wrong.
What should be covered in a brand audit?
Identify the target audience
Is your existing target audience still relevant and if not you will need to do some research into who your business should be targeting. Once you've done that then the other parts of the brand audit will become clearer
Map out your entire consumer journey
Start at the beginning of the entire journey before you even get to the customer facing points and work your way to the end after a customer has bought a product or you've off-boarded a client. Think about the creation of your product, the way you market your products, how you pitch your services to how it’s delivered, everything is important and can contribute to the overall experience. If most of your consumer journey is good but one part is bad, it’s most likely that your customer will remember the bad part and that is what defines their experience. This is why it’s important that every part, no matter how small or insignificant you think it may be is considered and worked on.
Once you've mapped out the consumer journey, you can start identifying the parts that aren't working. These are points in the journey that may stand out quite obviously as doing you a disservice. Maybe customers have reviewed their experience and bad customer service has come up multiple times or you're a service provider and have gotten feedback about slow turn around times. It is important to take customer feedback very seriously, these are also easy to address because they are very clearly stated for you.
Do a customer survey and test audience sentiment
This is a great way of finding out exactly what is working, what can be improved on or changed entirely. Doing a survey is a good idea especially if you haven't gotten much feedback before, whether it's on your products / service, the way your brand looks, customer service or any other part of your business.
In addition to these obvious points that haven't been working, you can also identify opportunities to go the extra mile. Maybe your delivery service is good but you can improve delivery times, creating an even better experience for your customers. These moments of delight and positivity are what can turn your customers into loyal fans.
If you are unsure of where you can value add, do research on audience pain points. This can be found out through a survey, talking to your existing customers as well as potential prospects from your target audience
How do you use the information you get from your audit?
Conducting a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis after gathering all your information from surveys, research and mapping your consumer journey can immediately help you identify the main parts of your brand you need to work on.
If after going through your brand audit, you feel that your brand's message or personality isn't clear or you struggle to describe your brand’s vision, mission, purpose and values and how they benefit and are advantageous to your target audience, this is when you know that perhaps your business has not established a clear brand strategy or maybe it has become lost due to things changing over time. Engaging a brand strategist that can help you build a coherent brand strategy may be the right next step for you.
If you've identified that your graphics and touch points are inconsistent, ensure that you keep to your brand guidelines moving forward. Whether you have one channel or multiple touch points, visual consistency is important for brand recognition. If you do not have a professionally done brand identity and you find your graphics looking messy or unprofessional , then you investing in a brand designer is a good idea to fix this aspect of your brand.
Take the feedback you got from your surveys and from reviews on social media and ensure that you fix all that you can to strengthen your customer experience
Come up with new solutions to fix your target audience's pain points
Find areas you can add value or go the extra mile to create a brand experience that exceeds expectations
Conducting a brand audit on your own can help you get a better perspective on what you need to work on for your brand. However if you feel like you analysis may not be impartial or you need a more indepth analysis of your brand then engaging a brand expert to conduct an audit for you may be a better choice for you.
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