What is Brand Audit?

Brand Audit is a great way to analyse where your brand stands in the market right now. It assesses your brand’s strengths and weaknesses to help you better understand what areas your brand can work upon. It aligns you with your goals in a way that helps you boost your brand’s performance.

What is the Purpose of a Brand Audit?

Brand Audit is like a regular health check-up. It helps you to know if your brand is on track or not.

It assists you to:

• Identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Understand the market better and work accordingly.
• Know what impact your brand is creating on your clients.
• Recognize the channels through which your brand can get the best output.

As a healthy practice, it’s a good idea to conduct a brand audit at least once a year, even if you’re reasonably certain there are no issue. Although, there are no hard and fast guidelines about how often a company should do one and you can choose what suits you best.

What are the two parts of Brand Audits?

The two pillars of Brand Audits are:

Internal Branding

This involves conducting surveys, within the company, to understand your company culture and values and also to give your employees a better understanding of the and vision. Employee engagement, productivity, and loyalty will all increase when your internal branding is strong. And if your employees feel that they belong to a professional, quality work-environment, they’ll be more inclined to stick around.

External Branding

This refers to how a brand is being perceived by its audience, through their presence and image. Details such as logo, online presence, emails and blogs all come under external branding. This gives the best output when the brand message and vision is presented to the audience in a consolidated and clear-cut manner.

What is included in the Brand Audit? Brand Audit Checklist:

Building a powerful brand requires doing a brand audit. Strong brands generate more revenue and are less vulnerable to crises. Higher brand recognition translates straight into higher sales and lower churn-rate.

As the generation changes so do the trends and market.

Additionally, the market will evolve as people’s wants and priorities change, therefore brands must stay ahead of the curve to be relevant.

• Pay close attention to market shifts that have an immediate impact on the applicability of your main offerings.
• Keep an eye on what other businesses in your market are doing since you too need to stay one step ahead of your competitors.
• It’s a good idea to re-evaluate your own brand if one or more of your competitors have updated their offers or developed something that could fundamentally alter the industry.

You can keep up by taking the appropriate measures when you need to, and a quick brand audit gives you the ability to do that.

Here’s a checklist for Brand Audit:

• Set a target that the audit must accomplish.
• Analyse the promotional materials.
• Examine the webpage for the brand.
• Evaluate the brand’s social media performance.
• Conduct a client survey.
• Identify brand awareness.
• Audit your own and your competitors’ brands.
• Planning will help you check the outcomes and address any problems.
• Follow the results.

This audit helps a company define the edge that serves as a competitive difference. In other words, it enables brand promoters to identify the distinct attributes that set the brand apart from the rest of the competition.

How to conduct a Brand Audit? Step by Step Guide:

1. Define why you are conducting the audit?

The first thing brands need to do is ask themselves why are they conducting a brand audit, which helps in creating the necessary framework. This will help target the desired areas.

Which internal or external elements need attention? What are your competitors doing differently? Is the company aligned to its goals? Are the targets being met? All these questions will help you understand the past, present and future of your brand.

2. Take a look at the External Marketing

This is a very important step as it gives you an insight into what is being presented to the clients and how are they viewing your brand. Elements such as logos, brochures, websites, email campaigns, business cards must be reviewed.

3. Gather Customer Feedback

Who can better tell you about your services than your customers? There are many options available for getting the information you require. A poll, an email or online survey, or a phone interview are all options to explore. It will provide you with answers to questions you can’t get through data, such how satisfied customers are with their interactions with your company or why they favour your brand over that of your competitors.

4. Web Analytics

Before making a specific purchase, more than 80% of current buyers conduct online research, so be sure to review your web analytics to gain useful information about how well your website is performing.

If a company has to rebuild, rearrange, or rewrite pages to direct website visitors to their best-selling goods or services, analytics might be helpful. Organizations should aim to boost their traffic or conversions while carrying out this audit.

Analyse the traffic-generating avenues for your website. It’s crucial to spread out the sources of your traffic so that you can withstand rapid algorithm adjustments and declines in social reach.

5. Social Media Analytics

Examine your social media data in detail as well. To gain a better understanding of your audience, use the demographics features on your preferred platform.

Do your present social media branding initiatives succeed in drawing in the target audience?

How do all of these figures match up with your sales information?

You can learn a lot about your public brand image by looking at the data associated with your branding activities and comparing them to what you discover by speaking with your audience directly.

From there, you’ll have a better notion of how to emphasize your brand’s advantages and meet your target-market’s expectations.

6. Sales Data

It is essential to know areas where your brand is making sales and where isn’t. This will help you to know areas or products that needs to be pushed more into the market. Combining this with the rest of the audit will bring out much better analysis of problem areas.

7. Action Plan

A brand audit should identify issues that require attention.

A thorough plan of findings should be followed by a number of doable goals and an estimate of when the outcomes will be seen. Once you have started working on each area, keep an eye on your results and progress.

Your targets will be monitored continuously to see if they are being met, but after a suitable period of time, you might want to repeat the audit process.

Whatever course you decide to take, bear in mind that the market will continue to develop, and brands must update and innovate frequently to stay relevant and in front of the competition.

Brand Audit Examples

Let us say a phone company wants to launch a new phone series for which they want to understand their presence in the market. Doing a brand analysis will let them know about how their products are already performing, what products are performing better, what are the features that are making their products perform better.

Imagine a company that makes t-shirts wanted to know where its brand stood in the market, so it carried out a brand audit. A framework has to be established, survey methods have to be chosen, a competitive analysis is to be done, and its web analytics, sales data, and social analytics should be examined. Finally, it examines the findings to focus on the discrepancies that needed fixing.

 Need help with Brand Audit: Contact MAD Designs

With MAD designs you get multiple branding solutions. We can help you make your brand one-of-a-kind and stand out from the crowd. We do not just provide services but actually connect with you, understand your brand and your vision. We keep in mind the consumer trends, the industry, your needs and your vision to take your brand to great heights with our affordable and accessible services.

Want to get the brand auditing done for your brand? Talk to our experts at +91 86982 51984.