How To Do A Brand Audit In Six Steps

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What is a Brand Audit?

A brand audit is essentially a checkup on how your business is performing in your industry’s landscape and against your goals. It’s a look at how your business is currently positioned on the market, which can help you determine future marketing strategies. 

Your brand is your business’s most significant asset, so it’s essential that you have a full picture of it to move forward with confidence. To learn more about how brand audits help businesses stay at the top of their game and the forefront of their industries, keep reading.

Three Areas a Brand Audit Should Cover

Brand audits incorporate the following three areas of a brand in order to get a holistic view. 

Internal Branding – Internal branding encompasses all of the intrinsic elements that make up your brand. These elements include:

• Values
• Mission
• Company culture
• Employee relations
• HR policies
• Company infrastructure

External Branding – When thinking about external branding, these are the things that your audience uses to differentiate you from your competition that you have full control over, such as: 

• Logo
• Advertising
• Marketing
• PR
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Website

Customer Experience – Lastly, customer experience refers to the specific interactions that your audience has with your brand, regardless of whether they are purchasing something from you. The main areas of the customer experience are: 

• Sales process
• Customer touchpoints
• Customer support
• Customer service

​​Why is a Brand Audit Important?

Before we go into how to perform a brand audit, it’s important to go over why they are important. Brand audits help businesses to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, create opportunities for improvement, and find new ways for your business to move forward. 

In addition to these factors, brand audits help businesses:

• Evaluate their position in the market
• Understand how their brand is perceived by consumers
• Identify strengths and weaknesses 
• Leverage opportunities
• Stay relevant 

Once you’ve completed your brand audit, you’ll be able to do a lot with the information. First, you’ll be able to align your strategy and marketing more closely to your customers’ expectations. This will allow your business to get to know your customers on a deeper level, which will encourage them to interact with your services. Brand audits also help you understand your market and how it’s evolving to stay relevant and ahead of the curve, which is how you’ll always stay ahead of your competitors. Now let’s dive into a brand audit example to get you one step closer to perfecting your brand strategy!

How to Do a Brand Audit 

Depending on your industry, market, and offerings, your brand audit may differ in some aspects. Also, a brand audit can be conducted by an external third party, or in-house. While an outside source is preferred for unbiased results, conducting internal audits is still good practice. 

1. Start with an internal review: When you’re starting a brand audit, the first thing to do is to review the elements at the center of your business, such as your marketing plan, mission, vision, and unique selling proposition. This step helps you define what you think your brand has to offer.
2. Analyze your external channels: Do a deep dive of your externally facing channels, like your website, social channels, and sales data. Then, take a look at how these channels are mapped out on your sales funnels so you have a full understanding of how your audience flows through each stage and how your channels affect that flow.
3. Evaluate your competitors and your market: Next, turn your attention to your competitors. During this step, be sure to work your way through these questions to get a full picture of where you fit in among your competition:
   1. How do your competitors’ brands compare?
   2. Do they have a stronger online presence?
   3. How does their marketing and sales strategy differ?
      To help with this step, we recommend using a tool that can track and report on competitive insights, such as QuestBrand. 
4. Survey, Survey, Survey: Next, it’s time to survey your audience, employees, and prospects. This is going to yield a lot of information that you can then use to inform your final brand auditing insights. For this step, we recommend using a tool that specializes in gathering insights surrounding brand perception through a variety of touchpoints. These insights come directly from your audience, which will take the guesswork out of compiling your survey results.
5. Gather your results, analyze, and act: Once you’ve gathered all of your findings, it’s time to assess them. Use your insights to fine-tune your overall mission and marketing strategy and craft a plan of action going forward.
6. Monitor your progress: Even though you’ve completed your brand audit, your work isn’t done. You should consistently monitor your brand’s performance and progress to ensure that your business is successfully following the plan you put in action. Additionally, take this time to assess how the changes you made affect your conversions, customer engagement, and online presence. And while you can do this manually, using a tool, like QuestBrand, that is equipped to handle long-term brand track through advanced analytics is a much easier route to take.

Brands continually evolve, so it’s vitally important to perform brand audits so you can continue to evolve in the right direction. If your business needs help getting third-party insights for your brand analysis, rely on QuestBrand. QuestBrand can support ongoing monitoring, which can capture many of the touchpoints related to an actual brand audit, such as conversion funnel, brand perception, customer touchpoints, competitive intelligence, and brand trends. To learn more about how QuestBrand can help you conduct a brand audit, get in touch with us today! 

We’re excited to show you all of the capabilities QuestBrand has to offer!