Maybe it's time to look under the hood with a Brand Audit
What is a Brand Audit?
The Brand Audit is a 360 objective and holistic review of the current state of your brand and an essential part of the branding process.
The goal is to ensure your brand is engaging, relevant to your target audience, clearly differentiated, and consistently presented. It also provides foundational insights into developing your brand's decisions, marketing, sales strategies, and future growth.
Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing but often forget about the heart, soul, and the DNA of their business. Your brand is the engine fuel and the biggest asset of your business. The stronger the brand, the stronger the company and the larger revenues and profit.
Therefore, it only makes sense to monitor, cultivate, manage, and protect your brand's health. And make it a priority.
How does a Brand Audit help your business?
B2B brands with strong brand identities
outperform the market by 73% and 74% ~McKinsey & Co.
🏆 Reveals if you are on the right path or not.
🏆 Confirms if you fully understand your customers' and stakeholder needs or not.
🏆 Forces you to examine your point of difference: Does your customer get it?
🏆 Creates focus on your brand and how it impacts profitability.
🏆 Provides the branding objectivity needed to take your brand to the next level.
🏆 Builds the foundation for future branding, marketing, and sales strategies and programs.
🏆 Secures market opportunities and insights to increase revenues and profitability.
🏆 Keeps an eye on any competitive encroachment.
🏆 Aligns the brand with your customer and stakeholders, and what is relevant to them?
🏆 Moves your brand, products, and team into alignment. When things are in alignment, they move with greater speed and ease, allowing focus on your business's unexpected curves and turns, multidimensional facets, and magic behind it.
Fewer than 50 % of employees believe
in their company’s brand idea,
and even less are actually equipped to deliver on it .” ~ Forbes
🏆 Highlights the need for consistency which breeds consumer trust, and makes the marketing process that much more efficient.
improve revenues by up to 23%
🏆 Improves Marketing Results: The quality of your brand and its management directly impacts the results of your marketing.
Shall I go on?
How to conduct a successful Brand Audit
A. Create a Plan
The first step in starting a brand audit is to develop a plan with objectives, and goals, deciding what evaluating criteria and data you will use.
B. Secure Objective Input
Whether you decide to do all the work yourself or hire a professional consultant, objectivity is key. Build that critical objectivity with input from a diversified set of customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholder research and applied insights. And don’t forget your front-line employees' input, especially customer service, account services, and sales.
C. Wherever possible, base your Brand Audit on complex data.
Brand tracking information and analytics can include reviewing website traffic/Google Analytics, social media, competitor data, customer loyalty, and other sources that enable you to objectively gauge whether your branding is pulling in the customers you’re actually targeting.
D. Do an Internal and External Review
Brand audits look at two different aspects of your branding: both internal and external.
Internal Review
Leadership GPS: vision, purpose, mission, values, Goals & Objectives
Present Brand Essence and ID: DNA, name, logo, tone, etc.
Brand Archetype/ Personality
Positioning & USP
Messaging & Keywords
Brand Promise
Brand Experience: How your brand is delivered: Key branding formats: website, social, presentations, etc.
External Review
Industry & Your Market Niche
Competition
Current Customers & New Targets
E. Brand Strategy
Make your decisions about what you need to change. Establish a budget, priorities, and timeline. Consider a phased approach for projects. Based on your budget.
"Brand launches or re-launches
typically achieve 15-25% greater growth."
When should you do a Brand Audit?
There are dozens of reasons to do a brand audit; aside from the obvious, it’s part of your dedicated branding strategy. Here are just a few:
Your profits and revenue are down.
Your brand has lost its point of difference,
You know you can do better but don't know where to start.
Your business starts to grow, and you need a new strategy and tools.
Your brand’s presentation is inconsistent.
Your customers aren’t loyal and don’t have good things to say about you.
Your team is out of alignment and does not “own” the brand.
You have high turnover, and it’s challenging to hire.
You’ve never done a Brand Audit.
Buckle up NOW a do a Brand Audit
Typically, once your baseline is established, you may want to do a Brand Audit yearly or every few years, depending on your business's size, complexity, and competitive nature. You will be on course to be the leader in your pack and realize more significant profit!
Conclusion
A brand audit can be an invaluable tool for any business.
Whether you’re just starting out or have been in business for years, it’ll boost productivity and efficiency, increase profits, provide better customer service, and more time to focus on growth opportunities rather than just keeping things going day-to-day.
And, when things are in alignment, it saves you time to do other essential items: think, plan, breathe, live your life… and enjoy the money you make.
Gentlemen and Gentlewomen
START YOUR ENGINES
Take the Next Step with a Brand Audit
Brands That Deliver™ and Laurie Pillings Rinker, a brand-driven marketing strategist.
Laurie is a consultant, author, speaker, podcaster, and Principal of Brands That Deliver™. Clients hire her to clarify, define, and transform their brands and revenue using her step-by-step process. After refining the brand and implementing the strategy, we develop successful brand-driven marketing programs while encouraging social good.
You can reach Laurie at BrandsThatDeliver.com
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