In today’s blog we’ll cover what is a brand audit, what elements will be reviewed and why it matters for your company, brand and towards achieving your desired goals and objectives. The top brands regularly review their brand in order to make sure their brand is consistent as well as in front of their competitors. Many companies utilize outside resources such as brand agency services to run their brand audit or you may decide to perform it internally, but regardless, make sure you perform a brand audit on a regular basis.
What is a brand audit?
A brand audit is the process of reviewing different aspects of your brand, such as your brand strategy, creative elements like your logo, color palette, tagline, messaging, and value proposition. Additionally, you would assess how your brand comes together across your website, social media posts, and other platforms to determine if they effectively communicate what you want your target markets to think and feel about your company. Many companies choose to leverage brand agency services to ensure their audit is thorough and to get expert insights on improving brand perception and positioning.
Types of brand audits
1. Aesthetic:
One of the most common brand audits out there is to look at and review the logo and brand and aesthetic assets of a company. This typically includes doing a competitive review of how your brand looks and feels versus the competition and if your brand positions you apart from the competition.
2. Strategic:
This type of brand audit is where you start to look at competitive positioning. For example, it can include reviewing the services, products, and features of your product, service, or technology, as well as pricing. Additionally, this usually involves evaluating how these competitive advantages are packaged and communicated through your messaging platform. Next, you’ll assess your brand assets and how they effectively communicate and highlight your brand. Ultimately, you’ll determine how and why your brand stands out from the competition.
3. Holistic:
Why conduct a brand audit?
When doing a brand audit we have a brand audit framework that we work within:
1. Collect:
First, we collect current brand assets, garner intelligence on the competitive landscape, get access to campaigns and assets as well as take a look at your goals and objectives and KPIs.
2. Review:
We take a look at the different elements provided and ask any clarifying questions we may have.
3. Research:
If desired and budget available, we may perform a different kind of market research to get feedback on brand elements, website, campaigns and calls to action.
4. Analysis:
Based on years of experience as well as the clients and potentially market research we develop insights and recommendations to improve your brand, its elements, your campaigns and the results they are producing.
5. Report and Suggest:
We turn these recommendations into a presentation where we report on findings and we make suggestions for improvement. We also develop and agree upon an action item list and timeline of when these will get revised.
6. Redesign and Revision:
Now it’s time to get busy and redesign and revise creative elements, content, websites, landing pages and campaigns.
7. Implement:
Now that we have made adjustments to the different brand elements, web and digital elements and campaigns, it’s time to roll these changes out to the marketplace and public.
8. Measure:
With the new brand creative, content, digital and campaigns and these elements are active in the marketplace, it’s time to track and measure the performance of how things are performing.
Having information about your brand’s performance also gives us the ability to determine the ROI on our marketing investment. This also gives us the information we need to make adjustments to maximize results and get the best return on your investment.
9. Your brand audit checklist:
Let’s take a look at the elements we’ll be looking at to perform your audit:
10. Business Goals and Objectives Analysis:
Whether you have a formal business plan, an executive summary, or just beginning your business journey, we take a look at how well your brand is helping you or hurting your chance to achieve your goals, objectives and position you to achieve your desired outcomes.
11. Competitor analysis:
12. Market Positioning:
There may be information in specific trade publications, industry groups, customer feedback, and so on to best determine where you stand in the competitive marketplace. After you determine where you stand in the marketplace than you can modify or adjust your brand positioning accordingly.
Brand Look and Feel
1. Logo:
Take a look at your own logo and determine if it conveys the image and feeling you want it to give to your audience?
2. Color Palate:
Is your color palette up to date, conveys the emotion you want it too?
3. Visual Elements:
In addition to your logo, are the other art elements, on brand? Any visuals, icons, photography, etc.?
Content/Messaging
1. Value Points:
Do your value points effectively differentiate you from your competitors in the marketplace?
2. Value Proposition:
Is your value proposition clear, concise and deliver true value to potential customers, partners and stakeholders?
Marketing/Digital Assets
1. Website:
Does your website convey your desired brand, messaging, image and functionality you need for your website?
2. Landing pages:
You may or may not have landing pages associated with your website and campaigns, but making sure they match your brand and website.
3. Social Media:
Social media these days is one of the most recognizable ways people connect with your brand and express their experience with your brand.
4. Posts:
Brand consistency is key, make sure your brand look and feel as well as message, communicates your desired brand and engages and compels people to take action.
5. Campaigns:
Ensure that you put your best foot forward and that your brand stands and message stands out, connects, engages and compels in a consistent fashion.
6. Marketing Materials:
Make sure all of your marketing and sales materials are on brand, consistent with a strong CTA call to action.
7. Pitch Decks:
This is an area that has a tendency to get off track. Make sure your pitch decks are on brand and have a strong brand story that is on point and connects. You may want to utilize a pitch deck expert (agency) to help you accomplish this and help you achieve your goals and objectives.
How to conduct a brand audit process?
1. Clear Cut Objectives:
Make sure you go into your brand audit knowing what your clear cut objectives are.
2. Timeline:
Go into your brand audit giving yourselves or partners to do a good job, but not dragging this thing out for too long.
3. Team:
Know who’s going to be part of your team utilizing internal and external resources.
4. Budget:
Have a good idea of what you have budget in time, energy and resources for your brand audit.
5. Desired Outcomes:
Go into your brand audit with an understanding of what you want out of it. Are you wanting to make some updates to your brand or blow your old one up and do a full overhaul? Or whatever you want to get accomplished.
6. Takeaways:
Have an idea of what kind of takeaways you want out of your audit and how that is going to help you evolve, revise or reinvent your brand.
7. Action Items:
Go into your brand audit with the idea that you are going to take specific actions to evolve and grow your brand in an effort to help you achieve your business goals and objectives.
Brand audit example
We get asked all the time to perform brand audits, just recently we helped perform an audit only to determine that our client didn’t own their IP (intellectual property). However, Huge problem, and to top it off, since they were a tech company, there were several other companies using the same brand name, causing huge brand confusion. Clearly our recommendation was to recommend a new brand name and brand creation.
Brand audit tools
We use all kinds of different tools in our audit process. For instance, project management tool like Asana, communication like Slack, Google for research, the USPTO (US patent and trademark office) for IP search, Network Solutions for URL searches and then putting all your research into a presentation or video for presenting to the brand stakeholder.
The benefits of a brand audit
1. Brand Consistantence:
Going through a brand audit and making sure your brand is consistent, sharp, clear, concise and separates you from your competition and positions you for success.
2. Company Alignment:
Another huge benefit for our company is that it brings everyone together within your company into a unified brand alignment. This also makes sure everyone is using the same message, using the same brand look and feel and keeping all your employees on the same page.
3. Increased Brand Value:
Also, a huge benefit of performing a brand audit is to increase your brand value, which is a very important part of the corporate valuation.
Conclusion
Armed with this information, therefore, I’m sure you now see the value of performing a brand audit for your company. Now is the time to perform your own brand audit or work with a trusted and leading branding agency like Brand Iron to make sure your brand is performing at a maximum level.
