How to Perform a Successful Brand Audit

Performing a brand audit is an effective way to pinpoint certain key things about your brand’s performance. For instance, through a brand audit, you can find out your brand’s strengths and weaknesses and how you can improve them for long-term success. Any time you want to enhance your brand’s strengths, improve your marketing efforts, or just reach more target consumers, a brand audit is your best bet to help you achieve your overall objectives. This is especially important if you want to monitor the impact of your brand storytelling efforts. Here’s how you can perform a successful brand audit for you or your client’s brand.

Identify the overall goal of your brand audit.

Take some time to consider why you want to conduct your brand audit in the first place. What do you want to fix? Is there room for improvements in your current branding? Once you’ve pinpointed what you would like to improve, then you can set goals for your overall brand. That way you can start organizing what you would like to measure and generate a strategic plan.

Define what metrics you’re measuring.

A brand audit is useless without clear measurements. Always think back to your brand identity, specifically think about its mission, vision, brand promise, positioning, and target customers. How can you measure where your brand is improving and where it isn’t? Are there specific benchmarks your brand needs to reach to measure any strengths and weaknesses? As recommended by Inc., you may need to compile your results in a report to have a clear, organized document that can provide further actionable insights.

Create a detailed plan.

Now that you have your goals and metrics set, your next step is to generate an organized plan or checklist that you can follow. You can format your plan the way you’d like, but the best way to do it is to divide your tasks at varying levels of importance. Another good idea to perform a SWOT analysis, which can help you pinpoint opportunities and threats—information that can be useful in your plan.

Collect and analyze your data.

Don’t forget to collect any important data throughout your brand audit. Based on your goals, think about what questions to ask and create surveys to send out to your target consumers. You can also send out such surveys to potential consumers. Once you’ve collected responses from these surveys, make sure to organize your data so that it’s easier to make comparisons, view areas for improvement, and other insightful findings of your brand.

Regularly track your brand’s progress.

After you’ve analyzed your data, there’s one thing left to do: use it! More so, use it to track your brand’s progress (if any) on a regular basis. Your data serves to further cement what parts of your brand are performing well and what needs work. Implement effective strategies that align your brand with its promise and mission. Make sure to review the results of your brand’s changes and track them over a period of time. According to an article on LinkedIn, it is recommended to perform another brand audit annually or every 2-3 years.

Brand audits are steps that every marketer should perform to ensure their brands are up-to-date and meeting consumer expectations. Although performing brand audits can sound complex, doing so will help you meet your marketing objectives in the long run. Therefore, it is highly recommended to conduct a brand audit to the best of your ability. With time, you will improve in generating successful plans, setting up your branding goals, and tracking your brand’s progress.