Tips for Performing a Successful Brand Audit to Improve Your Marketing
Conducting a brand audit can help you understand where you stand within your market and in the minds of your consumers. More specifically, you can:
- Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
- Discover positive and negative perceptions of your brand
- Align offerings with consumer expectations
- Determine where you stand among competitors
- Adjust your overall brand strategy
Follow these necessary steps to perform a successful brand audit, check in on your brand’s health and ultimately improve your marketing strategy.
1. Create a Brand Audit Template
It’s beneficial to set up an analysis template to guide your brand audit process. Prior to getting started, you should build a framework around how you will actually conduct it. If you’re doing this internally, you’ll want a guide to follow so that the collected data can be put into action. It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers, so you want to identify the data that actually means something to your business.
You can define your framework with a checklist of what should be examined and the methods you’ll use to do it. It’s also helpful to organize the list by internal and external brand elements.
2. Examine Your Website’s Analytics
Just because a website is visually appealing doesn’t necessarily mean it’s high-performing. If your website isn’t converting, it’s crucial that you understand why. Analytics you should be looking at include:
- Traffic
- Page views
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
There are plenty of tools that can provide website analytics but we recommend Google Analytics, as it provides rich performance data, both historic and in real-time.
3. Analyze Your Sales Stats
This is one of the best ways to get insight regarding both customer and industry trends. An in-depth sales analysis can show customer buying patterns, which you can then use to redirect your focus. Some things to look for are irregular dips in sales, change in buyer location and competitors offerings.
4. Take a Look at Your Social Media Metrics
Social media contains mass amounts of information on your consumers that you can’t get anywhere else. It’s important to analyze your demographic data to have an understanding of who your social media audience actually is. Because it’s common that our target customers may not be the ones interacting with us on social media. Analyzing social data will help you identify who engages with your channels the most, allowing you to reevaluate your communication strategy accordingly to get the most out of your efforts.
5. Observe Competitors
To get a full understanding of your own brand health, you also have to determine how your competitors are performing. Some things to check include:
- The type of content they’re writing
- Any brand partnerships
- If they’re getting frequent recognition
Most of this work will be manual, but there are tools that can help give a deeper look into specific elements of a brand. Some competitive analysis tools can provide SEO-driven data, help you monitor your niche, give info on organic traffic and keywords, as well tell you how you rank among competitors.
6. Ask Your Customers
If you want to get insight on what your customers think about your brand, just ask them. You can do this through surveys, polls or by just asking for feedback directly. It’s important to look into the minds of your consumers to find out what motivates them, what their pain points are and what influences their decisions to ensure your brand can best meet their needs.
When it comes to customer loyalty and brand advocacy, you want to measure your NPS (Net Promoter Score). This is found by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to friends and family via an opinion score. The NPS opinion scoring system is on a scale of 0-10 with 0 being “very unlikely” and 10 being “extremely likely.”
Final Thoughts
After you’ve completed your brand audit, it’s important to determine what data you want to use and how. Set some goals into places before acting on your findings. What do you want to see come out on these changes? Whether it be an increase in conversions, a more cohesive look or a new customer base, it’s essential to have a clear goal in mind. Lastly, create an action plan to carry everything out.
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