For every business owner, their BRAND is their business’s biggest and important asset- one whose condition and overall health must be regularly monitored and cultivated. The brand needs to have a strong identity and name in the market place. If your brand is strong you can make more money and own a powerful business. The ultimate strength of your brand has the power of captivating, inspiring and keeping your target audience engaged. This can help you increase the bottom line of your business dramatically and gradually.
A brand can either be strong, weak or robust.Not just an upcoming brand, but even the established brand in the industry needs to be regularly checked to make sure that things are going in right direction and on track. A Brand Audit is a regular check up for evaluating your brand’s position in the different markets, discover its weaknesses and strengths, and find new ways to strengthen it.
Follow this six -step guide to perform your own Brand Audit.
Step 1. Create a useful Framework:Start your brand audit report by looking at your business mission and strategic goals and create a framework. The important things you need to consider are your target audience, effective marketing plan to reach them and layout of your business to operate in. Most of the companies are able to refer to their go to market strategy. A framework consists of good plan that includes your target customers, sectors, job roles, distribution channels, product portfolio, partnerships, and pricing.
Step 2. Determine your Marketing Materials:Review your business brochures, sales sheets, logo, letterhead, product packaging, print advertising and letterheads.first compare them with your online presence, including your business site, newsletters and email marketing messages, content marketing pieces and social media profiles. Check whether these elements are consistent in terms of color, a tone of voice and design? Also find out how effectively does each piece target your market.
Step 3. Review your Website:
Review your business website through website analytics:
- From where your website traffic comes from?
- Is your business website attracting your intended market?
- Is your conversion rate falling or rising?
- What is your business bounce rate?
A detailed web analysis is a useful part of the brand audit that tells you whether you are attracting the right kind of traffic or not.
Step 4. Review your Social Media:Deeper Social Media analysis helps you find out how well your Social Media Marketing works? What kind of customers is engaging with your brand? What they say about your brand? Are they really your intended customers?
Step 5. Look at your Competitor’s’ Brand:There is no such brand that exists in isolation. Start assessing your biggest competitors’ advertising and marketing materials, customer service, websites and social media presence. You can also prepare a list of essential questions about your competitors’ brand and ask your employees, customers the same questions.
Step 6. Review your Final Results:By using all the essential information you have collected, documents actually aspects of your brand task, needs to be refined and points that are missing, mark them entirely. Create an action plan accordingly to update your brand to bring in line with your business’s vision and mission.
This is a helpful six- step guide to perform your Brand Audit. If you will repeat your brand audit every year, it will definitely keep your brand fresh and strong.
