Performing a brand audit not only paints a picture of your company, but also shows where to improve as a means to reach more customers and increase sales.
As many seasoned business owners already know, brand authority plays a big role in helping consumers to trust a company, which is a critical component in both acquiring and retaining a loyal community of customers.
In simple terms, having brand authority means that you’re an easily recognisable leader in your field or industry, but it also helps to ensure that consumers feel confident that you know what you’re doing, and that their money is well spent with your brand or business.
While this is the ultimate end goal for almost every brand or business, examining your current position and identifying ways to improve it is an entirely different kettle of fish – which is why learning how to perform a brand audit can be revolutionary.
A Beginner’s Guide To Performing A Brand Audit
Branding goes far beyond a company’s logo, and includes tone of voice, colours, fonts and overall consistency. These elements lay the foundation for how audiences talk about companies, how they feel about them, and can influence and even harness the all powerful ‘word of mouth’ marketing strategy.
While you might believe that your existing branding is a work of art, the general public might think otherwise. To measure these figures and see if it’s time for a change, a brand audit is a process that examines areas where your company branding is doing well, where you could potentially improve, where you’re currently sitting in the market in comparison to your competitors.
The fundamentals of conducting a brand audit covers two primary pillars: your internal branding, and your external branding. While the latter is what the general public sees through digital and print advertising, social media, your website and your logo, the former is just as important. While external branding is for your customers, internal branding is for your staff: think brand values, and your company culture. When done well, internal branding empowers and encourages staff to deliver world class customer service, and to elevate any investments towards external branding.
Like it or not, brand development is an ongoing task, and a brand audit is a means to look at quantifiable data to determine how the image of your business is being received, how to increase brand awareness, and identify any potential opportunities for growth. In addition, performing a brand audit is a must for businesses to track how their promotional efforts are faring – but where do you start?
Make A Game Plan – Aim to build a framework around how you will conduct the brand audit process. Identify any goals that you wish to hit in the not so distant future, and use this as a road map to know which forms of data to assess accordingly. For some, it will be measuring customer service via reviews, while for others, it will be tracking your efforts online through SEO.
Use Google Analytics – The best data to assess in any brand audit are the figures that can’t be fudged, such as your website traffic via Google Analytics. Key website analytics to review during a brand audit should include where your website’s visitors are coming from, which pages receive the most views, and which pages are generating sales or leads.
Review Sales Trends – One of the most effective ways to see if your branding relates to who you are and what you’re selling is to assess which products or services are receiving the most attention from consumers. This way, you’ll be able to assess where your strengths are, what you’re not so great at, and if any changes in direction need to be made accordingly.
Social Media Data – Most platforms are able to tell you all kinds of things about who is engaging with your posts. This can range from anything and everything to gender, location, relationship status, and even when they are most active. In turn, this data can help you get to know your audience, what content they like, and even which platform is the best fit for you.
Check Your Competitors – Combine website data, SEO and social media to form an in depth competitor analysis as a means to see where you might be potentially falling short. While some of this work may be tedious, it may help you to identify which keywords, social media strategies and even products or services that your competitors are embracing that you might not be.
Once you’ve conducted your brand audit, there’s often a big pile of information for businesses to decode and decipher. As branding is often closely linked to content marketing, knowing what to do with this information is often where business owners can come unstuck.
If you lack the time, energy or experience to successfully harness content marketing for brand development, the good news is that there’s never been a better time to consider outsourcing this task to the professionals – but where do you find them?
The Key To Good Branding Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources, and it’s for this reason that content marketing often falls to the wayside for busy business owners. However, avoiding these responsibilities altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
