BizTips from SCORE – Conducting a Brand Audit

A brand audit is a check that evaluates your brand’s positioning in the marketplace. It examines your strengths and weaknesses and how to strengthen it.   When conducting an audit there are essentially three elements: (1) internal branding – the brand’s values, organizational culture, and mission, (2) external branding – your logo, print and online marketing materials, public relations, website, social media presence, email marketing and content marketing, and (3) customer experience – your sales process, customer support and customer service policies. 

Step 1. Know what you’re measuring.

Refer to your marketing plan, and identify your business’s mission, vision, unique selling proposition, and positioning. Who are your target customers, and what does your brand promise them? Clarify what you think your brand is before evaluating what others think.

Step 2. Assess your external marketing materials.

Review your business logo, brochures, sales sheets, product packaging, letterhead, business cards, and print advertisements.

Step 3. Review your business website.  Using website analytics to assess:

Step 4. Review your social media data.  Use your social media analytics to examine how well your social media marketing is working. What types of customers engage with your brand on social media?

Step 5. Survey your customers.  Use a combination of customer focus groups, email surveys, social media polls, phone surveys, and online surveys to get customer feedback.

Step 6. Survey people in your target demographic who aren’t customers.  This will measure your brand awareness.

Step 7. Survey your employees.  Your employees create the customer experience that is essential to your brand. If they don’t understand your brand, they can’t convey it properly.

Step 8. Evaluate your competitors’ brands.  Assess your biggest competitors’ marketing and advertising materials, websites, social media presence, and customer service.

Step 9. Review your results.   Using the information you’ve gathered, document what aspects of your brand work, which need some fine-tuning, and which are missing the mark entirely.

Step 10. Monitor your progress.  As you complete each element of your brand update, review the results to ensure the changes are having the desired effect.

Contributed by Marc L. Goldberg, Certified Mentor, SCORE Cape Cod & the Islands, www.score.org/capecod, [email protected], 508/775-4884. Source: ASK Score, 2021.