

Your brand is your business’s biggest asset — one whose health must be cultivated and monitored.
A brand audit should cover three areas:
You can hire an outside marketing company to conduct a brand audit for you, but you can also do much of it yourself.
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.
Review your business logo, brochures, sales sheets, product packaging, letterhead, business cards, and print advertisements. Compare them to your online presence, including your business website, email marketing messages and newsletters, social media profiles, and content marketing pieces. Are all of these elements consistent in terms of design, color, and tone of voice? How effectively does each piece target your intended market?
Using website analytics, assess:
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? Are they customers you want? What are they saying about your brand?
Use a combination of customer focus groups, email surveys, social media polls, phone surveys, and online surveys to get customer feedback on questions such as:
This will measure your brand awareness. Using the survey methods above, ask questions such as:
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. Use anonymous surveys to ask questions such as:
Assess your biggest competitors' marketing and advertising materials, websites, social media presence and customer service. You can also ask customers, members of your target market, and even your employees the same questions about your competitors' brands as you asked about yours.
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. Then create an action plan for updating your brand to bring it in line with your business’s mission and vision.
As you complete each element of your brand update, review the results to ensure the changes are having the desired effect. Brands naturally become a bit stale over time. Repeating your brand audit every few years will keep your brand fresh.
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