Brand consistency can increase revenue by 10% to 20% and 81% of consumers report they need to trust a brand to even consider buying from it.
Is your digital brand presence consistent? Do consumers trust you?
Many businesses struggle to answer those questions, and to know what to do if the answer is in the negative. If this is you, don’t worry. We’ve got the solution: A brand audit.
Brand audits are powerful tools that uncover customer perceptions, a brand’s strengths and weaknesses, and new growth opportunities.
Let’s talk about it.
Table of Contents
What is a Brand Audit?
A brand audit is a thorough analysis of a brand’s current performance and position in the market compared to its competitors. After performing an audit, a brand should know how it is perceived by consumers, where it needs to shore up weak spots, and where its strengths lie.
Key Elements of a Brand Audit
In order to effectively conduct a brand audit you need to know what comprises your digital brand. It is these elements that you must assess:
- Brand Identity: This is your logos, colors, mission statement, and tagline.
- Online Presence: You must know where your brand appears online. This includes internal social media profiles and websites, external websites such as Wikipedia, external social platforms such as Reddit, search engines, and generative AI tools. You need to identify every single place you appear online, and understand what populates all search results.
- Brand Positioning: Now that you know where you appear online, how do you compare to competitors?
- Customer Perception: How is your brand perceived by your target audiences? What do they share in reviews and in chat groups?
Measuring each of these elements requires a mix of tools and strategies such as surveys, competitive analysis, website audits, and social media listening. Don’t expect this to be a quick process, not if you want it done right.
What Can a Brand Audit Uncover?
1. Gaps Between Perception and Reality
47% of brands publish off-brand content at least a few times a year. Bad idea. Remember what we said earlier? That brand consistency raises revenue? What do you think brand inconsistencies do? That’s right, harm revenue.
These inconsistencies can confuse customers, and potentially alienate them altogether. If customers don’t know what you stand for, they don’t know if they can trust you. If they can’t trust you, they don’t want to shop or work with you.
Brands don’t consciously plan to share off-brand content, but the data shows it happens. You may not think you’ve committed this error, but can you be sure without a brand audit?
Or perhaps you truly are always on-point, but someone else has published misguided content about your brand. If that content soars in popularity – perhaps in a YouTube video with thousands of views, or on a Wikipedia page with thousands of visitors – it can influence audiences far more than your branded content.
It can be this incorrect content that is shared by search engines, generative AI tools, and even other people on review sites. If you don’t know that the problem exists, you can’t fix it.
2. How to Improve Customer Experience
A brand audit comprehensively relays customer sentiment. This allows you to understand customer pain points and customer highs. Where are your customers dissatisfied? Where are you knocking it out of the park? Do they have pain points you can actually address, but your marketing doesn’t make that clear?
If you can answer these questions, you can craft a successful strategy to improve customer experience and show that you care.
3. How to Get Ahead of Competitors
If you know that your competitors are outperforming you in sales or social media mentions or in another area, but you don’t know why, you can’t strategize a way to outperform them.
A brand audit clearly establishes where you are being outperformed and how you can differentiate and move ahead. It will help you identify trends that you can adapt to stay relevant and appealing.
4. How to Enhance Engagement
You don’t know what you don’t know.
Your digital footprint covers a massive area. If you aren’t intentionally tracking all customer reviews and feedback, you are going to miss out on critical data. A brand audit finds everything. You can see where your brand resonates best, and where you need more engagement.
Remember, it’s all about knowing what people think of you and how often you are top of mind. Do people love your video ads? Is your blog the star of the show? Does everyone re-share your witty social posts?
It’s past time to find out.
Key Benefits of a Brand Audit
As your brand audit uncovers more and more about your brand’s positioning in the market and customer opinion, it delivers the following benefits:
1. Strengthening Brand Loyalty
Your brand audit will reveal your customer values, all the ways you clearly align with those values, and the communication opportunities you are missing.
Taking advantage of these opportunities will boost customer loyalty, encouraging repeat business and referrals, which are the highest compliment a customer can pay you.
2. Higher Conversion Rates
77% of consumers make purchase decisions based on brand name. They choose brands they recognize and brands they trust. How do brands gain this coveted status? With clear and consistent branding that tells customers exactly who a brand is, what it does, and how it is there for target audiences.
Gain clarity from your brand audit and make it easy for audiences to interact with you and form a relationship. Make them want to choose you over your competitors.
3. Informed Decision-Making and Cost Savings
Use your brand audit to inform smarter marketing decisions and business strategies. See where you have the greatest presence, what questions people need answered, where you need to clarify your position, and discover any negative news that is disproportionately affecting your brand.
In other words, see where your dollars currently have the most impact, where the most potential lies, and what you need to pivot away from entirely that simply isn’t working for you.
When to Consider a Brand Audit
Okay, now that it’s incredibly clear why a brand audit matters, the next question is, when do you conduct a brand audit?
If you are facing or in the midst of any of the following scenarios, now is the time.
Business Growth or Transition
Have you expanded and entered new markets? Have you rebranded? Any change along these lines merits a brand audit. You need to know how your brand is resonating, if all sites have recognized the change and are accurately reporting it, and if you are still keeping ahead of competitors.
Check out this story of Tropicana. When the brand changed its logo, their sales dropped 20% in one month. Some people reported this was because the brand was no longer recognizable. Others said it was because the new logo made the brand seem cheap and less nutritious.
Either way, this is information you need to know right away so you can swiftly proceed to damage control and climb out of the danger zone.
Change in Executive Leadership
Did you recently have a change in leadership? In this case, consider a brand audit for two reasons:
- New executives might need or want a feel for what’s going on as far as brand presence and reputation.
- Your target audiences can have opinions about the change and you need to know if that’s affecting your market position in any way.
65% of consumers report that a brand’s CEO and employees influence their decision to buy, and 50% of a company’s reputation can be influenced by its CEO.
After Involvement in a Major News Incident
Whether you were involved in a PR crisis or a triumph, you need your finger on the pulse of the digital world. How has this impacted customer sentiment? If negative, what precisely do you need to do to recover? If positive, how can you continue to capitalize on the momentum?
Brand audits deliver specifics for your unique situation.
Decline in Engagement or Sales
Any decline in engagement or sales can signal a brand issue. Is there misinformation around who you are, what you do, and what your brand stands for? Did a recent marketing campaign fall flat or actually alienate customers?
Even the strongest brands mess up sometimes. The last thing you want to do is jump to assumptions. Find out exactly what people are saying and every way it’s impacting your brand. Put out all the fires now and don’t leave any to secretly smolder.
Routine Checkups
Why wait for a crisis or significant change before checking in with the world? Regular brand audits, even when everything seems right on track, help to keep you aligned with your values and audiences, and ahead of the competition.
Running a Brand Audit
Ready to get started? Here’s a high-level overview of what needs to be done.
1. List all your target audiences.
2. Make a list of everywhere these audiences look for you, and how they search for information about your brand. This will likely take some research. Yes, there will be obvious, familiar answers, but there could be platforms that surprise you. Consider:
- Search engines: Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo!
- Social media platforms: YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc.
- Wikipedia
- Generative AI tools: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot. Google Gemini
- Review sites: Yelp, Facebook, Trustpilot, Better Business Bureau, Tripadvisor, Google, Glassdoor, Amazon, etc.
3. Search for mentions of your brand on each platform. Use your brand name, branded keywords, keywords you are ranking for, keywords you’d like to rank for, and keywords you don’t want to rank for.
4. Determine how your brand appears on each platform. Rank yourself on different elements such as:
- Clarity of mission, products, services, and values
- Commitment to values and audiences
- Authenticity
- Relevance – should you be ranking for these keywords? Does it make sense that you are paying for ads on a certain site? Are your target audiences there?
- Differentiation – do you stand out from your competitors?
- Engagement – are you engaging with your audiences? How do they engage with one another when it comes to your brand?
5. For each platform and site, ask these questions:
- Do you have the right information filled out so that audiences get the fullest picture of who you are? For example, if you can share your tagline, have you done so? What about your customer service phone number?
- Is all information presented up-to-date and accurate?
- Are there positive comments and sentiment on the platform?
- Are there negative comments and sentiment on the platform?
- Do you have any champions or detractors to make note of?
Who Should Manage the Brand Audit?
This is a big, important job. You need the right person heading the team. Here are our recommendations.
- You need someone who can be objective. They must not be blinded by biases or preconceived notions.
- Choose someone who will bring a fresh perspective to interpretations of results.
- Choose someone who isn’t afraid to highlight issues and who will also recognize wins.
- The audit will require different analytical tools. Pick someone who already knows how to use these tools and knows which ones to use for different elements of the brand audit.
- Pick someone who understands the market and can create actionable strategies to improve brand performance. Strategies include:
- Creating content, including client controlled content like social media profiles
- Promoting positive media across search engines, social media, and numerous other sites and platforms (i.e. everywhere your brand appears)
- Regularly reviewing online presence and making recommendations to improve and boost awareness and reputation
- Suppress unwanted search results
- Correct online inaccuracies
- Choose someone who can both make short-term plans to fix any immediate problems, and long-term plans to maintain a strong digital brand reputation.
- Select someone who is efficient and focused.
The First Step is Yours
Ready for a stronger brand? Take action today. A brand audit can be a turning point in elevating your brand and gaining a competitive edge.
Questions about anything you read here? Contact us at any time! We’ve conducted many brand audits and created strategies both to improve negative brand perceptions and boost positive brand reputations. We’re ready for you.
The Mather Group LLC is a digital marketing agency. We specialize in enhancing online reputations through authentic content and expert digital brand management. Clients trust us with Wikipedia services, SEO, PPC, and ORM. Don’t like how you’re showing up online? Let’s talk.
