A brand audit is a great way to discover whether your brand is effectively marketing your business. You can assess your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, and how your customer base or business may have changed since you first established the brand.

Want to make sure your brand does everything you need it to do? Here are the steps you’ll need to take to conduct a brand audit.

What Is a Brand Audit?

A brand audit is a thorough assessment of your brand, allowing you to see what elements work and what might need more — or less — attention. Your brand audit tackles three elements of your brand to improve the full picture:

• Internal branding
• External branding
• Customer experience

Once the brand is assessed, you should have a report of what parts of your brand effectively reach your customer base and what elements of your brand fail to serve your business. You can conduct a brand audit yourself or with the help of a marketing professional.

How To Conduct a Brand Audit

Planning to conduct your own brand edit? Here are the steps that you should follow:

Identify the Brand Elements That You Need To Audit

As mentioned above, the brand audit covers internal branding, external branding, and customer experience. But within each of those categories are different brand elements that you need to examine in your brand audit.

Internal branding includes the atmosphere and feel of your company from within. How is your business represented to your team, and how does your team represent your business to your customers? This includes things like:

• Company values
• Vision and mission statement
• Internal company culture
• Human resources

External branding refers to the visuals and marketing of your brand, including:

• Logo and any slogans
• Print and digital marketing and advertising
• Your online and social media presence
• Public relations

Finally, customer experience relates to the way your customers experience your brand. Is it engaging and easy to understand? Is it relevant to their lives and interests? Do they have a good experience when they interact with your business? Customer experience is key if you want to turn one-time customers into loyal regulars, get good reviews, or have your business promoted by word of mouth.

Make Sure Your Marketing Materials Are Cohesive and Effective

Do you market your business through print, digital, or a combination of both? Take some time to assess your marketing materials. Your print brochures, posters, and logo should all look like it comes from the same company as your digital marketing materials. Does it look faded or outdated? If so, consider updating marketing materials.

Consider how effective your different forms of marketing are, as well. It may be that you need to cut loose a less effective form of marketing to make more time for something more effective.

Examine Web Analytics

Web analytics can be extremely handy when conducting a brand audit. A data dashboard such as Google Analytics can give you a sense of how much interaction your online presence is getting and where. Web analytics can answer questions such as how many users visit your website, what pages they look at, what ads they respond to, and how long they spend on the webpage.

With web analytics, you can get a sense of how much customers actually engage with your brand elements. If you see a certain trend of some elements working better than others, you might consider featuring that more prominently in your brand.

Ask Your Customers

One way to ensure that your brand is actually reaching your customers is to ask for the opinions of your target audience. This could include taking a poll on social media or conducting a survey. Surveys could offer the incentive of a discount or exclusive content as a thanks for taking part. You can ask about their experience as a customer, what brought them to your company, what they use your company for, and how likely they are to recommend it.

Remember that you won’t be able to please everyone, and your brand can feel a little vague and wishy-washy if you try. However, you can take the results of your poll or survey on an average to get a sense of what your target audience likes and what they don’t.

After Conducting Your Brand Audit

Go over the results of your brand audit and consider the positives and the negatives. Where your brand seems to be representing your company well, reaching customers, and boosting company culture, keep it. You may even consider putting more resources into those elements to take your brand to the next level. If brand elements are no longer serving your business in other ways, you can consider phasing it out or tweaking it to make it more relevant.