Are you experiencing sudden downfall in your business? Are you losing your customers to your competitors? If you are having these two above problems then you need to conduct a brand audit in your business. As a business owner, you know that the competition is quite high. That’s why you are applying various methods to stand out from the competition. There are thousands of products which are available in the market and the only way to stay ahead of the competition is through “differentiation” and Brand is the only thing that differentiates your business.
Brand Auditing is a process where you can evaluate your brand position, strength and weakness. This will also help you know the methods to strengthen your business. This covers in 3 areas:
Internal Branding: This is the very first thing you need to do is, evaluating your brand value, mission, and company culture.
External Branding: In this second process, you will examine your business logo, content strategy, content marketing, social media presence, public relation, and website.
Customer Experience: n this last method you will monitor your sales presence, customer support, and customer service policies.
There are so many advantages for conducting a brand audit as it helps you to determine your brand positioning and also empowers you to discover the strengths and weaknesses of your business. If you want to perform this then you can hire any marketing company or you can also do it all by yourself. Below we have mentioned step by step guide to perform this.
Create a Framework
Before performing this, you need to start looking at your mission and strategic objectives in order to create a framework. Firstly, you need to consider your target audience, your marketing plans and the type of business that you are in. You need to check on your marketing strategy which also includes the plans for attracting attract customers on the basis of geographically, job roles, sector, buyer personas. This plan also includes product portfolio, distribution channels, partnerships, competitors and pricing.
Get Answer
You cannot get rely on web and social numbers because this will not help you to get a complete picture. Conduct surveys by email or telephone as a part of your marketing strategy. You can also perform an online questionnaire for free so that you can able to know what your costumers think about your brand or products. Knowing your customer’s experiences is an important part of the audit. These questionnaires will help you to know what your customers think about your brand and your products. If you have an official page on Facebook, then you can start a Facebook poll to get answers to your questions. This will give you instant feedback on social media websites.
Investigate your Web Analytics
As 85% of customers conduct online research so traffic of your website is very important. You need to take at your web analytics program seriously to know how your website is performing. This will give you clear information if your brand is gaining popularity or not. These analytics include few metrics.
Traffic Analysis: You need to analysis your traffic and identify whether they are coming from your geographical areas or from the markets that you are targeting. Make sure you identify what kind of traffic is increasing, before assuming everything looks well.
Bounce Rate: You also need to check your bounce rate to get the percentage of people who have visited your website and leave it immediately. A high bounce rate implies that there is something wrong with your website that is making your visitors go away.
Pageviews: This will help you to know the number of times each page of your website is visited. This is especially important if you have an e-commerce website. You can able to know which products are very popular or being checked out by your users.
Conversion Rate: This is another important metric for e-commerce website as it helps you know the number of goals that your website has achieved. You can also know your visitor's activities such as product purchase, account creation, newsletter subscription. Make sure that you check your conversion rate on regular basis.
Cross-Examine Communication
If you have an e-commerce website then it is very important to check and discover any glitches in the system. This will let you know the key features of your websites including navigation, shopping cart, and checkout. Make sure that you test these critical factors:
Security Testing: Your website needs to guarantee that all privacy-related concerns are tested properly. Make sure that you check user privileges and data integrity.
Data Migration: As you know that users will import and export their data from your application so validating data migration is also important.
Performance Testing: Make sure that you test SaaS application with the number of users from various locations.
Review Your Sales
As a brand owner, no doubt you will check your ongoing monthly reporting, but you need to coordinate it with rest of the audit data to identify problem areas. It will bring out specific areas that are causing problems so that you can solve these problems.
Look at Your Competitors
This process will help you to analyze how your brand stands against your competitors. This will give you a clear picture of your position in the market. You might take help of competitor analysis tools where you can track your SEO and rankings, backlinks, traffic, emails, and content.
You need to consider your competitors in your target market as well as those that came up to the same search results.
Monitor Results and Take Actions
Your brand audit is useless if you don’t work on your highlighted issue. You need to make a detailed report of your audit and start working on your problem areas. First, make an action plan and resolve it along with expected results. After all your plans are executed make sure that you repeat this audit after a few months. This will give you a clear picture of whether your plans are working or not.
