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Why You Need a Brand Audit to Grow Your Business

To run a successful Business, it takes a lot more than just a good product or service.

Every company or Brand has characteristics unique to itself.

Over time, your business grows, naturally facing ups and downs to fit the environment.

However, it is practically impossible to get every element working together to enhance the business.

At certain points, your business may start diverging from the supporting factors that will directly affect business strategies.

As a business owner, there must be several in your mind related to the business growth, such as losing customers to competitors, downslide in business growth, a sudden lack of sales or revenue.

In dealing with these issues, your company needs to stand out from the competitors.

And what exactly differentiates you from the competitors?

Your Brand Identity.

The effective solution to these problems is to perform a Brand Audit report.

So, let’s learn about the brand review, why your business needs a branding audit and how to do one.

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What Is A Brand Audit?

A brand audit report is a thorough examination or documented process of analysing the brand’s current position in the market.

Comparison to competitors and a review of effective strategy is a large part of that. It assists you in determining the strength and position of your brand in the market along with measurable weaknesses.

It offers you opportunities for improvement and new development areas.

Consider this as the corporate definition of a brand audit.

In simple terms; it is a process of giving your brand a makeover to enhance the performance position.

The methodology of a brand audit report varies between industries and individual organisations.

There are no exact criteria which a business or Brand consultant can follow.

Regardless of the brand audit template, you can consider some measurable points that you can follow in performing a branding audit:

  • The standard and performance of your brand
  • Discover your business’s strengths and weaknesses
  • The demographics of your target audience
  • Aligned strategic objectives of your business to fulfil consumer’s expectations
  • Strategies which can be used to reach desired goals
  • Understand the place of your business in the market.

After the completion of an audit, you will get an accurate diagnosis of the current status of your business in the market.

It will give you certain factors where you need to improve your business strategies and workflows.

However, there is no perfect time to update your business plans, but it is important to be objective during the branding audit.

The baseline of your business’s strategies should be analysed by measurable metrics, – not on subjective opinions.

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Why Your Business Needs A Branding Audit?

A powerful brand has the capability to inspire, captivate and engage a broad audience, consequently increasing the bottom line for your business.

A powerful brand not only attracts premium customers, but also encourages referrals, social engagement, and desire to earn money from new clients too.

A comprehensive audit reveals several new growth and development opportunities for the business.

A professional branding audit example provides the foundations for future growth and creates favourable circumstances for the expansion of the brand.

It can be considered a benchmark for your current business activities which can be compared to future endeavours.

A successful brand audit will help the business in determining the customer’s and company’s viewpoint in several terms such as:

  • Helps you to determine the value of the brand in the market
  • Helps in planning corrective business strategies
  • In discovering the strengths and weaknesses of your business
  • Assists you in reviewing new marketing trends and growth opportunities
  • Recognising the competitive stand in the market
  • Enhancing brand resources
  • New development possibilities and future profitability
  • Business threats responsible for failure
  • Effectiveness of brand management efforts

After performing a brand audit of your business, you will have a good understanding of false strategies and marketing behaviour followed to promote your brand.

While taking help from these outcomes, you can now take positive steps for the growth of your business.

You can create a whole new action plan, readjust your business standards, and acquire new marketing strategies to support your business structure.

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What Are The Elements Of A Brand Audit?

A comprehensive branding audit review comprises of several components:

1 – Analysis of existing marketing and branding strategies, marketing plans, business structure, etc.

2 – Analyse the market, brand research and marketing research. This audit will help you preview your brand as well as competitor’s brand too.

3 – Internal Brand Audit: Internal branding audits assist in determining the future perceptions of the brand and the business. An in-depth research is performed to find how the firm manages by both perspectives, staff, and management. This research can be quantitative or qualitative or both. However, if you are opting for internal brand audit, make sure to consider quantitative elements.

4 – External Brand Audit: To conduct an external branding audit, it requires representative research sample of external stakeholders such as your brand’s potential customers, missing customers, competitor’s customers, media, and suppliers.

While performing an external brand audit, you can get the in-depth understanding of your brand image in the market, and it also helps you in determining the desired brand positioning.

An external branding audit is highly beneficial when it comes to determining the reach of your brand to the end users in certain areas such as brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality, and assistance.

5 – Brand Management Audit: Brand management review helps in determining multiple key areas of your business that defines the desired goal, i.e., the brand’s vision, target sectors, brand standard and strategies, marketing tactics and executions.

Brand management audit also comprises of all the financial elements, measurement of brand’s performance, i.e. KPI and ROI, and communications.

A communication audit is mostly conducted by big enterprises having multiple departments and divisions.

6 – SWOT Analysis: The combined approach of all the brand review mentioned above elements is known as a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

SWOT analysis is a technique of understanding strengths and weaknesses, identifying opportunities and finding threats.

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How Do You Perform A Brand Audit?

The business itself can perform an audit.

As a business, you have all your data readily available to carry out a branding audit.

There are some certain metrics which you can use to measure the growth and strategies of your brand.

However, here are the relevant parameters which you can consider while performing an audit:

1. Create A Framework: To create a structure, you can start analysing the brand’s mission and strategies.

Analyse your target customers, marketing behaviour acquired by your business to reach the customers, major competitors, your product’s strengths and weaknesses and layout of the company.

2. Have A Brief Look At Web Analytics: Web analytics play a vital role in online businesses growth and success rate.

While performing a brand audit, you can include these metrics:

  • Traffic Analysis
  • Bounce Rate
  • Page Views
  • Conversion Rate

3. Ask Questions To Your Customers: After analysing the factors mentioned above, you can conduct surveys for your clients via phone call or email.

You can even try running online polls for a quick customer feedback. It is the effective way to perform quick customer review.

4. Review Social And Sales Data: Reviewing social data will help in recognising the online visibility of your brand.

Whereas the sales data will assist in determining the monthly revenues.

5. Take New Actions And Monitor The Result: After analysing these metrics and performing a comprehensive brand audit, you must be having some highlighted areas where you need to perform or implement new strategies.

So start concentrating on these specific areas and apply new business strategies carrying along the core business values.

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What Are The Benefits Of Performing A Branding Audit?

The list of benefits of performing a brand audit majorly comprises of pros and hardly any cons.

Brand inspection is the best possible way that helps you realise your business’s consistency in the market, weaknesses of the brand, poor marketing strategies and missing opportunities.

There are lots of deliverables of a branding audit that reveals multiple things such as comparison of your brand with the competitor, performance in the market, and lot many doubts.

The benefits and deliverable of a brand audit are:

  • It enhances brand awareness among internal staff
  • Gives you honest opinions on how your brand works as a whole unit
  • It sharpens your marketing communication skills
  • It evaluates your brand positioning
  • It helps in improving brand management efforts
  • It provides whole new direction and lets you create new marketing strategies to enhance the future of your brand
  • It increases the value of your brand with the help of consistent implementations.

Once you evaluate all these deliverable as mentioned earlier of a branding audit, you can create a new action plan, marketing and business strategies, implement better development services and several other tactics that help in the growth and development of your business.

The brand audit helps in determining the areas of problems and helps you in applying new marketing tactics or strategies that result in the growth of your business.

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Author Bio: Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology. He loves technology, especially mobile technology. He’s an avid blogger and writes on mobile applications. He works in a leading mobile app development company with skilled android app developers that has developed innovative mobile applications across various fields such as Finance, Insurance, Health, Entertainment, Productivity, Social Causes, Education and many more and has bagged numerous awards for the same.


If you wish to discuss how we can develop your brand or provide graphic design for your product or business, email us at: [email protected]

Inkbot Design is a Creative Branding Agency that is passionate about effective Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Logos and Web Design.

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