Evaluating your brand highly recommended practice to understand how your potential customers think about your company. Furthermore, it is a great exercise to discover how to smooth out techniques, increment effectiveness, and reduce marketing costs.
Before you can survey if a brand review is appropriate for your firm, you should initially have a comprehension of what the expression “brand review” truly implies.
What is a brand audit?
Every brand needs a refresh from time to time, to align it’s values and messages to ever-changing customer expectations, technology, and social trends. Surface-level changes are typically focusing on graphical elements, but in order to action meaningful and purposeful changes, a deeper analysis is required.
Your brand is not how you define it, but how it exists in the minds of your potential customers. In order to measure and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, it is necessary to get meaningful from your target audience – in large quantities.
A brand strategy is as good as it’s execution, so even with the best brand guidelines in place, what needs to be measured and monitored is the actual marketing communication, and what impressions it makes on your target audience. Changes in a marketing team, especially in management positions are frequently causing deviations from the original brand guidelines and strategies.
A brand review ought to get a comprehensive assessment of your brand image in 2 ways:
- The present recognition and popularity of your brand, benchmarked with competitors
- Understanding which aspects of your brand trigger like and dislike in your target audience
Our brand audit solution offers a pure survey and audience-opinion-based approach that excludes any subjective human opinion. Our surveys are streamlined to collect meaningful information such as score ratings and comments from people in your target audience.
Should you do a brand audit yourself, or internally with your team?
No, it is not recommended. Performing a brand review with inside assets just can regularly slant the information dependent on one-sided suppositions. It is unlikely that people involved with the company will be able to provide unbiased feedback, and quite frankly your peers might not even be able to see the business through the eyes of potential customers.
Always ask the opinion of your potential customers. Forget the opinion of your marketing consultant, as well as the branding-related input of your friends and family. Quite likely they will not be able to see your business as a customer, and once again, their opinion will be biased.
Why should you audit your brand regularly? What are the benefits?
Solid brands attract best-in-class talents, appeal to more customers, stand the test of time, and ultimately generate cash flow. What separates strong brands from amateur ones is their brand management practices.
Most small businesses brand their company to the linking of their owners and stakeholders, giving little to no consideration to what actual customers would like or expect to see from them.
In a slightly better situation, small to medium-sized companies start off with a professional brand strategy that works out great for a few years, then starts to fade away as trends are changing.
The most successful brands listen to their customers and manage their branding and marketing communications dynamically, with regular subtle and minor changes that often go unnoticed, but keep the brand fresh and relevant. This approach helps to avoid “complete rebrandings” and other risky practices that can alienate loyal customers or trigger dislike from the target audience.
This process requires continuous brand auditing. Brands with an active audience often use social listening tools like Brand24 and BrandWatch, combined with customer perception measurement solutions like Brand Auditor.
The main purpose of a brand audit is to understand what your customers think about your company, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing communications, and understand what changes to make to make your business received better.
Why popular brands lose engagement and interest over time? What makes big brands fail?
Well-known companies with strong brand awareness are not safe from the risk of becoming boring and unpopular. Ask any executives who were in the management of once-popular brands, they will all tell a similar story: they found a good branding and marketing communications formula and kept doing it even after the market has changed.
The main reason behind brands failing is not adjusting to new realities, not updating their ways of communications and values they aim to convey through their branding and marketing management.
Successful brands regularly seek feedback from their audience regarding how to adjust and optimize their branding. Most mid-size companies follow decade-old brand guidelines or create brand concepts that were proven to work 10 years ago. Lacking dynamism and flexibility in branding will likely expose the company to substantial risk.
Do not buy brand audits that reflects the opinion of one person (like a brand consultant).
If you decided to purchase a brand audit, do yourself a favor and do not buy an essay-like audit from an independent consultant or freelancer. Regardless of the price, the information value of such audits is minimal – as these kinds of reports mostly reflect the opinion of one person.
Despite done with expertise and best efforts, brand evaluations and audits from an individual can do more harm than benefit, unless the report is based on extensive surveying and customer feedback.
In most cases, such reports consist of information and statistics that are easily available for you and your team, like Google Analytics stats, Google Trends comparisons, and social media statistics. You do not need a consultant to compile a report based on those.
As recommended by most branding experts, a brand audit needs to be as objective as possible, and undoubtedly the best way to get that is by asking thousands of people in your target market. Brand Auditor offers an excellent solution for this.