Reviewing your brand: How to conduct a brand audit yourself

All right! So you know all about the benefits of conducting a brand audit and why it’s a great idea to do one. While getting someone to conduct a brand audit for your business means you’ll have the advantage of an unbiased and neutral evaluation, I know it’s not always possible to bring someone in.

That’s why I’ve put together this handy guide to take you through the steps of how to conduct a brand audit yourself and review your brand!

Let’s get right into it.

Some benefits of a brand audit

Let me quickly recap some of the great reasons why you’d want to conduct a brand audit.

Evaluates the performance of your brand
Provides deeper insight into the direction of your brand
Assesses how well your brand is engaging with your intended audience
Identifies your brand’s strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement

1. Put together your brand summary

The first thing you want to do is define your brand and create a brand summary. This will be a framework that you can use to measure the effectiveness of your brand elements. To set this up, answer these questions about your brand:

What are the goals for your brand?
What are your brand values?
Who is your core customer?
What is your brand’s personality?

This is also a good time to brainstorm any problems you are currently facing with your business that you want to fix. You can also keep that in mind while carrying out the audit.

2. Consider your audience

Let’s take a closer look at your customers. Consider these questions:

How do you want your customers to feel when interacting with your brand?
What do you do to engage with your customers?
How do they find you?
Do they come back time and time again? (Customer loyalty)

If you collect testimonials from past customers/clients, then take a look over them and see if there are reoccurring themes. You can also look at any other interactions you’ve had with customers, like emails or social media comments. Take note of positive and negative points made.

3. Make a list of everything that makes up your brand

To conduct a brand audit effectively, you’ll want to take a close look at each and every part of your brand. Everything from your logo to your website to your brand voice.

To make it easier, I’ve created a handy checklist of items that you can use to keep track. Here is a step-by-step guide to take you through the process of a brand audit on your business or blog. Download it free! You might not have everything on this list (you probably don’t need it all) and that’s totally okay. I’ve left room on it for some quick notes, which might be useful for the next section of the brand audit.

4. Go through your list and evaluate each item

As you go through the checklist of brand elements, measure it against what you’ve written for your brand summary. Ask yourself if the item is:

true to your brand’s values
helping you achieve your goals
portraying the right mood and
evoking the right emotion from customers
consistent with your visual identity

Make sure you’re being as unbiased as possible! You might feel attachments to some parts of your branding (or even the opposite and you’re bored with it!), but make sure any decisions about the quality of your brand is coming from as neutral a point of view as you can.

As you evaluate your brand elements, decide whether they are working or not. You can divide things up like this:

Yes, it’s working. I’ll keep it.
No, it’s not working. I’ll fix it.
No, it’s not working. I’ll get rid of it.

5. Make a plan to implement necessary changes

If anything needs fixing or replacing, make sure you set aside time in your schedule to do it! It’s no good going through the work of conducting a brand audit, identifying problems, and then not fixing them.

It can be easy to procrastinate and think “well, it’s kinda working, so it’ll be okay for now…” but don’t fall into this trap! Strong brands are more profitable and successful. If there are weaknesses in your business’s brand, don’t delay making the changes to fix them.

Last thoughts

If you’ve worked through the steps of this brand audit guide, then congratulations! I hope your brand audit has left you in a better performing place with a better understanding of what makes your brand work.

Don’t forget that maintaining the health of your brand means taking a look into it’s workings at regular intervals, so make a note in your calendar of when you plan to next review your brand (one year from now is a great start).

How is your brand looking?