How can you conduct brand audits and research?

If you're an e-commerce company or even one with a digital presence, there's an easy way to define brand strength. It's the number of times people key in your company URL or brand name and come directly to you. Instead of clicking on a random Google search ad, or some long tail SEO link. Every such visit typically saves you money in terms of not having to pay Google or your SEO team for the click. The stronger your brand, the less you'll need to spend on SEM or SEO.

Brands can only grow over a period of time however there has to be methodical steps in that direction for this goal to become achievable over a period of time One of the primary aspects here is awareness of what needs to be tracked and what's the definition of the measurable criteria i.e., definition of each KPI Any research or audit to track the brand progress will only be effective when its backed and aligned to a clear objective

I'm not convinced that all marketers understand "brand" very well at all. Brand is how you ARE perceived, not how you would like to be perceived. So, be clear in your goals to measure perception, not ideals. If you're measuring your ideals, you're missing the gap where actual change needs to happen.

One tool I use is a visual audit. I have the internal team gather a hard copy of every piece of content. This includes everything from marketing brochures to email signatures, packing slips, invoices, user instructions, warranty information, tradeshow graphics, etc. I then have them scatter the materials all over a conference room table and review. Does the information look like it comes from the same organization? That's typically a telling exercise and prompts a list of every customer touchpoint which is your hitlist for getting a brand aligned.

There's data around you if you know where to look. And often this data is better than any focus group meeting. Glassdoor gives a fair idea about how a company treats its own people. Threads on Reddit give you a good idea how a company's customers think of its products. Conversation on the Twitter customer service handle will give you an idea how it handles complaints. Remember no company will be free of service complaints - what differentiates them is how they handle and respond to the complaints. Once you do this, the look at direct 1-to-1 online research. Use tools like Survey Monkey to do this. Do not pay respondents for the answer, but invite it from them as if they were an esteemed advisory panel - and they are.

This is easier said than done. One cannot really see how your brand is perceived versus competition by looking at your typical internal data. You'll need to go outside. Look at data on GlassDoor to see how you and rivals are perceived by employees. Look at reviews data on Amazon to see how you and rivals are perceived by consumers. Look at sub-reddits on Reddit to see how the larger world out there perceives your category. Finally, conduct quick 3- or 4-question objective type surveys without paying respondents to get a true picture of how a subset perceives brands differently. And then extrapolate.

Be cognizant of the way asking has an effect on the answer. Don't measure speculative data (what ifs, would you...). Measure past actions (what they did). What people are willing to tell you is not necessarily the same thing as observing them.

CX Management practices are also a way to collect and analyze data from both internal and external sources. For example: XM Discover - Listen to 100% of all customer conversations and get a brand sentiment analysis to uncover areas of friction that require immediate attention, while at the same time uncover what's working well for your brand and do more of those things across all channels. Re: Reddit - the LLM of ChatGPT was build off Reddit data. Therefore, one might expect that you could enter a question and get responses without the need for surveys. Target your question to brand-specific categories that align with your research questions. Journey Economics - today, you can understand the financial impact of your brand's performance.

We use an in-house tool to measure relative engagement of rival brands' social handles. Distrust the in-house engagement measures of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok. Those are junk. What we do is see the relative virality of each post by each rival to our brands on 3 axes: likeability, shareability and commentability. That gives us a fair idea how the brands communicate on social,and how they are perceived. This is a powerful tool as it drives free brand growth, using organic content.

IMHO more important here than quantitative data is qualitative data. People can engage with a brand frequently, but does their engagement lead to behaviors that matter? Engagement itself should not be the endpoint. Do you see ambassadors and champions or do you see idiots and complainers? Are there just +1 likes or are there conversations? Are people talking about past purchases or are they just hanging on a fad or some humor?

Here's an opportunity to leverage the brain power of people who don't know you. Your bias as a marketing employee may interpret information in ways that aren't objectively true. Utilize your network. Make a list of your assumptions, then test each one.

This instruction assumes you are not a marketing department of one. Instead, construct a series of experiments where you have clearly defined the single item each experiment is capable of measuring (don't combine). Give each experiment a month of run time and don't guess the outcome too early. You may run multiple experiments simultaneously (separately), but each one should only test one factor. Don't worry about KPIs just yet and don't watch the kettle boil. It takes time for behaviors to drift. Repeat experiments where you see promising results and prove that your assumptions about why it worked are correct. This is a continuous process, not a single audit and new drop of tactics.

It's not a final step. It's just an annual check-up, like going to the doctor. But, hopefully you don't just go once a year and then never think about your (brand) health again until next year. It's important to officially assess marketplace changes at least annually, but your business may be one that changes more or less often than that. And there may be events that push circumstances that require more attention. For example, anyone using the same strategy after the pandemic as before is missing the major shift in customer expectations and priorities. Even if you have the same targets, they care about different things than they did before. You know your environment and will need to adjust accordingly, based on what it is you're marketing.

This task has been framed for a marketing department, not a solo-flyer. If you work by yourself on marketing, you may not have as many tools, resources, or even KPIs. Don't let that stop you from a brand audit. Get educated on contemporary marketing practices. Read books by people like Seth Godin, Doug Hall, and Daniel Pink. What many forget is that brand is not a static thing. It's living and breathing in everything the company does and says. You can write a guide to help shape internal behaviors, but brand comes from outside perceptions. Those perceptions change due to factors outside company control. Best advice is to be aware and not afraid of objective critiques from outside. Familiarity makes brand hard for insiders to see sometimes.