What are the most effective ways to identify areas for customer engagement improvement in a brand audit?

1 Define your customer engagement goals

Before you start your brand audit, you need to define what customer engagement means for your brand and what goals you want to achieve. For example, do you want to increase your website traffic, social media followers, email subscribers, reviews, referrals, or conversions? How do you measure these metrics and how do they relate to your overall brand objectives? Having clear and specific customer engagement goals will help you focus your brand audit on the most relevant and impactful areas.

2 Assess your customer journey

The next step is to assess your customer journey, which is the path that your customers take from becoming aware of your brand to making a purchase and beyond. You need to map out all the touchpoints and channels that your customers interact with your brand, such as your website, social media, email, ads, content, events, customer service, etc. You also need to understand the needs, expectations, pain points, and emotions of your customers at each stage of their journey. This will help you identify the gaps, inconsistencies, and friction points that affect your customer engagement and satisfaction.

3 Conduct a competitor analysis

Another way to identify areas for customer engagement improvement is to conduct a competitor analysis. You need to research and compare how your competitors engage with their customers and prospects across different touchpoints and channels. You need to look for their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, as well as their unique selling propositions, value propositions, and brand personalities. This will help you benchmark your own performance, find out what works and what doesn't, and discover new ways to differentiate and improve your customer engagement.

4 Collect and analyze customer feedback

One of the most important sources of information for your brand audit is customer feedback. You need to collect and analyze feedback from your customers and prospects through various methods, such as surveys, interviews, reviews, testimonials, social media comments, analytics, etc. You need to ask relevant and specific questions that relate to your customer engagement goals and customer journey. You also need to listen to their opinions, suggestions, complaints, and praises. This will help you understand how your customers perceive and value your brand, as well as what motivates and influences their behavior.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?