How can a brand audit help you outsmart your competition?

It’s easy to blame your competitors when growth stalls. They got in early. They’ve already made their name and won over their customers. Now they get to coast while you’re fighting for your startup’s survival. The truth, however, is another story.

Industry leaders got where they are today because of one simple rule: continual innovation. Rather than coasting, they’ve invested time, money, and effort into defending their market share against you and the many others who want to steal their customers.

A lot of work goes into building a business, but even more goes into maintaining it. If you want to rise to the top and stay there, you better be prepared to put the work in. A good place to start is a relatively simple yet overlooked process called a brand audit.

As you rise through the ranks of your niche, soaking up market share as you go, remember to take stock of the rapidly changing market. Assess your situation both internally and externally, and your position at the top will be a sure one.

What is a brand audit?

While it might sound like another piece of marketing jargon, a brand audit is actually pretty simple (and powerful). It’s an in-depth and detailed analysis of your brand, how it's performing against targets, and how these findings have affected your standing in the market.

While the exact criteria for your audit will depend on your business, here are four things you’ll want to accomplish:

1.      Quantify how well your brand is currently performing.

2.      Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your brand.

3.      Align your business strategy with customer needs and expectations.

4.      Gauge your performance against that of your competitors.

Who conducts the audit is up to you. You or your team can do it, or you can ask a branding agency who specializes in this kind of work to do it on your behalf. So let’s look at what a brand audit entails.

How to audit your brand

Whether you or someone else audits your brand, you need to follow these steps to provide an accurate and helpful set of results.

Step 1: Understand your brand’s purpose

Before you can audit a brand, you need to understand what its purpose is. That means looking into the very core of your business:

·        What are you trying to accomplish? 

·        What are your business objectives? 

·        Who is your target customer? 

·        How will you catch their attention and get them to buy from you? 

·        What’s happening in your market? 

·        What factors affect your ability to give customers what they want?

The answers to these questions constitute the framework upon which you’ll evaluate your brand.

Step 2: Ask your customers for input

Business leaders often rely too much on data and not enough on what their customers are (or aren’t) saying. Always ask your customers for feedback – not only does it help you, but it makes them feel special. There are lots of ways to this: phone or email surveys, web-based questionnaires, face-to-face meetings, and so on.

However you do it, pay attention to what comes back – even (and especially) if it’s bad. When your customers tell you what’s wrong with your product or service, listen carefully and figure out a way to solve the problem.

Whatever you do, don’t ignore negative feedback or discard it as ignorance. Your customers’ opinions are the single most important yardstick by which to measure your performance. After all, without them, you don’t have a business.

Step 3: Analyze your web traffic

After customers, comes data. Start with web analytics to see what kind of traffic your business website gets:

·        How many people are visiting?

·        Where do they come from?

·        What do they do while there?

·        How long do they spend on your website?

·        How many of them return?

Pay attention to both organic and paid traffic. Combined, these measures indicate how many people find you through search or word-of-mouth versus those from paid channels. They’ll also reveal the success of advertising campaigns, SEO, content strategy, web copy, and so on.

Of course, the most important measure is the conversion rate:

·        How many people visiting your site end up as customers?

·        What’s behind high rates?

·        What’s behind low rates?

·        How has the conversion rate changed over time?

·        How can it be improved?

A strong brand will drive a high conversion rate, so it’s important to understand how the two correlate.

Step 4: Gather social media data

Social media provides more demographic information than standard web analytics. Both are important, but social media will tell you more about your audience, and whether or not you’re engaging and selling to the right people.

Social intelligence platforms like Brandwatch curate social media data for you. They can reveal customer interests, who are posting links to your website (and therefore qualifies as an influencer), location data, and lots more.

Step 5: Review sales data

Your sales data is perhaps the most important metric of them all. Combine sales data with all the factors mentioned above and you can detect patterns or changes that have had a positive or negative impact on sales. 

For example, did a change in keywords in your web copy cause a drop in traffic, and therefore, a decline in sales?

Step 6: Learn what your competitors are doing

Know your enemy might be an extreme phrase, but the principle applies. Ignore your competitors and they’ll lay waste to your best intentions, hoovering up market share from beneath your feet. So you need to pay attention to them at all times:

·        How do their sales compare to yours? 

·        What kind of marketing campaigns do they run?

·        How do their products or services compare to yours?

Consider using a web-based tool that analyzes your competitors. They can usually derive web metrics, social data, and lots of other meaningful information. Once you’ve figured out what your competitors are right and wrong, you can use that information to your advantage.

Step 7: Act on your audit and track the results

Now you've got all this data about your company, your customers, and your competitors, what do you do with it? Well, it’s time to develop an action plan:

·        Figure out your shortcomings and how to fix or work around them.

·        Determine what your customers want and give it to them.

·        Learn what your competitors are doing and work out how you can do it better, faster, cheaper, or easier.

Once you've defined and implemented your action plan, monitor the results. If your action plan fails, begin again from step 1 to root out the problem. And if successful, don’t let complacency fool you into handing over market share to your competitors – keep an eye on your results to sustain and improve them.

A brand audit isn’t a one-time fix but a lifetime strategy designed to keep you at the peak of your game. Markets change. You need to change with them or you’ll fall behind. Audit your brand regularly and you’ll stay ahead of the pack when the landscape changes.