Have you conducted a brand audit?
If you read my post Why is brand consistency important? and are sitting there thinking what the heck am I going to do with all of this information and numbers?!
I get it, and we're going to help you work through that.
When the new year really just now starting, it’s a perfect time to do a brand audit. You can certainly pay someone to do this for you, but definitely something you can do yourself.
Conducting a brand audit at the beginning of a new quarter or year is also useful analytics wise.
If you keep up with your internal project tracking and customer engagement, now is the time to analyze and see what worked and what didn’t.
Once you’ve compiled that information and seen where you can improve, the final step to starting fresh is conducting a brand audit.
Part 1 - Internal audit
Rather than focusing on your external branding, the first step in a brand audit is to start reviewing your internal branding because everything else really builds upon that foundation.
So what are your brand values? What is your mission statement? What is your company culture?
If you're sitting here like oh my gosh I don't have a mission statement or brand values right now or I can't couldn't really tell you what my company culture is that's totally fine.
Entrepreneurs (myself included) skip this step all the time because we are so excited about getting our companies launched, getting into the weeds of what it is we're selling, and talking to our customers.
The problem that arises is if you don't have this foundational work done, it makes communicating things externally a lot harder.
So if you don’t have these things already, here are a couple things you need do:
First, watch a video from Simon Sinek called “Start With Why — How great leaders inspire action” it's on YouTube. The version I like is 18 minutes long, there's a five minute version but it cuts out a lot of the good stuff. We send this video to all of our branding clients because it’s so critical for us to understand what their “why” is. Once you know what your “why” is, it’s a lot easier to craft these brand values, mission statement etc.
Second, company culture is one of the things I recommend to evaluate. Do a survey for your employees (if you have employees) or even some focus groups. Get feedback on what their why is. These are the people who have bought into your beliefs and know more than anyone externally about how you operate. So check in on their motivations and beliefs and see if there is some synergy there to build off of.
Part 2 - External Audit
Once you've done a good audit of your internal branding now it’s time to focus on your external branding.
This includes but is not limited to you:
Logo
Color palette
Fonts (do you even have specific fonts?)
Print and online advertising (both the messaging and the visual aspects of those)
Marketing materials whether that be your brochures, or business cards, even your email signature.
You also want to think about your PR and your media relations.
Do you have a Media Kit that you're sending out? If so, what does it look like?
Website landing and lead pages (so when you're finally getting people to take action and they're landing on your site to where they can actually purchase your product or service, what is that site look like?)
Social media presence (both the way your social media feed looks and the tone of voice in the captions)
Email marketing and your content marketing.
Part 3 - Customer Experience
The last thing you want to review is your customer experience.
The best way to see if your customer experience is fluid and efficient is to follow their journey.
Start by following the trail of your customer to your website or the landing page where they make a transaction.
If the customer makes a transaction, what happens after?
Customer service and what happens post-sale is nearly as important as the purchase itself as it can reaffirm a positive interaction or turn into a one time purchase where you never see that customer again.
Do your customers get emails thanking them for their purchase?
Do you send them a postcard?
Do you send them an option to write you a review?
All of these checkpoints are things that should be branded and have consistency just like all of your external marketing so throughout the customer experience journey, they’re consistently exposed to consistency (yep that’s a tongue twister.)
You can only be so objective when evaluating your own brand, so a good way to get a feel for how your customers feel about your process for them is to send out a survey to those who will be able to give you the best feedback of what your current situation is.
If you're finding that your current clients aren't your ideal client, some steps you can take are setting up some interviews with some people who are in your target demographic.
Not only will this give you a better idea of how to bridge the gap between you two, but also can give you an opportunity to start building a relationship with people in that target demographic without doing a Hard Sell.
All of these are parts of your brand, and essentially parts of you, that you need to think about making consistent.
Got a good To-Do list? Great! Here’s a checklist you can print off along with a few tips we find helpful for our own internal and external auditing.
