Conduct An Online Brand Audit - Business Branding

We’re currently past the phase of debating whether or not building brands is important. It’s been proven time and time again that a strong brand impacts customer purchase decisions therefore impacting a business’s bottom line.

The Challenge

What happens after a brand has been thoughtfully created and established?

How are you evaluating your brand’s performance?

How is your brand being perceived by the public?

How is it doing in the eyes of your customers? 

How are you managing and tracking your brand’s reputation?

Think about the cases where a lot of budget has been allocated to crafting the perfect brand visual identity, messaging or compelling brand campaign but a company will still have negative associations tied to it.

Or the cases where your company is doing multiple brand marketing initiatives but you’re not sure which levers are driving results and which ones are causing you to lose out on significant market share.

The Path Forward

If you want a clear pulse on how your brand is performing and being perceived - so you can strategize more effectively - this course is for you.

A Brand Audit provides clarity on exactly how your brand is doing; what’s broken, inconsistent or confusing customers in addition to providing clarity on what is resonating with prospects and helping you get ahead of competitors.

Most other courses offered on the Udemy platform cover the work that needs to be done to build a brand from the ground up. This course dives into the stage after your brand has been built and you’re wondering “What's broken? What’s working”

A Brand Audit uncovers your accurate positioning in a market, not the positioning you and your team outlined for the business, we're talking about where the target audience actually ranks you in their heads --and see if that’s aligned with your team’s internal vision

A well conducted Brand Audit lets you know if the perceptions of your brand are negative or positive and provides context into why, letting you know what needs to be fixed or what you need to double down on.

Your instructor on this course, Dana Mando, is a marketing communications specialist who has managed and audited global brands for over a decade. She will be sharing her knowledge and guiding you through the framework of conducting and online Brand Audit in today's competitive landscape.

So much goes into forming a brand’s reputation, image and perception, while a lot of it is driven by a company's own marketing efforts, MUCH of a brand’s image is informed by external forces. Things like conversations happening on online channels your brand doesn’t own. Like a thread on Reddit discussing the pros and cons of a specific company. Or a negative review of a company written within a blog. These are all things that can actively make or break your prospect’s perception of your business.

A brand audit takes all this into account.

A lot of the work you put into brand marketing can feel elusive and Initiatives can have vague results. Band audits are practical, checklist driven, logical and most importantly trackable. In this course you’ll get access to structured tools and templates that inform a sound brand strategy.

The course follows the below framework of building an Online Brand Audit:

1. Business Overview & Alignment

   This first crucial step involves level-setting to identify the business's current priorities, goals and any micro/macro factors impacting the business as a whole. Most importantly this step concludes with mapping out your Brand Audit's objectives to ensure the rest of the framework has clear direction.
   

2. Evaluation Of Online Assets

   Here you'll be evaluating your brand’s owned online channels for strengths and weaknesses to see how your controlled online brand presence is coming across to your customers. You will learn all the ways you are either helping or damaging your brand image.
   

3. Online Reputation Audit

   Here you'll be uncovering your brand's accurate reputation and perceptions among your target audience and the public, this step includes the following key sections:

   • SEO Audit:
     Here your brand's SEO strength will be put to the test with a search engine ranking analysis in addition to an assessment of your company's SEO efforts.

   • Online Mentions:
     Quantitative and qualitative data that uncovers your brand's true reputation and image. You will learn first hand how your target audience speaks about your brand online and identify what's shaping your brand's reputation.

   • Web Analytics:
     Here we'll be analyzing the metrics that keep your online business alive. In this evaluation you will diagnose and identify what is either confusing your customers or what is increasing engagement through looking at key website metrics. We'll be looking specifically at: traffic, bounce rate, page views and conversion rates.
     

4. Competitive Analysis

   In this section you'll be identifying the context and industry your brand is operating in, you'll learn everything from top industry trends and projections to who the top players are in your market. Most importantly you'll be identifying your business's direct competitors and how well your brand is ranked against them using a brand perceptual map. This step is broken down to the following sections:

   • Defining Your industry

   • Industry Overview

   • List Of Competitors

   • Perceptual Map
     

5. Brand Strategy & Tactics

   You’ll be developing a concluding brand strategy and integrated online marketing communication plan using all the findings you gathered from your audit. The beauty of this plan is it’s based on precise gaps and opportunities that were made clear through the audit, putting you in the perfect position to strategize.

Finally the course will conclude with a bonus lecture reviewing the areas AI can be used to facilitate the online brand audit process.

Live Case study:

Throughout this course your instructor will be building an online brand audit from scratch, using a live case study of a well known Saas company, putting all the theory in the framework into action.

Enroll now to start building your own Online Brand Audit & Strategy to get closer not only to your brand goals but to your business goals too!