The road to Brand Equity – the commercial value of a brand as a result of the brand’s consumer perception – can be long arduous, but having a plan can set you up for success instead of utter failure.
Here are some steps you can take to audit your brand and identify possible sources of brand equity.
Every good building starts with a strong scaffold.
When you build a brand or business from the bottom up, important things like your mission and objectives are necessary to recognize what you’ll be working toward. Once you have determined your brand’s intentions or strategy, it becomes easier to know what goals you’ll be measuring.
Ask and you shall receive.
Survey your customers and followers. Ask them questions about your brand to confirm their perceptions of your brand and your products and assess what they believe you are doing right, wrong, or can be doing to meet their needs as consumers of your brand.
Analytics tell a story.
We are fortunate to live in a world where web and social media data are abundant and easily accessible if you take advantage of the analytics tools in your social business profiles and websites.
Leverage that data to explore trends and patterns that can help you gauge what your engagement looks like during specific campaigns and assess what has worked for your brand. There are tools available for social media analysis that categorize key words and mentions that can allow you to see the associations people are making about your brand.
Money talks.
Whether you sell products or make monetized content, sales data is a great predictor of brand health. Make connections between peaks in revenue and peaks in consumer activity – both good and bad. This analysis can provide insight into your customer journey and indicate your strengths, weaknesses, and potential setbacks of your brand.
Keep the competition close.
Unless your brand is extremely unique that it has no competition, you should be paying attention to what your competitors are doing. Where do they outperform your brand? Or what does your brand do better? What does the competitive landscape look like in terms of saturation and where do you stand in that market? Understanding this can help you determine how far you have to go to be recognized above the rest.
Ready, set… action!
Once you have your plan and have determined actionable items and target areas for your brand, you have to monitor the progress of your objectives and take note of the results. This is the part that takes a while. It may require some trial and error of different tactics to boost your engagement, stats, and revenue, but the more you keep analyzing, the more you start to understand your brand and help it become a healthy and successful.
Things may change along the way, as trends come in waves, but as long as you get good at auditing your brand, your brand will be audit can be.
