- Brand Audit Template
- Brand Audit Checklist
- Brand Audit Report Template
- Brand Audit Presentation Template
- Brand Audiences Audit Template
- Brand Audit Questionnaire Template
- Competitive Brand Audit Template
- Logo Audit Template
- Communication Audit Template
- Internal Brand Survey Template
- External Brand Survey Template
- Brand Asset Management Audit Template
- Brand Engagement Metrics Tracker Template
- What Is a Brand Audit?
- How to Conduct a Brand Audit: 5 Steps
- Audit and Organize Your Assets With Brandfolder
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Every internal and external branding decision you make impacts how your target audience, stakeholders, and competitors view your brand. Your logo, design assets, mission and vision statements, social media accounts, user experiences, and more need to work together to create a cohesive brand.
If you’re considering a rebrand or a refresh of your company’s assets, it’s time to conduct a brand audit. We’ve compiled a list of 13 brand audit templates for professionals at every stage of the auditing process, plus five simple steps for conducting an official audit.
Brand Audit Template
Our comprehensive brand audit template is a great place to start the audit process. This document helps marketers analyze their current branding, identify strengths and weaknesses, and consider three action items for increasing brand effectiveness.
This template walks users through a brand’s core, verbal, and visual identities, which can help elevate branding, eliminate strategy gaps, and prioritize brand improvement.
Brand Audit Checklist
Consider using this template to create a brand audit checklist after an initial audit. You can separate your action items and brand concerns into three categories: external branding, internal branding, and user experiences.
These categories help marketers analyze their brand through the eyes of their stakeholders, customers, target audience, employees, and users, which allows organizations to prioritize branding improvements based on their potential return on investment (ROI) and brand impact.
Brand Audit Report Template
Our brand audit report template provides an official framework for presenting the findings of your brand audit. Use this template to create an executive summary, run a competitive analysis, disclose your methodology, and outline recommendations for external and internal stakeholders.
Brand Audit Presentation Template
Are you convinced your brand needs a refresh, but you can’t get anyone else on board? Our brand audit presentation template can help you create a data-backed presentation to share your findings about your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.
This template allows you to compile data about your brand’s core, visual, and verbal identities, present your challenges in a succinct way, and provide action items and valuable insights to all viewers.
Brand Audiences Audit Template
Your audience comprises more than those who purchase your products or interact with your services. Your marketing efforts should prioritize everyone in your audience, including:
- Past customers
- Existing and future customers
- Potential customers or stakeholders
- Internal and external stakeholders
Our brand audiences audit template is designed to help you understand the customer experience you are providing your audience. Using this template, you can also gain insight into your brand’s value propositions, marketplace and industry perception, unique selling points and key messaging, and the strengths and weaknesses of your products, services, or offerings.
Brand Audit Questionnaire Template
How effective is your current branding? Is your branding helping your company reach its business goals and objectives? If you are unable to answer these questions with certainty, you may need to conduct an effectiveness questionnaire.
Our brand audit questionnaire template helps you understand how your internal and external branding — including your brand’s core, visual, and verbal identities — affects your business success.
Competitive Brand Audit Template
To successfully capture your target marketplace, you need to understand your competitors’ branding. By conducting a competitive analysis using a competitive brand audit template, you can better understand your industry, the needs of your target market, and where your brand can improve.
Logo Audit Template
Your visual assets define your branding. With our logo audit template, you can analyze your brand’s visual identity and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your color choices, typography suite, internal and external design assets, and visual messaging.
Make sure your logo and other visuals follow your brand’s design guidelines, essential logo principles, and personality.
Communication Audit Template
Since your brand communications matter both internally and externally, our communication audit template includes two sections — a communication checklist and a communication audit. Both sections help brands understand their current communication procedures, preparedness, and needs.
Once you have completed the checklist, the communication audit walks you through a seven-step process for evaluating, identifying, performing, reviewing, and publishing the results of the audit.
Internal Brand Survey Template
Thorough brand audits include internal team surveys. Your employees and internal stakeholders know your brand, and their thoughts, concerns, and ideas can inform your brand audit. This internal brand survey template includes questions about a brand’s culture, mission, and value.
The template also includes scaled questions about internal and external assets, marketing, and products or services. Team members can anonymously share any insights, frustrations, or suggestions within the brand audit survey.
External Brand Survey Template
Like the internal survey template, our external brand survey template is designed to help brands collect and analyze customer insights. This anonymous survey can be distributed to past and current customers, target audience members, and external stakeholders.
Use this template to learn how and why customers make purchasing decisions, how your brand makes them feel, and what your unique selling points are.
Brand Asset Management Audit Template
Effective brand asset management helps you maintain your brand identity. With this brand asset management audit template, you can inventory all assets — visuals, videos, logos, icons, audio files, and more — and track project owners, last updated dates, and storage locations.
After you’ve inventoried your brand assets, you can use DAM software to store and organize your assets, grant permissions to developers and designers, and enforce security policies.
Brand Engagement Metrics Tracker Template
This brand engagement metrics tracker template includes some of the most common customer engagement metrics, like subscriptions and page visits. Update this template with your engagement data on the second tab to populate individualized metrics graphs on the first tab.
The graphs and metric tracker are completely customizable, which means you can add or remove data as needed, create and populate additional graphs, and analyze brand engagement from your unique audiences.
What Is a Brand Audit?
A brand audit is a process marketers use to compare a brand to its competitors and understand its strengths in the market. An effective audit will reveal brand weaknesses and areas for improvement, as well as which campaigns are succeeding and why.
An in-depth brand audit analyzes:
- Audience and Brand Identity: Use an audit to understand your brand’s target audience, business personas, and the effects of your internal and external branding.
- Goals: Track the goals and objectives of your brand’s strategy, as well as actions needed to achieve these goals.
- Marketing Strategies: Compare how marketers are using innovative marketing strategies at your brand and your competitors.
- Asset Management: Ensure your brand’s digital assets are created and distributed consistently.
- Customer Experience: Analyze metrics on a customer’s engagement and experience when using branded products or services.
- Brand Awareness: Monitor how your audience feels about your brand and how your marketing campaigns support brand awareness growth.
Marketers can use the information uncovered in a brand audit to make strategic branding decisions, update or recall brand assets, retarget campaigns, and create new internal processes and systems.
Why Are Brand Audits Important?
Brand audits are important because they give marketers a clear picture of a brand’s current marketplace position, performance, and success. An audit can help you understand where your highest ROI improvements lie and what to prioritize when brainstorming new strategies.
When Should You Conduct a Brand Audit?
You should conduct a brand audit when you are considering any significant changes to your brand’s strategy or major business initiatives. That includes:
- Rebrands: During a rebrand or refresh, conduct an audit of your current logos, designs, goals, target audiences and personas, and other brand-based assets.
- Expansions: Conduct a brand audit before expanding into a new market or targeting a new audience. You may need to adjust your current assets to be successful.
- Mergers or Acquisitions: Whether you merge with or are acquired by an existing company, your business will undergo an audit to examine existing strategies and inventory assets.
Brand audits help all organizational members understand the brand assets at their disposal and learn whether assets need to be created, are outdated, or are incorrectly categorized.
How to Conduct a Brand Audit: 5 Steps
When conducting a brand audit, it’s important to complete the process for your entire brand. Successful audits should cover these areas:
- Internal Branding: Audit your brand’s core values, mission and vision statements, company culture, and other internal branding assets.
- External Branding: Consider what your external stakeholders see, including your logo, brand colors and typography suite, design assets, social media, and other external messages.
- User Experience: Inspect your customer service processes, user support, and physical and digital user experiences.
To check your brand's health in these three areas, you can run a brand audit in five steps.
1. Identify Your Needs
Before conducting a brand audit, examine what you want to achieve. Are you changing your brand strategy, expanding your marketing, or merging with a new business? Complete a needs analysis of your business to understand the goals of your audit.
By identifying your needs, you can understand your current positioning, gaps between you and competitors, and areas where your branding can improve.
2. Define Your Objectives
Once you’ve identified your needs, outline your audit-related objectives. It’s important to have goals in mind before conducting your audit. Whether broad or narrow, your objective must be achievable through the steps or findings of a brand audit.
At this stage, you should also identify your overarching business goals to recognize how your current branding has affected your performance.
3. Design an Audit Plan or Use a Template
By step three, you’re ready to begin the framework process of your brand audit. You can design your own plan or use one of our free brand audit templates included in this guide to lead your data collection and analysis.
Consider performing a SWOT analysis at this stage to recognize what your audit should focus on.
4. Collect and Analyze Data
The bulk of your brand audit input will consist of real-time data. During this step, you should pull data directly from your customers and software — including your digital asset management software.
You can collect data for your brand audit using various methods:
- Surveys: Create and administer questionnaires for your customers to collect their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors associated with your brand.
- Social Media: Analyze your social media data to understand your target audience through their demographics, likes and dislikes, pain points, engagement, and brand awareness.
- Web Data: Web analytics can show you how your audience interacts with your online services and help you understand your conversion and click-through rates, user experiences, website traffic, and online performance.
- Competitor Analyses: Compile a list of your competitors and analyze their current marketing efforts, how they engage with their audience, their social media presence, customer experiences, and value propositions.
While analyzing your data, it’s important to organize your findings as you go. Consider logging qualitative data in spreadsheets and storing user-provided quantitative data in copy-based documents. At this step, focus on analyzing your data to gain insights about your brand’s current strategies
5. Implement and Monitor Solutions
Your audit analysis should give you ideas for brand improvements. During the last stage of your brand audit, use your data to brainstorm solutions, implement them into your branding, and monitor their success using the methods covered in step four.
Depending on your needs and objectives, you can also use A/B testing for multiple solutions to find the best one for your brand.
Audit and Organize Your Assets With Brandfolder
Conducting a brand audit shouldn’t feel overwhelming, especially if you use brand audit templates. With Brandfolder by Smartsheet, you can store, tag, define, and organize your assets for your brand, simplifying asset audits and usage for your whole team.
Our digital asset management software is designed with your flexibility and scalability in mind, which can help you keep your assets updated and on-brand.