2016 is the Year of UX (user experience) and the first quarter has already brought fresh opportunities for customer engagement for your brand. If you haven’t evaluated your brand’s competitive position recently, it’s time for a review. A strong consumer-focused brand enables you to meet or exceed sales and fiscal goals with less time and effort.
Here are 10 key review points for your brand’s health and success in a consumer-driven marketplace. Use this checklist to evaluate the strength of the brand your sales and fiscal goals are standing on.
10 Point Consumer-Focused Brand Review
- Is your brand fine-tuned to your specific market ?
- Is your message clear and consistent?
- Does it clearly relate your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)?
- Do your brand visuals and brand message support each other?
- Pull data on your best and highest profit customers.
- Does your brand engage those demographics and psychographics well?
- Collect honest data regarding how customers and prospects perceive your brand. Do they receive the message you are trying to communicate?
- Solicit input from returning customers. Why do they come back?
- Solicit input from customers who are not satisfied. Why are they leaving?
- Evaluate your current external communication channels.
- How are your brand messages delivered to customers? Prospects? Community?
- And how/when to they want to hear from you?
- Pull samples of your brand from your website, social media, news, print materials and packaging. Is the brand represented across multiple media consistently and professionally?
- Check your marketing campaigns (traditional and digital) against your brand promise. Are they consistently delivering the right UVP?
- Pull brand samples from your 5 strongest and 5 closest competitors.
- How does your brand fair among the competition in visual strength, clarity and UVP messaging?
- Evaluate the health of your brand internally.
- How are brand elements distributed internally to stakeholders and employees?
- Do they know your UVP or brand promise?
- Are brand elements, colors, fonts, imagery and voice understood and implemented well?
- Do customer interactions support the messaging and brand promise?
- Check your brand messaging and visuals against your pricing and positioning strategy. A premium product shouldn’t have a “blue-light-special” message.
- Perform a SWOT analysis with the data you’ve gathered.
- Make plans for building on strengths and addressing weaknesses in your next quarter.
If you find areas of weakness or uncertainty, address them. It’s helpful to periodically complete a professional communications audit. Hiring an agency to research, analyze and deliver expert recommendations will simplify the process and provide advantages in perspective and strategy.
Your marketing, sales and customer retention rely heavily on the health of your brand. The investment to strengthen your brand position will result in stronger returns in your sales and marketing efforts across all channels and segments of your audience.
For help with a communications audit, call one of our brand experts at 910-938-4319.
