A competitive brand audit illuminates the environment in which your brand exists, demonstrating how competitors communicate with consumers, how they position their brand and how your strategy compares. Effective competitive brand audits uncover how your brand truly stacks up against these competitors along important elements of brand strategy, revealing strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to differentiate.
By surfacing your most pertinent strengths and weaknesses, these audits pave the way for relentless action, providing the context necessary to determine how you outperform your competitors and deliver the best possible experience to sustain loyal customers. This guide explains how to do a brand audit, what an effective competitive audit entails and how to convert the insights you gain into actionable strategies that allow you to stand out in your vertical.
Competitive audits provide insight into your market position and guide decision-making to help you stay salient and recognizable. By understanding your brand performance relative to your competitors, you gain a baseline metric for how you can improve your products, enhance your communications and boost relationships with your customers.
All together, these audits allow you to accomplish the following:
Throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks won’t bring the results that allow you to stand out. A brand audit allows you to recenter your efforts with a clear understanding of your market position and current impact so you can take action with intention and demonstrate value to your customers.
A comprehensive brand audit requires a detailed and multi-layered approach to understand how your brand is performing across all customer touchpoints. Review all of the following elements, gathering insights through team opinions, customer perception and thoughts from other stakeholders.
Brand positioning reflects how you present your brand to the public, involving a clear mission, values, messaging and tone. Through rigorous brand positioning research, consider how your brand presentation and brand promise compare to other brands in your category and whether you are aligned with the needs of your audience. Review your findings to assess whether there is room for strengthening your positioning to better align with your customers’ interests and expectations.
Examine your visual and verbal identity, expressed through logos, color palettes, imagery, fonts and overall messaging. Consider the uniqueness of your brand relative to your competitors, as well as the message and emotions your visual identity evokes.
What elements are common across logos and imagery of other brands in your vertical? Are there clear differences that distinguish you from your competitors? Are the differences too stark that the message of your verbal identity is unclear or lost on consumers?
Use your research to identify the balance between standing out against competitors and clearly communicating what your vertical requires. For example, a tech brand’s visual identity should be unique from its competitors, but it should still convey its position through the same elements of sleekness and modernity its competitors are using.
Closely examine the customer experience at every touchpoint, including website UX design, social media content and engagement, the buying process and even customer support. With a bird’s-eye view, consider how welcoming the experience is and how likely it is to drive conversions or build loyalty.
Ask yourself: How does the ease of interaction compare to other brands? Are customers interacting with your brand across these different touchpoints, or are they being pushed away? Where are there opportunities to optimize the experience for improved engagement and conversion?
These questions set the stage for tangible optimizations that make the customer journey smoother and strengthen relationships.
Brand reputation and sentiment are crucial for understanding how your audience perceives your brand and its value. Reading reviews, conducting customer surveys, exploring earned media and tracking online mentions are great ways to gauge brand perception for both you and your competitors. These insights offer a window into direct feedback from your audience, guiding strategic decision-making and uncovering what changes would bolster brand perception and earn your customers’ loyalty.
Analyzing your digital performance provides insight into your online discoverability relative to your competitors. Consider your SEO performance, social media visibility, and ad presence to gauge your share-of-voice in your vertical. Whether you are outperforming competitors or falling behind will inform how you should balance spend between your digital marketing efforts and messaging through other channels.
A successful audit requires intentionality. An effective brand audit process should include the following steps.
Clarify the information you’re looking to spotlight during your audit, whether it’s market positioning, brand awareness, creative performance, campaign resonance or customer sentiment. Always start with clear objectives so that you can laser focus on the elements you’re looking to improve, develop a full picture of what you’re seeking to understand and choose the right metrics to tell you what you want to know.
Identifying specific competitors is essential for a focused audit. Pinpoint competitors who have the same target audience as you in your market, making space to include both direct competitors and indirect competitors in your audit for a wide dataset.
A direct competitor is someone who offers the same services as you. If you sell athletic wear, then your direct competitor would be another athletic wear brand. Meanwhile, an indirect competitor is a brand that sells something different but targets the same audience. In this case, an indirect competitor may be a larger clothing store that sells all types of clothing, with athletic wear being a small subset.
Include approximately 2-3 direct competitors and 1-2 indirect competitors in your audit. Highlight both close competitors operating at similar revenue levels, as well as larger brands that you aspire to compete with, to picture the full spectrum of dos and don’ts for engaging customers.
Center your audit on finding usable data to guide your understanding of your market position. Gather actionable data with methodologies like social listening, SEO analytics and brand tracking, and then hone in on the stories told through that data to guide future decision-making and resource allocation.
Consider data for the following areas:
Consumer touchpoints are the areas where your consumers interact with your brand, whether online or in person, and it’s important that they all work together to provide a consistent experience. Evaluating the effectiveness of these touchpoints and how they compare to competitors highlights opportunities to refine the customer journey so you retain prospects in an easy-to-follow funnel.
Review customer touchpoints like your:
Messaging consistency across these touchpoints is crucial to capturing attention, converting interested prospects into customers and sustaining brand loyalty. Review your whole customer journey map to ensure you’re building a cohesive experience across all touchpoints and effectively move your customers down the funnel.
Take the time to sit with your findings and guide your future steps in your brand strategy. Consider both areas where you overlap with your competitors and gaps they leave for you to fill. Then, pinpoint opportunities for standing out in your market, whether it’s an opportunity to offer a distinct new product that would pique your audience’s interest or build a campaign to communicate to a customer need that isn’t being addressed.
Develop a detailed brand audit report of your findings to simplify this process. This report compiles all your findings into a single document that highlights similarities and differences among your competitors, clearly lists strengths and weaknesses, and provides recommendations to differentiate your brand.
Using the information you’ve gained and your report from the brand audit process, identify areas of improvement across all your touchpoints to either keep pace with or outrun your competitors. Update your brand positioning, visuals and messaging to target the most rewarding opportunities, speak to gaps in customer needs and capture audience attention. Your insights should open the door to refinements that improve the user experience and optimize the customer journey for more conversion opportunities.
The most important part of a strong competitive audit is how you shape your strategy afterward. Convert the insights in your audit report into tangible steps to better engage your audience and set your brand apart in your vertical.
Brand audit findings can be used to do all the following:
Your audit report will ensure alignment among your team and provide context for the most appropriate next steps for your brand, whether it’s informing your next marketing campaign for greater impact or initiating a full rebrand to improve your long-term market position.
Once you’ve locked in on your refinements, continuous measurement of your impact is key to building and sustaining success. Compare established metrics from before and after your audit to assess whether your changes are making the splash you’re aiming for.
Measure success by engaging in all the following steps:
A competitive brand audit isn’t just a one-time review, but an ongoing process to maintain relevance and differentiation. By staying forward-thinking and continuously measuring strength and performance, you can highlight focus points for future brand audits and stay ahead of shifts in your vertical.
A competitive brand audit paints a clear picture of your current market position, guiding how you can outshine competitors. Start by pinpointing your goals for a detailed audit to identify gaps in your brand strategy, then channel the creativity needed to shape meaningful refinements based on the insights you’ve gathered.
At VSA Partners, we drive success through bold creativity, shaped by intensive, research-driven data and inspired brand consulting services. Using our proprietary research methods and a thorough brand audit process, we’ll assess your market position and the strength of your consumer experience, helping you uncover ways to stand out with clarity and confidence. Then, with decades of expertise in design and brand strategy, we’ll use these insights to shape brand messaging and outward presence for maximum impact within your target audience.
Let’s chart your brand’s course together. Get in touch with us to start the conversation.
