Smart marketers know their audience—who they are, what they care about, and how to reach them. But one of the most elusive elements in the marketing arena is knowing exactly how your audience perceives your brand. What they think of your organization, how it compares to others in the market, what interactions they value, and which they find aggravating. That’s the focus of a TWIST Brand Audit.
The goal of a brand audit is to accurately assess how various constituents perceive your organization—that includes your clients, partners, employees, and prospects. The outcomes of the audit will help inform your marketing efforts, ensuring your identity, your look and feel, materials, messages and interactions are all aimed at deepening your audience’s perception of your brand. With the intelligence gathered during a TWIST Brand Audit, you’ll be able to make more intelligent, focused and cost-effective decisions.
Explore the key steps—and how to get going with TWIST.
- + Planning & Scope >>
Planning & Scope
To start the process, we’ll work with you to outline the scope of the audit, identify outcomes areas and the overall process. TWIST will work with your team to create the brand audit questionnaire, providing insights into questions (and question structure) that elicit both meaningful and measurable results. Audit questionnaires help guide the interview process to ensure that the data gathered is substantive and relevant. Because our audit professionals are adept at the art of conversation, anecdotal information is gathered for even richer results.
- + Interviews >>
Interviews
Brand audits’ scope and timing is driven primarily by the size of the interview “field” you want to survey. We’ll work with you to identify the right pool of interview candidates. Depending on the scope of your audit, the interview pool can range from 20 to 50 candidates, including clients, prospects, employees and other stakeholders. We’ve conducted audits that include interviews with former clients—with tremendous insights gained. Ensuring that the interview pool has depth of perspectives based on their roles and responsibilities correlates directly to the quality of the outcomes. The TWIST team provides the communications you’ll need to introduce the brand audit process and invite the target candidates to participate. Interviews are conducted either by phone or in-person, depending on the scope of your audit.
- + Analysis & Outcomes >>
Analysis & Outcomes
As the brand audit interviews are conducted, our team gathers the information using an online tool that helps us aggregate the findings and identify key trends and outcomes. We look at issues that relate to client relationship development, employee recruitment and retention, and more. After the audit interviews and analysis are complete, the TWIST team will present the key findings and recommended outcomes to your team. The TWIST Brand Audit report will include near- and long-term recommendations for addressing key brand perception issues. These may include strategies for leveraging key brand strengths as well as proposed solutions for addressing brand weakness.
Depending on your desired scope (and availability/ accessibility of your interview candidates), the TWIST Brand Audit timeline ranges from 6 to 12 weeks. Contact the TWIST team today to learn more about how our Brand Audit service can help you better understand your market environment, and how to move forward with a smart, focused plan.
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