In today's episode, I’ll break down the 3 steps you need to take to audit your existing brand so that you can determine whether a brand refresh OR a total rebrand is on the cards for you. Whether you’re aiming to DIY it or hire a professional for help, before you go diving head first into a whole new logo, colour palette and brand identity… Listen to this episode FIRST.
Let me guess… you’ve suddenly got the urge to rebrand *ha-hmmm* again?
Look, you and I both know that there’s nothing better than having a fresh new brand to showcase to the world, but in this episode, we’re talking about why you may not actually need a rebrand at all.
Today, I'll be breaking down the 3 steps you need to take to audit your existing brand so that you can determine whether a brand refresh OR a total rebrand is on the cards for you.
Whether you’re aiming to DIY it or hire a professional for help, before you go diving head first into a whole new logo, colour palette and brand identity… Listen to this episode FIRST.
Are you ready to grow your audience, attract new customers, and get business-building opportunities on repeat? If so, then you’re gonna love The Next Level Creative™!
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How many times have you found yourself thinking “I feel like rebranding my whole business” or “I'm so bored with my colors. I feel like changing them up” or” is it time for a new logo?”
It is so easy to randomly change things up, especially when they feel like productive things to do. But how do you know if you actually need to update your brand at all? And if you do, whether you need a small refresh or a full rebrand. Today, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to analyse the health of your brand so that you can know what you need to do next when it comes to your visual identity.
Let's dive in. As I mentioned, it is so tempting to update your brand all the time, especially when things aren't working or you're just feeling a little bored with the actual work that you need to do, or maybe you've seen a new trend that you really want to try, but you might not need a new brand at all, and if you do, you might not need a full rebrand.
Being able to strategically analyse and audit your brand is going to make you be able to make informed decisions about the health of your brand and what to do with it so that you can make the most of your time, your money, and your effort. I don't want you to waste money hiring somebody or waste your time rebranding everything if you don't need to.
I want you to make sure that you are spending your time on the things that matter so that you can spend time maybe, making new products or upgrading your market set up or updating the way that you sell your products. Like I want you to focus on the things that matter. And if you don't need a rebrand, that's great, but if you do need a rebrand, I want you to make sure that you're focusing on the parts of your rebrand that actually need updating.
So how do you know when it's time to do that and make sure that you are making the right decision? There are three main steps and three main ways that you can do this and make this decision for your business.
Step number one is that you can do a self-check-in. So first things first, you can ask yourself how you feel about your brand right now.
There are a lot of questions you could ask, but here are some that I recommend that you ask yourself. You can do this just by journaling, writing it down, just thinking about it talking to a friend about it, or maybe working with a coach to ask and answer some of these questions. So these can be questions like, Do you like your brand?
Does it represent you well? Does it feel like you? Does it align with your vision and your mission? Does it reflect your current like, era or style of work? Does it show off who you are in the best way possible? Does it match the quality of your work and your expertise? And are you proud to show it to people and send people to look at it?
After you have asked these questions and answered them, I want you to weigh up how many yeses or positive answers you have to these questions versus how many no's you have. Next, let's move on to step number two.
Step number two is getting outside feedback. Because we can be too close to our own brand sometimes. Some people like to say, you can't see the forest for the trees. Or maybe you can't see the label because you're inside the jar, right?
So it's really important to get some outside feedback too, to check that we don't have a warped view of what is going on, because, for us, we might think, Oh,” everything's perfect” or “it's really clear to my audience what I do, or they think this about my brand,” but actually it's really confusing, or it's messy, or they don't have a clue what's going on, or vice versa. We might think it's a disaster, but actually, it's fine, and they love it, and it's great. And we might want to change everything, but it's fine.
So what we need to do is get some feedback. The three main places and people that I recommend getting feedback from are: customers, audience members who aren't customers, and people who don't know who you are, they've never heard of you before, strangers, and then people who know you very well. So that could be friends, family members, or colleagues.
This will give you a range of different answers and perspectives on your brand so that you're not getting a biased or swayed version because if you just ask customers, they are people in your audience who know you very well, and who maybe have followed you for a really long time.
They're already quite loyal to you versus strangers. They have never seen your brand before. They've never heard of you. They are going to have a different experience and a different level of knowledge about your brand than someone else. Your friends and family have a really unique experience because they know you very well.
So they are going to know whether your brand represents you, whether it like reflects your personality really well. So you want to get this range of feedback from these four different types of people. So what questions do you ask them? You can ask them the same questions that you asked yourself. Do you like it?
Do you think it represents me well? Do you think it feels like me? Like all those same questions. But then some additional questions that you can ask them like What feelings does my brand evoke to you? What do you think that I do from looking at my brand? What descriptive words would you associate with my brand?
How consistent or cohesive would you rate my brand from 1 to 10? Does my brand make you want to follow me or buy from me? And what other businesses does my brand remind you of? There are a lot more questions you could ask feel free to go ask your own questions from that. But these are just a few to get you started.
Again, try and weigh up the positive feedback you're getting and the negative feedback. What is the feedback you expected versus the feedback you didn't expect? What fits what you wanted to hear versus what you didn't want to hear and try and weigh up those results.
Last but not least becomes the more methodical part of this process.
So I want you to go through each and every part of your brand and kind of rate how you think it is performing or how good you think it is. I have a resource for this, it's called The Ultimate Branding Checklist. It does a lot more than just this process; it teaches you about every part of the brand and all the things that go into branding, but you can use it as a checklist and as an auditing process.
You can go through, and especially if you get the paid version, you can get the Notion templates and all the Trello templates. All of the different templates come with this ability where you can use tags to decide is it does it need work or is it good or is it, does it even exist, right?
For example, you can say, okay, my logo, do I have a logo? If I have a logo, is it bad? Is it good? Or is it great? And then you can do that for every single part of your brand identity and beyond your brand identity as well. I want you to do for your whole brand, your brand strategy, your brand identity, everywhere your brand identity is applied.
So think like your Instagram stories, your Instagram highlights, your website, your packaging, all of those different places, everywhere that your brand is seen like your invoices, your receipts, your signage, everything like that, and tag everything. You can use colors, if you don't have the template, you could just write this down, you could use Post-its, or you could use highlighters etc. I want you to use like a very simple three-step system of Is it bad? Is it good? Or is it great? Does it need a little work? Does it need no work? Or does it need a lot of work, right? So you need to go through every single part of your brand and audit it like this.
And then at the end, you are going to count them all up. And this is how you will know what level of work your brand needs. So if you have just a couple of red things that need work, you can just fix those. No problem. You probably don't need any branding process at all. Maybe you just noticed that okay I need to just update a couple of things on my website or, Oh, I've noticed I don't have any like covers on my Instagram highlights. I could just do that. No problem.
Or, maybe you realise you have a handful of things that could do with some work and need a refresh or an update. So it's looking like a small brand refresh is on the cards for you. And lastly, if you are missing a lot of things and what you did have was quite out of date and not really cohesive and in need of some help, it's rebrand time for you, baby.
So that's how you audit practically every part of your brand.
Now, if you combine this with the check-in that you did with yourself and the feedback that you got from others, you should now have a pretty good picture of where your brand is at and what you need to do from here. So now, instead of jumping into redesigning everything, or hiring someone to overhaul it all, maybe you've found out that actually you just need to refresh a few things.
Or maybe instead of jumping around updating random pieces here and there every couple of months, you've figured out that what you really need is to do a dedicated rebrand and look at it all together as one.
This is the entire process that you can do to figure out intentionally, strategically, and analytically what you actually need to do for your brand instead of, here and there randomly, sporadically changing things every now and then and doing things out of boredom or because trends are coming up or because you're just feeling the urge to rebrand, which I know happens and I know it's tempting.
But, branding is a really intentional process and once you start thinking about it like that, you can be really smart and you can be really strategic and you can see so much progress in your creative business and see how branding can be the thing that fuels your growth as a creative business and that brings you customers and that brings you opportunities and that brings your audience growth up when you start treating this as a tool in your business.
Do this process next time you feel the urge to rebrand something, stop yourself, think about what you feel, do some research and get some feedback, do the brand audit and actually figure out, do I need this? And if I do, what level of this do I need? And then you can decide what to do about it.
Okay. Do I do this by hiring someone to do it for me and you can make a plan and go forward from there.
As I mentioned, you can use The Ultimate Branding Checklist to help you do the brand audit. It's free. There is a paid upgrade to it if you want to get the templates, like the Notion, Trello, and all of the different templates to help you.
But just the PDF version is free, so you can just go and download that or be in the show notes for that. And if you are ready to have a brand that like feels uniquely yours and brings in customers on repeat, then you should enroll in The Next Level Creative™ so that you can start growing your audience, increasing your visibility, and securing those brand-building opportunities for your business.
And as soon as you join, it's a branding lab that's just for artists. Then you can start diving into the brand identity lessons that we have in there. So you can start learning how to do this. You can also start sharing your brand identity with me to make sure that it is working.
I'm a brand identity expert. I do this for a living. I can give you feedback and make sure that it's top-quality work. And then you can also collaborate and chat with your fellow artists as well, who are doing this process too. So if you want to make progress and you want to start taking your brand seriously and see how it can help you to get customers and take it to the next level, then join The Next Level Creative™.
The link to that will also be in the show notes and I would love to have you.
So other than that. I hope this has been really helpful. I can't wait to see the results of your brand audit. If you have any questions or want to chat about doing the brand audit and determining whether you need to do a brand refresh or rebrand at all you can always come and chat to me on Instagram or threads @makerandmoxie. I'm happy to chat with you anytime.
That's all from me this week, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!