Your business is built on — and for — functionality and visual appeal. Do your business assets and operational experience align with your brand and the services you provide? Your brand identity — how you show up across all digital and physical spaces — influences how potential customers feel about working with you: Brand consistency alone can boost revenue nearly 25 percent.

Inconsistent branding can leave customers feeling disconnected from the experience, or even confused. Stellar design outcomes alone aren’t enough; provide customers with full service so they come back and refer others to you.

Why brand identity matters

Your brand identity includes both the visual and conceptual representation of your company — how your brand looks, and the feeling it exudes. While logos, colors, and fonts are included, it also includes voice, tone, and personality, among other traits.

View your brand from the first touchpoint that a prospective customer would have. Audit the customer journey, note areas that are unclear or disconnected, spot gaps, and identify opportunities to improve.

Customers typically need to see a brand around seven times before committing to a purchase. The goal is to create a cohesive experience that builds brand affinity and lowers the barrier for a customer to conduct business with you. Don’t create undue confusion or give prospects reasons to look elsewhere.

How to audit your brand identity

Even if you have established brand guidelines, are confident that your assets are working for you, or have conducted a brand audit in the past, best practice is to review annually. This is especially true if you have added new offerings or marketing channels or are repositioning your business.

What assets to audit

Start by gathering the assets to be audited so that they can be reviewed individually and as a compilation of assets. Be sure to include any guidelines or playbooks around brand identity, style, or creation to benchmark and check accuracy.

A brand identity audit should include:

• Visuals: Logos, colors, imagery, website, social media, emails
• Messaging: Website copy, social captions, pitch decks, bios
• Collateral: Presentations, onboarding documents, business cards, brochures, one-sheeters, contracts

Where to collect information

The more information you collect from different perspectives and viewpoints, the better data you have from which to improve. Consider key audiences to provide feedback: Company owner, salesperson, marketing team, customer, prospect or project manager might make sense.

Information can be collected through various methods, such as anonymous surveys, facilitated small groups, checklists, user testing, interviews, or other methods. The goal is to collect and document information so it can be reviewed and applied.

Questions to answer

Put yourself in your customers’ place: What do you want them to experience when interacting with your brand?

At the end of the audit, no matter the audience or format, you want to come away with actionable insights. Consider collecting data around your brand identity that provides the following:

• When looking at the visuals across assets, do they feel like they belong to the same brand?
• Is our tone consistent with our brand personality?
• What feelings are we leaving people with, based on our brand identity and assets alone?
• Does our messaging align across touchpoints?
• Does our brand make sense no matter where in the journey our audience enters?
• Does our professionalism match the quality of our work?
• Where is the experience inconsistent?
• Where might we be missing an asset or messaging across the experience?
• Would someone know they are viewing us if we removed the logo?

Turn insights into action

Once you have completed a brand identity audit, collect and organize data. This could be as easy as capturing feedback in a spreadsheet or creating transcripts of conversations and noting similar feedback or specific assets, for example.

Next, identify a few items as your top priority to tackle — these could be low-hanging fruit that will quickly boost brand consistency or a few assets that are tied to revenue. When complete, repeat the process.

The goal is to tackle something and gain momentum. Commit to addressing, say, one to two items on the list a week, breaking it into manageable chunks. Document what you update and create or refine your brand identity guidelines as you go. Add templates for repeatable items to save time and gain consistency. Add an annual brand identity audit to your calendar.

More than half of consumers (59 percent) prefer purchasing new products from brands they are familiar with, so leaving a strong impression is a solid investment that’s well worth your return on investment.