How to Do a Brand Audit?

Paul Copcutt
 
Alfonso: He's at the controls and he has been an integral part, like a cornerstone, foundational part of our team and truly a major success for the REITE club for all of our personal careers as well. Just the conversations even during COVID, we were probably 12 feet away and we just shared a conversation outside and things that you get to learn and grow with people that are around you.

Thank you, Paul, for being an amazing part of our team, our brand and marketing strategist, his niche market is real estate investors and related professionals. And that's who's here tonight, get your notes out. We're going to be recording this as well, too. He's going to make sure you can see this on the website, but you're going to learn something.

What he's going to be talking about is how to conduct a brand audit. What does that mean? What's a brand? What's the REITE Club? What's your brand? And Mr. Paul Copcutt, it's an honor. Thank you. 

Paul: Thank you Alfonzo. And yes, I was hovering over the mute, but as you were saying nice things about me, I figured I'd let you go. Very quick, this is like a marketing minute. What I want to do is give you some concrete ideas and actions that you can take away and use in your real estate investing business tomorrow.

Why a brand? I do find with a lot of real estate investors, they focus a lot of time on looking at the impact of their marketing. But they don't spend a lot of time looking at the impact on their brand. And marketing gets you the attention, but brand will be the reason why somebody chooses you.
That's why it's critical that you do think about your brand and you spend time on a regular basis to audit that brand. And what are the perceptions of that brand? Because you may have an opinion around what your brand is, but it's that what's being truly reflected in the marketplace. It's a good practice from that in terms of a regular check, you can get that perception.

You can find out the reach of your influence and you can find out how effective you'd be. And the highlights that a brand audit will give you are things like what are your strengths, but it will also highlight what are your weaknesses. And underneath that, it'll also give you an insight into where the opportunities may lie and where the potential threats may lie.

It's like a mini SWOT analysis if you like. It also gives you an opportunity to allow yourself with your customer's expectations. Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, famously said your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. What are people saying about your brand? Do you really know what they're saying in a brand audit might give you that insight. And then if your customers are saying something different, then you need to switch, you need to change your branding, in alignment with your potential customers or with your current clients.

And then also the brand audit will give you an insight into where you stand in the marketplace and probably, equally, importantly where you stand against your competition. When you're looking at a brand audit, you want to use your marketing plan and hopefully you have some kind of marketing plan pulled together. But use your marketing plan as the framework. And then you want to be measuring for things and it's ABCD. 

The ABCD of Brand Audit

"A" is the Analytics. The analytics are things like your web obviously, your web presence and the reach of that. 81% of consumers and that's business to consumers. Consumers, 81% do some kind of online research prior to making a purchasing decision.

And if you're in the business to business end of the real estate investing business, 94% of people will use online research prior to making a purchasing decision. It's critical what's being perceived and the analytics of your website, where you're driving people to, because everything else that you do outside of your website, if you treat your website like a home country, everything else you do the social media, anything else out there are more like embassies. It gives people a flavor for your home country, but it's not the same as people coming and visiting a home country, which is your website. You want to be very sure about the reach, the analytics of your web, the organic reach, the paid reach, what the conversion rates are like. Analytics is very key.

The "B" is around your Buyers. Your buyers and your customers. And it's not just the web numbers or the number of social media followers. You really want to be sure about what your customer's experience is.How are they experiencing you? Because when you make a decision around a brand, there's some kind of emotional connection. So that emotional connection you want to know, what is that emotional connection that's happening between you and your potential clients or your existing. And you also want to know from servings.

You'll notice that the REITE club, for example, we're sending out more surveys now after events, because we really want to get to know what the REITE community wants to hear. What are the subjects you want to hear? Who are the speakers you want to hear? Because at the end of the day, what's important to us is sending you and providing you with the right training and education and information for you to make the right decisions. Serving your customer, serving your prospects is critical in terms of understanding your buyers.

And when you look at "C", you're thinking about Competition. The great news about technology and analytics nowadays is many of the things that you can collect and gather about your own brand. You can actually go out and gather around your competition. You can get a deeper understanding of your competitions reach on places like Facebook.

For example, you can use things like Alexa to see what people's web analytics are like. There's a lot of information that you can gather around your competition. What keywords are they using? Are they working? What keywords should you be using that might help you? Understanding your competition and gathering that information.

And then finally "D" for Data, social media numbers. Yes, numbers are great, but it's around engagement. What's the kind of pickup that you're getting from your social media accounts? What's your sales stages as well? How many leads are you producing? How many conversions are happening? 

Analytics, Buyers, Competition, Data (ABCD). And when you're thinking about your analytics, if you really want to go deep. Are you getting the right traffic to your websites? Great, if you're getting lots of visits to your website, but all they, the people that you won't come to your website and are they the right people that are converting and what content is working better on your website?

Your target market enjoys videos or they enjoy audio. Do they enjoy writing or is it a combination? You spend the time understanding because we could all spend a ton of time producing content, but if it's not producing the results you want, that's wasted time, resources and everything else. I encourage you to regularly look at a brand audit and in terms of a brand audit, I would suggest probably at least once a year.
But if you're making changes give it time to have enough. If you may be doing a rebrand, for example, which is quite a popular thing to do. Give yourself three to six months before you go back in and measure that brand again, because you've got to give time for that brand to rebrand to get traction.

Take action, measure. And if you'd like a little bit more information around a brand audit, and the more questions you should be asking yourself you can go to my website, reibranded.com/checklist and download a free checklist. And there's a list of about 30 questions there that you can ask yourself. I appreciate the time I'm going to hand back to Alfonso.