How to Do a Brand Audit: A One-Afternoon Version for Small Teams (Free Template)

Search "how to do a brand audit" and you get guides written for brand managers at companies with a design team, an agency on retainer and a quarter to spare. They run to ten or twelve steps, with stakeholder interviews and an executive report at the end.

If you run a small business, you have none of that. You have a website, a few social accounts, an email list, and a feeling that things don't hang together the way they used to.

This guide takes one afternoon of desk work, plus a week to collect what customers say. At the end you have a filled-in scoring sheet and three fixes, each with a name and a date next to it.

What a brand audit checks

A brand audit compares two things: what you say your brand is, and what people actually meet when they find you. Every gap between the two is a finding.

For a small team, five areas cover it:

1. Your own description: who you serve, what you do for them, how you sound.
2. Visuals: logo, colours, fonts, photos.
3. Voice and message: the words on every page, post and email.
4. Customers: how the people who pay you describe you.
5. Competitors: where you sound like everyone else.

Voice gets its own area because it breaks first. A logo stays the same until someone redesigns it. Voice changes every time a new person writes a caption, or an AI tool drafts an email and nobody edits it. We wrote about that slide in brand voice drift.

Before you start: one question and one document

Write down the one question you want the audit to answer. "Why do our Instagram posts get likes but no enquiries?" is a good question. "How is our brand doing?" is too loose to act on.

Then open a blank doc or spreadsheet. Copy the template at the end of this article into it. You'll fill it in as you go.

Send the customer request from step 5 now, before anything else. It's the only step that waits on other people.

Step 1: Write down what you say you are

Fill in three lines without looking at your website:

• We help [who] to [do what] so they can [result].
• We sound [word], [word] and [word]. Pick three plain adjectives, such as "warm, direct and a bit dry".
• We never sound [word]. For example "salesy" or "corporate".

If you can't fill these in, or two people on your team fill them in differently, write that down as your first finding. Every later step measures against these three lines.

Step 2: List every place your brand shows up

Make a table of every touchpoint: website pages, each social account, your email newsletter and automated emails, Google Business Profile, marketplace listings, ads, proposals, invoices, your email signature, the chatbot if you have one.

For each, note who writes it and when it last changed. Most small businesses find a surprise or two here, like an old landing page that's still live or a welcome email written by someone who has since left.

Step 3: Check the visuals

This is the quick part. Put screenshots of your main touchpoints side by side and check:

• Is it the same logo everywhere, at a size you can read?
• Are the colours the same, or close enough that nobody would notice?
• Two fonts at most?
• Do photos look like they come from the same business?

Mark each touchpoint pass or fix. Don't redesign anything yet.

Step 4: Read your words against your three voice words

This step finds the most problems and takes the most time. For each channel, read your three most recent pieces: three posts, three emails, three pages. Hold each one against the "we sound" and "we never sound" lines from step 1.

Copy any sentence that breaks the rules into your sheet, with where you found it. You're looking for:

• Filler your best writing never uses, such as "leverage", "solutions" and "seamless".
• Drift between channels: your site is plain and direct, but Instagram is all hype and emojis, or your emails turn stiff and formal.
• Different promises: the homepage says one thing you do best, and LinkedIn says another.

Doing this by hand for a website plus three channels means reading forty or fifty pieces. If you'd rather not, our free Brand Genome audit reads up to twelve pages of your website in a couple of minutes and quotes back the lines that drift. It covers your site, not your social posts or emails, so read those channels yourself. The audit page spells out what it checks and where it stops. Either way, you end up with a list of real sentences that don't sound like you.

Step 5: Ask how customers describe you

Collect ten or so descriptions of your business written by customers, in their words:

• Your Google, Facebook or marketplace reviews
• Testimonials and thank-you emails you already have
• Three short messages to recent customers: "In one sentence, how would you describe us to a friend?"

Highlight the words that repeat. Then compare them with your step 1 lines. If customers say "fast and friendly" and you say "premium and innovative", believe the customers and rewrite your lines to match.

Step 6: Look at three competitors

Pick three businesses a customer might choose instead of you. Fill in the step 1 lines for each, using only their homepage and their last few social posts.

Now read all four side by side, with your own name covered. Could a stranger tell which one is you? Any phrase you share with all three ("quality service", "your trusted partner") does nothing for you. Mark it for rewriting.

Step 7: Score each area and pick three fixes

Give each of the five areas a score from 1 to 5:

• 5: consistent everywhere, and it matches what you meant
• 3: mostly right, with a few gaps you can name
• 1: different on every channel, or you couldn't fill in step 1

Take the three lowest scores. For each, write one fix small enough to finish in two weeks, a name, and a date. "Rewrite the Instagram bio and pin three posts that sound like us, Sam, by the 14th" is a fix. "Improve social presence" is not.

Leave everything else for the next audit.

How often to audit

Run the full audit once a year, and before a rebrand, a new product or a new market.

Check voice more often. Once a month, take your latest post, email and page from each channel and read them against your three voice words. It takes ten minutes, and it catches drift while a single rewrite still fixes it.

The template

Copy these tables into a doc or spreadsheet.

Your description (step 1)

Touchpoints (steps 2 to 4)

Customer words (step 5)

Competitors (step 6)

Scores and fixes (step 7)

Turning findings into rules

An audit tells you where the brand drifted. Unless something changes in how you write, it drifts back.

To make the fixes stick, turn your findings into rules every new draft has to pass: the words you never use, the tone each channel should hit, the claims you make and the ones you don't. That's the idea behind a Brand Genome, and it's what Savra checks every post, email and reply against before it goes out.

Start with step 1 today. If you want the website reading done for you, run the free audit and bring the flagged lines back to step 4.