167 | The 20 Minute Brand Audit (You Need This Month)

Does your website and/or brand need a little facelift?
Book a website glowup or work with me to create your brand strategy!
Learn more at heykristamarie.com/coaching

--

When was the last time you checked in on your brand? If you’re feeling stuck, confused, or like your brand just isn’t reflecting your expertise the way it should, it might be time for a quick 20-minute brand audit.

In this episode, I’m walking you through a simple step-by-step process to review your brand’s messaging, visuals, and overall consistency—so you can make sure your brand is still aligned with your goals. You’ll learn exactly what to look for, what small tweaks you can make (that leave a big impression), and how to ensure your brand is attracting the right clients. 

Topics we discuss:

• What you need to check in on regularly to continue attracting the right clients
• Exactly what to update (monthly and/or quarterly) in under 20 minutes
• A quick test to refine your messaging and copy for your socials and website
• A repeatable audit process you can use anytime you need it

I can't wait to hear your takeaways from todays episode! 🎧

💫 Join the waitlist for the Website Template Shop at narrative.heykristamarie.com 

Ways we can work together: 

• <<Website Design>> Create a website so strong that clients are sold on working with you as soon as they find you!
• <<Brand Photography>> Is it time to elevate your business with new brand photos?

I'D LOVE TO CONNECT WITH YOU!

• Say hello on Instagram 👋
• Join the email community ✍🏻
• Leave a review on Apple Podcasts 🎙

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello, and welcome to Amplify Your Brand and Business, the podcast that helps you create a personal brand that sells out your offers 24-7 so you don't have to. In today's hopefully pretty quick episode, I want to do a quick breakdown of how to audit your brand in 15 minutes. And you're gonna notice today we're gonna walk through some things that uh I think are really important. I try to do these at least once every quarter, if not once every month or every two months. Some of them you can probably do less frequently, some of them you're gonna wanna do more frequently, but this is gonna be a really great place to start if you are wanting to think about up-leveling your brand, about making your brand more impactful, more cohesive, and have it stand out, this is gonna be a really great place for you to start. So if you're driving today, no worries, you don't need to have a pen and paper handy. I do recommend coming back and listening into this episode when you can jot down some notes. But even just listening in today, if you can't take any notes, I think you'll walk away with some really great things to think about. And when it comes to brand coaching and brand strategy, I work with a number of clients one-on-one every single month to help them individually take their brand to the next level, to create a brand that does the selling for them, that feels really cohesive and clean and professional and is built really intentionally. And I think it's really important to communicate that there is no overall big checklist or like overall vague generic brand strategy that I send to every of my clients. Like when I work with clients one-on-one, it's not just from some generalized place. We do really intentional work based on what they're doing. And so there's a lot of constant communication between me and my individual coaching clients when they can share with me what they're working on, what their brand is, what they want their brand to revolve around. Do they have new offers coming out? How is their content converting? Do they need to create new sales pages? Do we need to tighten up their messaging? Do we need to create more cohesiveness in their brand? So there's a lot of back and forth one-to-one that needs to happen with my one-on-one clients in order for us to be able to create that strategic intentional brand because there is no general checklist. There's no thing that I can just send to everybody that says, if you do all of these things, this is how you build an impactful brand. Because every business is starting from a different place. Some businesses and some brands that I work with have certain things really dialed in and need help kind of bringing everything else together to align with it. Some brands and businesses are starting from the beginning. And so we really need to get intentional about how they're growing, what they should focus on, which offers should we talk about first, how should we create messaging that will speak to their dream clients. And so I share all of this to say that this checklist that we're gonna talk through today is not this like brand-building Bible. It's not this thing that I send to every single one of my clients. But I had this idea to talk about this today because I do think that there are one, a good place to start for everything. But two, this is really great to start thinking about again to check in quarterly, to give yourself a little brand audit every once in a while, to figure out and ask the questions of do I need to dial some things back in? Have I lost sight or lost track of certain parts of my brand? Are parts of my brand outdated? Do I need to maybe tweak or change some of the wording or messaging? And so the things that we're gonna really dive into today are gonna be a great place for you to continuously look in and check in on to make sure your brand is cohesive, that it's speaking to your dream clients consistently, and that it doesn't go out of date. So all of that said, let's go ahead and dive in. If we haven't met yet, I'm Krista Marie. I'm a brand strategist and a brand photographer for women business owners. And over the last five plus years, I've coached hundreds of women inside the podcast programs and inside my community. And each episode, I'm here to help you create that business in the brand that does all of the selling for you. And really quickly, I want to share, I got a message from one of my recent brand clients who we did, we did an inclusive entire brand makeover for her. We did brand photos, brand colors, brand strategy, her website glow up. We did kind of everything. And I got the most incredible message from her sharing that she booked one of her, uh, someone found her on Google, and then she hopped on a discovery call with them and they booked her highest ticket offer, and she did minimal selling in order to get that client. And that just made me so happy because that is the point. That's what we're here for. And so I just wanted to celebrate her publicly on the podcast. I'm not gonna share her name because I always keep my client's information private, but just celebrating that so big because that's what we we are here to do. So, okay, let's go ahead and dive in. So, first and foremost, the first thing I want you to look at is of course your brand photos. As a brand photographer, I think that it is so incredibly important to take a look at what images am I sharing on a consistent day-to-day basis. And some one of the questions that I get asked often is what should be the balance between professional brand photos and more like authentic day-to-day behind-the-scenes selfie style photos. And I think it's really important that if you are looking to grow a premium brand, if you are asking clients to spend significant amounts of money to work with you, I think it's really important to err and lean on the side of sharing those professional brand photos more consistently than you are sharing your behind the scenes and selfies. And of course, there's a caveat to that. I think that sharing the behind the scenes and the selfies is so important to do that in your stories because people want to know you in your stories. The reason they look at your stories is because they're curious about what you're doing, they want to see a little sneak peek behind the scenes. We all love, we're so curious about each other's lives. So the things you might think are boring to share in post, I can promise you, in your stories, people are looking for that. They want to see what your day-to-day looks like. So if you're feeling the desire to share more of that authentic behind the scenes day-to-day, 100% share that in your stories. But when it comes to your profile feed, the things that you're actually sharing, like on your main profile, it's gonna be so important for you to really speak to those premium clients. And those premium clients want to see that you are investing both in yourself and in your brand and your business because when they see that you're investing in your brand and your business, they have more trust in you as a business owner. So, number one, take a look at the photos. Look at them everywhere. Where do you show up online? Are they all up to date? Do they feel cohesive? How much are you sharing professional photos versus selfies? Take a peek at your website. Do any of those photos need to be updated? We're gonna also talk at the end of the update about your Google Business profile, which is 100% something that you need to have set up, especially if you're a local business who provides local services. So think a photographer, a planner, a calligrapher, a relationship coach if you take on a lot of local clients, a life coach if you take on local clients, therapists, all those things. So if you're someone who provides local services, you 100% need to set up a Google Business profile. But one of the things, speaking of photos, is making sure that you have updated photos on your Google Business profile. Because one thing you want to remember is that when people are searching for local services, they're gonna come across your Google profile and we want to make sure that your pictures are up to date. So take a look at everywhere where you show up online and once a quarter, just take a look and see do I need to update my brand photos. In line with that is also your brand colors. And I think it's important to share that sometimes I think we put a lot of emphasis on our brand colors and our brand fonts and like the visuals of our brand in those manners. I actually find that a lot of people, when they come to work with me for brand strategy, get kind of hung up on brand colors and fonts and things like that. And I think that they're important. There is definitely a message that you convey by choosing certain colors when you think about color theory and color psychology, and there's certain fonts that will, you know, give a different feel for people. But as your brand evolves, it's also okay if your brand colors evolve and if your brand visuals evolve. So take a look and ask yourself everywhere that you're showing up online, take a look at your website, your Instagram, your like your story, your highlights on Instagram, the little circles above your, like in your posts, above your posts in your profile. Like, do you have colors there? Look at everywhere that you have colors of your brand online and just ask yourself, do these still feel relevant? And you'll notice actually, I just worked with a brand client who had kind of evolved past her past brand colors. She had DIY'd them herself and she just felt like they didn't really fit with the energy and the vibe that she wanted to portray to her new brand that she was wanting to build. And so we changed them and we we shifted them. We actually changed them quite a bit. And so just look at them and ask yourself: do these still feel aligned? Do these convey the message that I want them to convey? How do they make me feel? Um, what are some of the words that I think of when I see these brand colors? And just do a quick audit of that. The next thing I want to encourage you to look at is your Instagram link page that you have on your Instagram. So if you're still using a Link Tree or one of those other link holding websites for your Instagram profile, there's nothing wrong with those. The only downside is that they have very limited metrics and tracking that you can do. You have to actually go to that website. So, for example, if you're using LinkTree, you can only use really the LinkTree stats and data, and you can't really know any data beyond what they give you. I always recommend to clients having a website page, so a page on your website that is specifically for links. And if you're not really sure what I mean, if you go over to my Instagram at Hey Krista Marie and you click on my link that's there on Instagram, you'll find that it brings you to my website and a website page that hosts all of the relevant links. And I like this because one, I have the opportunity to actually brand it better than you can general link tree accounts. If it's on your website, you actually can control the backdrop, what the colors look like, how many links you have, like visuals if you want to add photos in there. So there's so much more you can do branding-wise. And you also have the ability to, again, thinking of your Google business profile and your Google Search Console, when you have people clicking to your website, you can actually find that data more easily. And you can do things like better track how many people are coming to your website, where how many people are clicking that link and actually getting to your Instagram link page. And so I always recommend to people if you're still using like a link tree link or anything else in your website. You can probably hear my dog in the background. We're just gonna keep that in. Um, if you're using that, I highly recommend switching over to a branded specific Instagram page that is built on your website. And the reason I wanted you to audit that is because check the links. Do you have outdated links that are shown there? Do you need to update anything? I know for some of my clients, they when they host events, especially, they might have old event links that are up there. So just do a quick sweep and ask yourself, do any of these need to be refreshed and updated? The next thing I want you to take a look at are your Instagram stories. And by that I mean your highlights. So taking a peek at your highlights on Instagram and asking yourself, do I need to remove or archive some old stories that no longer make sense? Do I want to update? He's just really having a grand time right now. Um, do I want to update my highlights at all to include new offers that maybe you didn't have up in your highlights before? One thing I always recommend to my clients is that when you have Instagram highlights on your profile, try to avoid having so many stories in each of them that the dots at the top turn into like tiny little like periods because chances are no one is gonna really click through all of those. We want to keep our most relevant, up-to-date, and pertinent and impactful information, like first and front and center, anytime clients are gonna be clicking through to our content. So if you have highlights on your Instagram profile, clean them up every once in a while. Can you update or simplify or make the stories more impactful so that you don't have to just keep adding to it and then all of a sudden you have like 30 to 50 plus stories inside each highlight. So do a quick audit of that and see if anything needs to be cleaned up or refreshed. The next thing we're gonna talk about is something I actually encourage you to do pretty frequently, and that's taking a look at your last nine to 12 Instagram posts and really diving into the quality and the content that you shared. So in those last nine to 12 posts, taking a look at did I post super valuable, intentional content that is meant to speak to my dream clients and speak to them in a way that makes them want to move, to take action, to inquire, to reach out, or did I post just for the sake of posting or going viral or wanting to be trendy and really getting honest with yourself? I want you to reflect in a way that's not shame-based. There's like there's no room for shame here. It's simply for us to take a look at what have I been sharing? Has it been converting? Are people actually reaching out from the content that I'm sharing? Are people um clicking over to my profile? Are they clicking over to my website after seeing my posts? Like really asking yourself, is this content getting engagement? And if not, what can I do to tweak it? How can I make my content more impactful? And I think it's important to not check this every single day or every single week because what I don't want you to do is to get so hyper-focused on only sharing super relevant, high-converting content because the reality is the content may not immediately be um converting. Let's say, for example, you go a whole week and let's say you didn't really get a lot of engagement, people weren't really clicking over to your profile or anything. I don't want you to throw in the towel and say, well, it's not working. This is why I don't think it's important to do this. It's don't do this every single week. So depending on how frequently you're posting, nine to twelve posts could be one to two weeks. And so if that's the case, maybe check this once a month or once every six to eight weeks or something like that. But if you're only posting on Instagram once or twice a week, then do this on a cadence that's maybe every six, eight, ten posts, because then you're gonna be able to just look back at your content and again analyze it, look at the data, figure out did I say or speak to my dream clients in a way that actually uh made them want to take action? And this is where you just really have to get uh really honest and look at your post through your dream clients' eyes. If I was my dream client and I knew nothing about my business and what I do, would this post make me feel something? Would this post make me want to learn more about what I do? Would this post make me want to um look into hiring me potentially, right? So I want you to think about it from the lens of if I were my dream client, what would they think or feel or experience if they looked at this content and these posts? And then the next thing that we're gonna talk about is just checking your website. Again, this is one of those things that does not need to be done super frequently, but we do want to take a look at it at least once every quarter, maybe once every six months, depending on how quickly or how consistently your offers change and your services change. If you're someone who's constantly or consistently releasing new offers or services, then of course you might want to do this more frequently. If you aren't consistently releasing new offers, then again, maybe twice a year, once every four to six months could work totally fine for you. But taking a look at your website and doing what they call the grunt test. And I can't remember who came up with this. I know that I read it when I read the Story Brand book by Donald Miller, and he talks about the grunt test where again, thinking about this through the lens of someone who comes to your website who knows nothing about what you do, right? I want you to take any preconceived notions that you have of let's just assume that when people come to my website, they don't have any information, they don't know where I'm located, they don't know my business name, they don't know what I do or who I serve or how I help people. Like, really think about it from the lens of if someone just stumbled onto my website, would it pass the five-second grunt test? And what I mean by five seconds is realistically, someone's really only gonna see the top part of your website in the first five seconds that they're there. And so they call that like the top of the fold. It comes, it goes back to like newspaper or like journalism things, like the top of the fold when people would fold newspapers in half. The that top fold area is your gold area, right? That's where your headlines are, that's where you want to have the biggest text, that's where you want to have the really informative, impactful information because that's what people are gonna see first. So taking a look at your website and asking yourself, does it pass that five-second grun test? If I'm a local business owner and I serve people locally around me, do I have my location at the top? You would actually be surprised. I have seen this many, many times by photographers. For a long time, I coached a lot of photographers specifically, and I would go to their websites and the top of their website didn't even have the location in which they served. And when I tell you, that is going to lose you so many clients because if someone has to hunt around for relevant information for what they're looking for, you've already lost them. And so if you are a local service-based business, do you have in that top part of your website where you're located and who you serve and how you serve them and something that makes you unique? And I don't have time today to get into like how to create a super impactful website. One of the things that I do as a service for my clients is we do something called a website glow up. And in the website glow up, we really take a look at the grunt test as well as so many other factors. Is it super usable? Is it easy to navigate? Is there a lot of white space? Does it feel clean and professional? There's a lot of things that we look at. But really, this top part of your website, your banner, your header, the first like two sections of your website are gonna be so crucial for that initial experience that you have for your clients. Someone who is coming onto your website, like that part is gonna be the first thing they see. And so you want to make sure that it's gonna be super clear and impactful. And there's also a lot of other other SEO reasons that we want to do it, but really we just want to think about usability and is it super clear when people come to my website what I do and who I serve. And then the last thing I'm gonna touch on, we're not gonna get into specifics because I don't want to confuse anybody, but every couple of months, again, once a quarter, update your Google Business profile. So just taking a look at again, um, do I need to update any photos? Do I need to update any of the the information? Have my the clients that I serve, has that changed? Do I need to update that, the text and the information that I have in my Google Business profile? Uh, do I have any new testimonials or reviews that people have submitted to your Google Business profile? If you haven't had any reviews, that would be a good chance for you to then write some emails to past clients and ask them to leave you a review, a review on your Google Business profile. Google Business Profiles are honestly, again, especially for local-based businesses, this is going to be something you want to have in place because you, if you want to be at the top of Google, you want to do as much as you can to have your information easily found on Google and to make sure everything matches. So take a look at your website. What's the contact information there? Do you have the exact same contact information for your Google business profile and just making sure that everything? Lines up and is super cohesive because the more that you can do that, the more optimized your brand and your online presence is going to be. So I know that we just talked about a lot of things. Again, even if you weren't able to write those down, I highly recommend come back and listen in. I'll also just do a quick recap now. So if you are able to take notes, the six, seven things that we talked about were taking a look at your brand photos. Are they consistent? Do you need to update them anywhere? Taking a look at your brand colors, do they still feel aligned with your your clients and who you're looking to attract? Taking a look at your Instagram link that you have for your link page. Is it a Linktree account or do you have it linking back to your website? Taking a look at your Instagram highlights, so your saved stories, if you will, do you need to clean those up? Can you share it more concisely? Does it need to be cleaned up? Is there like a million stories in each highlight? And just taking a look at that. Also looking at the last nine to 12 posts, again, that number might be higher or lower based on how consistently you're posting on Instagram, but taking a look at the quality. What type of content are you sharing? And if you were someone who knew nothing about what you do, what would you feel? What would you think? How would you experience your latest posts? Then taking a look at your website, asking yourself, does it pass that five-second grunt test? And then lastly, updating your Google Business profile. So hopefully this is helpful. If you are wanting to up-level your brand, if you're wanting to create a more cohesive brand that does the selling for you, that the brand that people come to and they can just tell immediately and know that you are legit. You are professional, you have everything together, they know they're gonna be taken care of. These are gonna be steps and things that you're gonna wanna consistently take a look at because that'll help make sure that everywhere that you show up online that everything matches. And that's what we want, right? We want that cohesion, we want this level of professionalism to be seen by our dream clients. And so when you take the time to do this, it really does make so much of a difference. So thank you so much for being here. I'm cheering you on so much, and as always, I hope you remember that you deserve a brand that does all of the selling for you, and I'll see you in the next episode.