Is Your Brand Making the Right First Impression?

A Self-Audit for Purpose-Driven Websites and Messaging

First impressions are everything in marketing. Potential buyers make and often hold onto their initial judgments about a brand for a while, especially if it’s a bad first impression. It’s important to start the conversation with them in a strong and compelling way. 

This first impression is arguably even more crucial if you consider yourself a purpose-driven brand. After all, customers who shop based on their values aren’t just judging your logo design and how quickly your website loads (although these things are important); they’re also evaluating whether your values stand front and center across your brand’s messaging and whether you are actually putting your values into action.

We recognize how difficult it can be to self-judge something as intangible as a brand identity and the impression it makes, which is why we’ve designed this self-auditing tool to give you a roadmap toward making a better first impression. With the right questions and focus areas, you can effectively determine if your brand’s values — and your quality products or services — shine through in the brand you’ve built.

Are Your Branding Mission, Vision, and Values Clear?

For a purpose-driven brand, this is one of the most important questions you can ask. It’s also a good starting point for the rest of your audit, because many of the decisions and changes you’ll make will flow out of what you learn here.

To start, make sure you actually have a clear mission that everyone in your organization understands and stands by. If you’re not sure what the mission is, consider why you (or the original founder) started the brand. You must be modeling the appropriate mission and values in a clear and compelling way as the leader of the organization. Additionally, ask your employees why they chose to work at the company and why they continue to work there.

Once your mission is clear to everyone internally, make sure it’s communicated clearly to your customers. This may be achieved through mission, vision, and values statements on your website. Or perhaps you’ve created an “About Us,” “Our Story,” or “Why We Care” page that conversationally explains your purpose. Another great approach is to clearly answer questions like:

• Who is this product or service for?
• What problem(s) is our company solving?
• How can the company and its customers reach solutions that solve these problems?

Whatever route you take across your website and brand channels, make sure a consistent mission, with a clear vision and values, is stated again and again.

Brand Mission, Vision, and Values Audit Checklist

Consider the following points as part of your audit process:

Our website is filled with clear mission, vision, and values statements that are easy to find (maybe through a dedicated About Us page).

It is clear what products and services we offer and why we offer them.

We have summarized what we’re working toward through an impact statement or goal statement.

Our website, newsletter, social channels, and other brand assets are peppered with stories and examples that align with our mission, vision, and values.

Our messaging uses plain, easy-to-understand language that avoids jargon whenever possible, making our mission, vision, and values even clearer.

Our brand language is consistent and designed to build memorability with our values-driven audience.

Is Your Brand Messaging Consistent?

Customers who are interested in purpose-driven brands are more likely than the average consumer to notice if something in your messaging is amiss. For example: 

• Did someone write a guest blog that doesn’t really align with your brand’s mission? 
• Did you send out a recent newsletter that has nothing to do with the impact you’re trying to make? 
• Do you have an out-of-date page on your website that sounds different from the rest of your brand’s messaging? 
• Did one of your employees respond to a social media comment in a way that doesn’t reflect your brand’s values? 

All of these are examples of inconsistent messaging that may seem minor but can turn customers away for good if you’re not careful. Your messaging audit should cover the full range of your digital and physical assets, allowing you to assess whether your website, blog, podcast, social media accounts, newsletters, ads, and print media A) align with the overall tone and message you want to convey and B) maintain a consistent tone across all platforms. In particular, look closely at older blogs and campaigns – these may not align with your current messaging and brand strategy and should be updated accordingly.

Brand Messaging Audit Checklist

Use these statements as part of your brand messaging audit:

  Our messaging sounds like and aligns with our mission, vision, and values.

  All written and audiovisual materials in our portfolio sound like “us.”

Our visual, audio, and written choices all communicate the same thing; media format doesn’t change what we’re saying.

Our brand guide includes clear guidance on messaging, with channel- and media-specific instructions where necessary.

All members of the team have been trained on how to write and speak according to the messaging strategies outlined in the brand guide.

Everyone on our team can accurately state who we are and what we do through an elevator pitch.

Our tone and voice remain the same, regardless of who is speaking on behalf of our brand; this includes guest bloggers, influencers, and third-party partners we work with.

Our messaging reflects our current values and goals rather than past values and goals.

Is Your Website User-Friendly and Accessible?

An outdated or clunky website could turn away almost any customer, whether you’re running a purpose-driven company or not. It can be tricky to keep up with all of the updates and tweaks necessary to keep a website running smoothly, but it’s worth it to have a digital presence that feels welcoming to your users. 

Fortunately, there are many tools out there that can help you with updating user-friendliness and accessibility, including several ADA-compliant accessibility tools and built-in CMS backends that help you check all of the boxes. If you’re overwhelmed by the prospect of building or maintaining a website that your customers will enjoy visiting, consider hiring a web developer, web designer, UX/UI designer, or full-service marketing agency to help you stay on top of things.

Website Accessibility Audit Checklist

At a minimum, evaluate your web presence with the following statements:

Website navigation is easy, ideally with an organized and clearly labeled navigation menu.

The website passes accessibility tests related to color contrast, text size, metacontent, and more; we’ve made this evaluation with an accessibility tool or template.

Our website loads quickly enough that people won’t get frustrated and leave the page.

We have taken steps to make our website work well on mobile devices.

Everything on the website works; there are no broken links or buttons.

Clear calls to action are clickable and spread throughout the website in logical places.

Does Your Brand Resonate With Your Target Audience?

Your connection with the right audience is a huge indicator of how your brand will perform. That’s why it’s necessary to look at your website and other brand assets through the lens of your ideal buyer. What are they looking to buy? What values do they hold that will matter when shopping with your brand? What about your brand is most likely to stand out to them and make them feel connected to you? What else constitutes their identity and might influence the purchasing decisions they make?

At a general level, you can make sure your brand quickly makes a good impression on your target audience by completing a design audit that focuses on your digital assets. Take a look at your colors, fonts, logos, layouts, and other elements of the site, assessing whether they contribute to a modern and uncluttered aesthetic for your brand. Then, get more specific, considering whether the choices you’ve made will consciously or unconsciously connect with your consumers’ tightly-held values.

From there, focus heavily on all storytelling media on your site. This includes any photos, videos, stories, testimonials, and other content that will catch their eye. Make sure all of these assets align with who you are and, based on your knowledge of them, find a way to extend that to connect with who they are.

This is a great opportunity to talk to current customers and test groups about their impressions of your brand. You may be surprised to find out what is and isn’t working for them; often, the biggest problems they’ll have with your branding will be easy fixes you wouldn’t have known to make otherwise.

Audience Alignment Audit Checklist

Use these audit statements to help you determine if you’re effectively reaching your target audience:

Our messaging speaks directly to the needs, motivations, and pain points of our core audiences in an accessible and sincere way.

Our purpose and values show up naturally in our messaging; our statements don’t feel inauthentic or like they were added as an afterthought.

We use inclusive language and follow accessibility standards to ensure all members of our target audience feel connected to our brand.

Our website and social media presence are attractive, with an overall design and feel that works well with who we are and who we want to be.

Our stories and media choices not only align with who we are but also center the people and communities we serve.

We balance emotional storytelling with factual credibility and transparency.

We’ve gathered feedback from our target audience to determine how we can better reach them with our brand strategy.

Is Your SEO Strategy Working (Or Does It Exist)?

SEO strategy is key for all brands that want to keep up a strong digital presence and brand identity. A holistic SEO strategy can be the difference between making a strong first impression on new customers and never reaching them at all. Many great brands out there are some of the best-kept secrets because their lack of an SEO strategy effectively hides them from prospective new customers.

So what can you do to improve your SEO strategy, especially if you’ve never paid attention to SEO before? Start by taking the previous sections of this audit guide seriously. Many of the messaging and web improvement decisions you make based on the previous audit sections will help you improve SEO right off the bat. A consistent messaging strategy makes you more likely to optimize your site’s keywords in ways that boost your search engine rankings. Websites that run well and follow basic accessibility rules prove reliable and are also more likely to rank highly in search results.

If you’re totally new to SEO, there is a wide range of free and paid tools that can help you. Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help with checking for errors and performance issues on your site. Other tools like SEMRush can help you evaluate site health and see if people are finding your content and how they’re finding it. Many of these tools offer assistance with keyword optimization as well, and they may even offer suggestions for improved tags, meta titles, and descriptions.

SEO Audit Checklist

 My team and I know what SEO is and are paying attention to it.

We have invested in paid or unpaid SEO tools to help us evaluate website performance.

We regularly check on our site’s health and SEO performance, especially for key webpages.

 We’ve come up with target keywords and keyphrases that are important to us.

 We are taking steps to increase our authority and rankings for these keywords that matter to us.

 We are following SEO best practices and recommendations, especially as recommended by our chosen SEO tools.

We aren’t compromising the quality or tone of our content in order to stuff keywords into content where it doesn’t belong.

What’s Next? Putting Brand Audit Results Into Action

There are a lot of steps here, and many of these individual steps will take some time, thought, and energy to complete. They are well worth the effort for making a good first impression, but we recognize that most teams don’t have the bandwidth available to do a good-faith audit that checks off all the boxes.

That’s where we come in. Mane Impact’s team is trained to handle exactly this kind of work, especially for purpose-driven brands with priorities that go beyond basic web design and SEO. We can help to drive the audit forward, and we can also help you with mitigation strategies and next steps based on the problems you discover. We’re here for it all, and we’re excited to see what we can do to spread your purpose and impact message to more interested customers.

Contact Mane Impact today to learn more about how we can help you with a full branding audit and the all-important next steps and action items that make the process worth it. You can also check out our free website audit checklist and brand audit checklist resources here.