Levelling Up Your Brand Analysis with Nexis Newsdesk™︎

The start of the year is an excellent time for internal reflection, with many companies taking a step back to analyze the status of their brand and the impact of their communications strategy. Conducting a proper brand analysis requires an in-depth review of everything from your brand’s messaging, services and products to customer sentiment, marketing impact and how your share of voice stacks up against the competition.

Undertaking this level of analysis can be arduous and time consuming, but having a firm process in place and utilizing the right tools can help keep the task manageable and improve the quality of your insights and takeaways. Below is an overview of the five areas your brand analysis should focus on, and how Nexis Newsdesk can help.

Start with the Basics

Before exploring how your brand is viewed from the outside, you need to review your company’s basic communications framework. Start by examining your short, medium, and long-term goals—and how you’re tracking success against them. Understanding what’s working (or what isn’t) will inform what marketing and communications efforts need to be tweaked or improved.

Next, reassess your brand’s mission and vision statements to ensure they match up with the company’s worldview and leadership team in 2022. The same should be done for your company’s key messaging.

And don’t forget to analyze how these messages are being communicated to the world. Evaluate your owned media channels and marketing materials to confirm that all copy reflects your mission and vision, and that your logo, color palette and design aesthetic are representative of the way you want the company to be perceived.

Evaluate the Competition

Once your foundation is set, it’s time to conduct a thorough competitive audit. Understanding who your key competitors are is a great first step, but Nexis Newsdesk can help you to dive deeper into data that can turn insights into actionable advice. Use it to understand where your competitors excel, where their customers are dissatisfied and where they’re most vulnerable.

To take things up another level, consider searching for companies outside of your core industry for those aspirational companies that are innovating in unusual, creative or useful ways. Here again, Nexis Newsdesk can help. Our Smart Indexing terms make it easy to search, aggregate and analyze coverage from thousands of companies and industry terms—making aspirational brand research a breeze.

Look to Your Customers

Identifying your core customers, how they interact with the company and what their journey looks like are all central to building and maintaining a successful brand. This can start with a review of brand sentiment via social media. If you haven’t already, you should also solicit customer feedback on what consumers like (or don’t like) about your products, customer service and more.

And finally, map out the average customer journey from start to finish. Identify how these consumers enter your sales funnel, how long it takes to convert and where the biggest sticking points are.

Know Your Digital Footprint

One way to better understand the customer journey is an analysis of your digital footprint. Successful brand building can’t be accomplished if you’re not keeping tabs on—and improving—your online presence.

Take advantage of basic tools like Google Analytics or more comprehensive subscription services to monitor traffic to your site, as well as how long people are staying and where they’re entering or exiting. All these details can hold clues to what’s working, what’s not, or how customers prefer to engage with the brand.

You can also utilize Nexis Newsdesk to analyze your brand’s social media presence against your competitors. Data and analytics that can help you measure brand awareness and sentiment across hashtags and handles, platforms and people will give you a sense of how you can unify the external perception with your brand voice.

Monitor Your Media Coverage

Comprehensive media monitoring should be an ongoing best practice, but an all-encompassing audit will play a part in any successful brand analysis. Nexis Newsdesk can shave hours off this process, helping to make your review of media attention simple and intuitive.

For basics, be sure to look beyond how many stories mention your company and/or your competitors. You should also investigate story sentiment, which types of news attract the most attention, which reporters are writing about your brand most often and which key messages are most clearly represented. To elevate your media monitoring, dig into micro-themes or trends affecting your coverage to better understand niche subsets of the data. This can help you position your brand for unique competitive advantages.

Once you’ve completed your brand analysis, the final step is translating your findings into actionable recommendations that can drive your strategy moving forward. Nexis Newsdesk can help with this process, providing access to deeper insights across all these steps. It also allows you to download graphics, charts, or other data visualizations to show rather than just tell your executive team the most important findings.

Ready to leverage Nexis Newsdesk for your brand analysis? Visit to learn more.