Instead of “Should we rebrand?” the question for 2026 is, “What marketing initiatives will bring us the most ROI for the least amount of money?”

To answer this question, we’re going to do a little thought experiment.

Imagine owning a factory, and there’s an economic downturn. The last thing you plan to do is break ground on a new facility or buy expensive equipment.

What you’ll probably do instead is maintain your existing factory and introduce efficiencies to keep it producing.

If you think of your branding and marketing similarly, maintaining and building on what you already have will help you navigate economic uncertainty.

We’re showing you how to do this using a brand audit to find your company’s best creative and give it a second wind.

Why do brand audits in the first place?

Brand audits give you an in-depth look into all of your marketing materials, internal communications, and other branded assets. You can see at a high level and in detail what’s working, and, more importantly, identify the assets that are draining value from your business.

And surprisingly, they’re often hiding in plain sight.

It’s the welcome sequence going out to leads that still references a webinar from two years ago. Or the landing page with a “Book a Demo” button going to a generic contact page. And it’s also the sales brochures with outdated product icons.

These are examples of assets causing leaks due to brand inconsistencies (bad) or creating confusion for buyers (worse). Brand audits help plug these holes.

Looking for the gems in your marketing archives

Mining your company’s brand and marketing assets often reveals a goldmine of reusable content.

But how far back should you go? A year? Since the start of your business?

We recommend covering the last five years of your assets because you can see how your messaging and designs have evolved over this timeframe.

As you review these assets, identify inconsistencies and other issues, you’ll begin to notice opportunities to remix, refresh, and republish high-performing assets and those with the potential to help your business grow.

Auditing your brand (DIY style)

Where do you begin with your company’s brand audit, especially when you have a lot of files to go through? To take the overwhelm out of it, we recommend starting with a high-level view of your marketing assets and then getting more detailed.

Here’s how to go about it.

Gather your company’s assets

The first step in a DIY brand audit is to collect all of your company’s customer-facing marketing and sales materials, as well as any internal communications. This includes emails, landing pages, websites, one-pagers, brochures, trade show backdrops, slide decks, etc.

These marketing pieces can be in a physical folder, but ideally, it’s easier to keep everything organized in a digital format. You can use a simple spreadsheet or tools like Trello or Notion to catalog these assets, which allow for more customization, organization, and tracking.

The goal is to have a system in place to show your brand’s entire visual ecosystem, so once everything is laid out, you can go through each one.

Perform a visual check

Now, you can start asking some objective questions about what you’ve done. Put yourself in the shoes of a stranger who’s seeing these marketing materials for the first time.

Would they know that everything they’re looking at belongs to your company? If not, why?

Let’s dig deeper because there are four visual categories that you want to be mindful of to help answer those questions.

Logo
Look through your logo files to see if they’ve been stretched, squished, or altered in any way that violates your brand standards.

Color palette
Check out how your brand colors are used across your print materials, landing pages, social posts, and other digital pieces. Are there five different shades of blue (or another color) showing up?

Typography
Your designers know which fonts to use when creating customer-facing marketing pieces, but your sales team or HR department may not when they’re producing documents in-house. As you review your materials, is there evidence of people playing fast and loose with the company’s branded fonts?

Imagery
From the graphics and icons used on sales pieces to the stock photography sourced online, all of these images tell a story about your business. You want to be on the lookout for images that are low-resolution, low-quality, or break away from how your products and target demographic should be represented.

As you go through these different visual assets, you want to make a note in your spreadsheet or other tool of the outliers. They are visual leaks that are causing problems for your brand.

Assess your messaging

What your marketing and sales materials say is just as important as how they look. As you read through your headlines, subheads, and body copy in your print and digital assets, here is what you should pay attention to.

Voice
Does the language, more specifically the words used in your marketing materials, seem like they’re coming from the same company?

Tone
Does the copy shift drastically from one mood to another? Maybe your website is more conversational, while your customer onboarding materials are stiff and corporate.

Remember that you’re looking at this from the customer’s perspective. While they may not be able to pinpoint the exact problems in your messaging, they will be able to tell when something is “off.”

Patching the holes

After you’ve audited all these assets, we recommend stepping away from them for a few days before taking the next step: identifying which ones are worth reusing.

Deciding which marketing pieces to repurpose will vary depending on your business type, marketing strategy, and overall goals. But there are a few things to think about as you assess all your marketing pieces with fresh eyes.

– Are there existing metrics for your printed and digital pieces? If so, which were the mid- to high-performers?
– As you plan out your marketing over the next quarter or year, which of your existing assets can be reused?
– Which of your pieces has a ton of great information, but just needs a design update?

As you go through these questions (and your own), you’ll find the rough gems you can turn into polished jewels.

Reduce, reuse, recycle (your brand assets)

Brand audits are necessary to help you see which assets are (or will become) workhorses for your business or dead weight. The winners will be the marketing pieces that carry your business through unpredictable times.

Doing a brand audit will reveal what’s working and what’s not in your business and expose the leaks in your branding and marketing, so you can seal the gaps.

But remember, you aren’t reinventing the wheel. You’re optimizing what you have and giving it new life.