A Guide To Brand Monitoring On The Internet

Imagine that you have reacted to a consumer’s tag on social media, whether it is thanking or resolving their issues. You view the tag and immediately reply to the tag. This is one of building positive a customer relationship.

But what happens when a consumer has not mentioned your brand? 

You will simply not view it and hope that it is not a negative opinion, which could affect your brand image. This is exactly why you need to start brand monitoring on the internet. 

To indulge in the relevant content, appropriate audience, and timely reactions, you have to understand brand monitoring. This can help you in several other ways so you can get the most out of your brand monitoring efforts. 

Before you start to monitor essential conversations and activities around your brand, you have to understand how brand monitoring will benefit you. Further, in the guide, you will discover more about why brand monitoring is important and how you achieve it.

Why should you consider brand monitoring on the internet?

Brand monitoring on the internet can benefit your brand is not only timely replies but to improve your brand image. Here are some reasons why you should start brand monitoring.

Improve marketing impact

The most important reason to embrace brand monitoring is to assist you in measuring marketing campaigns. Ideally, you use the name of your campaign as hashtags for social media promotions. Track this campaign name to see the number of impressions and engagements. 

Moreover, you can dig deeper into the campaign results and analyze the responses made by the people. You can check whether these are positive or negative. Without brand monitoring, you can only view responses from those who mentioned you. 

Similar to this tactic, you can also measure the performance of a new product in the market. Many products have their own hashtags so that when people use these keywords, brands can analyze the marketing impact. 

Create centered products

Monitoring your brand is an effective way to gather feedback about your products and services. Your consumers will be writing reviews and opinions across various platforms. 

In fact, consumers come up with innovative ideas for an improved version of your product or services. With the help of these ideas, you can recognize improvements that deem profitable for your brand. 

For creating customer-centric products, include clear track records consisting of requests and complaints. Identify profitable features, complaints, and disliked features of the products. 

Better customer support

Attracting potential customers is a big part of the job as a brand owner. Even so, once you attract customers, earning their loyalty is the next big part. Ensuring customer loyalty guarantees consistent revenue generation. 

To do so, you need to listen to what your customers have to say about your brand, regardless of it being positive or negative. You are required to provide timely responses to queries, complaints, and praises. 

Through follow-ups, your brand perception can be greatly affected. Brand monitoring can help you track these complaints and queries. You can retain consumers effectively by providing apt customer support. 

Increase in sales

Brand monitoring also identifies your sales opportunities and helps to boost them. Consumers discuss products online before deciding to buy it. They look for reviews, opinions, specifications, and more. 

Every consumer is looking to buy a product that has positive reviews throughout. While they understand that a product is never really rated with five stars, they further look for assistance in the review sections. 

As a brand owner, your job is to help these consumers make a fast and effective decision while converting them into customers. To do so, you identify conversations across platforms. To stay ahead in the game, you could try identifying your competitor’s dissatisfied customers. 

When the timing is right, engaging with your potential audience helps to enhance your sales effectively. 

Strategical monitoring

Besides monitoring your own brand, it is necessary to consider other factors as well. Along with monitoring your overall performance, you can take a look into industry records and trends. With all the gathered data, your brand can effectively make future decisions. 

Make sure you monitor your brand reputation in the industry and receive clarity of your brand’s perception. Explore the industry trends to see what is new and what the touchstone is for innovative products. This will also help you understand what the people are expecting from your brand. 

Track competition

The last but equally essential reason to start brand monitoring is to track your competition. This is similar to monitoring your brand with keywords, except you input the competitors’ keywords. Check for positive or negative reviews, complaints, customer experiences, feature improvements, product opinions, etc. 

Through this tactic, you can understand where your competition stands. Further, you can engage with their dissatisfied customers and convert them into your potential consumers. 

Social media banter is a great way to grab consumers’ attention. If you and your competitors have a friendly rivalry, you can mention against them publicly in a humorous way. For instance, Wendy’s and KFC have the best comeback tweets for their competitors while keeping it cordial. 

What keywords should you use to monitor your brand online?

Now that you have decided to start brand monitoring on the internet, the next question is how. But there is a step in the middle that most people skip. 

Before you start to monitor your brand online, you need to understand what sort of keywords need to be used. If you want to make the most of brand monitoring, then you have to start with understand the potential keywords. 

Branded keywords

As you start brand monitoring, focus on branded keywords and their common variations. This includes your brand names, slogan, catchphrases, and more. For example, for Nike, you input their brand name, and their tagline ‘just do it.’

Along with that, you can also monitor variations related to the brand name, such as Nike.inc. This is because most people may refer to it as Nike or Nike.inc. Come up with more possible variations for your brand.

Do not forget to also monitor the misspelled names for your brand. These mostly occur due to typing errors and are quite prevalent across platforms. 

Product names

Many consumers do not directly mention or tag your brand name. If you recently had a product or service launch, they take to platforms and mention product names. At the same time, this does not happen only during launches but is comparatively more common.

Instead of mentioning ‘Nike,’ they will directly tag a product name like ‘Air Force 1’. These specific mentions could take place in case of complaints, issues, queries, or praises. You could also put in really obvious phrases like ‘Air force 1 quality issue’.

Think really specific and conduct brand monitoring since it will give you clarity on the issues prevailing in the products. 

Campaign names

Campaigns are an integral part of gaining increased traction. People discuss campaigns at length, eventually promoting your hashtags through networks, writing, blogs, reviews, etc.

You can input your campaign names, hashtags, and common variations of these. This will help you determine how the campaign is performing in the online community. Through this, you can also put an estimate of what is working, what is not, what to avoid in the future.

Industry-centric keywords

Besides your brand, consumers are constantly discussing several industries. The external and internal factors of the industry, the revenue generation, labor costs, and needs, etc. Monitoring these discussions are necessary so that you get an insight into the minds of the consumers. 

You can also understand the on-going trends occurring in the industry. If you are feeling risky, then you can analyze these insights and start a trend of your own. 

Product features 

Most times, consumers engage in discussions about products and their features. While they may refrain from talking about a specific product, they will mention phrases relating to the functions. Analyzing these will help you to reflect on some features you can add to your products. 

You can also use this analysis to come up with improved versions and create a customer-centric product. For instance, footwear brands like Nike could use keywords like ‘leather and fabric coating’ or ‘slimmer lines.’

Competitor keywords

Like we discussed, monitoring your competition is an essential part of brand monitoring. To do so, you have to keep track of keywords that are relevant to their brands. You can go beyond the brand names and slogans and include product names, campaign names, product features, etc.

Competitor tracking is similar to monitoring your own brand, except you replace the keywords. In the case of Nike, you can go ahead and monitor Adidas with keywords relating to their brand. 

This includes their tagline ‘impossible is nothing’ or product names ‘hyperon training shoes.’ These are only examples, but you can surely include many such common variations.

Brand public figures

Large brands are currently more than willing to monitor associated public figures, which are subject to their online community. They may appear in blogs or news posts and bring you traffic.

For positive reactions, you might want to address as well as engage in the content. In case of negative reactions, ensure immediate damage control while measuring the amount of the impact. 

Brand ambassadors, like celebrities, are constantly talked about. Brand monitoring will help you filter out posts that mention these concerning your campaigns and launches.

What is backlink monitoring?

Backlinks are inbound links that are linked on one website only to redirect to another. You can say that backlinks are the spine for SEO since they have the largest impact on your rankings. Over time, your efforts will help you acquire the best backlinks for your brand. 

Even so, SEO professionals find it difficult to track these backlinks after a certain period. If you have wondered where your backlink has disappeared and why it has stopped impacting your ranking, then you are in the right place.

Why should you consider using a backlink monitor software?

Backlink monitoring is a procedure conducted to determine where your vanished backlinks are. With brand monitoring tools to monitor backlinks, you can easily claim an upper-hand because this task usually gets overlooked. Here are some reasons why your brand should consider using backlink monitor software.

Unknown adjustments 

There is a great possibility that the website which once features your backlink has undergone webpage redevelopment. This causes your earned link to disappear in an instant. 

Nevertheless, you can receive immediate notifications with the help of backlink monitoring when unauthorized adjustments are impacting your backlink. 

Backlink profiling

Evaluating your backlinks is a big task, and you need to constantly switch between various tools. Backlink monitoring allows you to import data all at once. This way, you can easily analyze whether the links are good or bad.

Most platforms even provide a detailed report based on the criterion such as Alexa rating, anchors, external links, Facebook likes, Googles shares, Tweets, Google index, etc. 

Simple management

Like we mentioned before, the backlink is a major factor in your ranking. This is why you cannot allow it to destroy your brand’s web reputation. Bad links include gambling, explicit, and other such spam webpages that are not related to your website. 

Backlink monitoring helps to prevent these bad links that threaten your link profile. A brand monitoring tool to monitor backlinks also helps to create and share a report once you get a new link. 

Anchor text

Understanding the distribution of anchor text is as essential as is knowing where the links come from. Your backlink could end up in Google penalties due to an unnatural link profile. 

Backlink monitoring helps to effectively monitor the distribution of the anchors and protect your webpage from being weighted with exact-keyword links. 

Using brand monitoring tools on the internet

One brand monitoring tool can do efficient multi-tasking when used wisely. Instead of using the basic features, make sure that you are making the most of these tools. Brand monitoring on the internet will not only determine your performance but help you in improving certain aspects.

Here are some effective ways to use a brand monitoring tool to track competitors and brand mentions. 

Competitor tracking software

This is a constant reminder that tracking your competition is essential, however sneaky it may seem. With the help of a brand monitoring tool to track competitors, you unveil opportunities for your own brand growth.

Note that your competitor might be monitoring your brand as we speak! Nevertheless, we have some tips so you can use a brand monitoring tool to track competitors smartly. 

  • Target keywords – With the help of a brand monitoring tool, you can easily reveal keywords being targeted for paid and organic search by your competitor. Once this is identified, you can further use the information to track missing keywords. This is an opportunity to be grabbed as you can target relevant keywords immediately. 
  • Analyze Rankings – Use the keyword analysis of your competitor to track their ranking progress. The right brand monitoring tool allows you to simultaneously compare your brands and competitor’s ranking. 
  • Track social activities – Try keeping an eye on your competitor’s social presence. The discussions their social media handles are engaging in, topics followed, their communicating tone, etc. If you find a minor fault in their reports, you can use it to call them out for a friendly banter online. 

Brand mentioning tool

A brand monitoring tool’s basic feature is to monitor brand mentions. This is a priority task since most consumers grab every opportunity to speak up online. 

Note that there are no sly tips to use brand mentioning tools because it is completely related to keywords. But, here are some ways you can practice upright brand monitoring.

  • Negative mention alerts – Addressing positive remarks may be essential to building good connections, but negative mentions are on a time-crunch. You need to be prepared to do damage control, which is why you must set up alerts. 
  • Plan ahead – While brand monitoring seems enough, it really is not. After you receive your records, you have a lot to work on and improve. Make attempts to resolve, thank, and offer help wherever required. 
  • Stay silent – When you first start monitoring your brand mentions, it is easy to get carried away. Make sure this does not happen, and you do stay low at times. Try to avoid stirred up unnecessary drama on platforms and respond to only valid complaints. 
  • Learn from your competitor – Staying ahead of the competition is one thing. But try to take away lessons from them about customer service, tone of voice, or complaint resolution. 

Endnotes

Brand monitoring on the internet may seem like a hefty term, especially if you are a beginner. As long as you understand the need for it, the tools, and the several other concepts it branches out into, then you are good to go.

The ultimate guide may have helped you understand the practices involved, but delivering the best end results after that is completely your job. Incorporate these tips to bring out the best of your right brand monitoring tool.