How To Monitor Your Personal Brand

Building your brand name gives you a leverage to represent your personality that way you want to. However, the growth and reach of your personal brand can sometimes go off track in the online world. Very often, Google searches fail to show who you are and why you stand out as a brand. And this is where you need to jump in and redesign your image online so that it reaches the right people.

A good personal brand should present you in both professional as well as a personal light. This helps people relate to you. So, if your goal is to grow your business, then using your individuality can become your strong suit. To do that, you have to be active in observing your brand image and its reach, round the clock.

Here is a guide to not only give you tips on how to monitor your brand but also control and maintain its relevance online.

Why should you monitor your brand

Are you looking for opportunities in your industry? Do you want to be known as a powerful individual? Then the first and foremost thing to do is to keep track of how engaging your brand is online. Is it relevant? Is it standing out? Are people noticing it?

In this day and age, companies depend on hiring their employees online. They look for prospective individuals with the use of search engines, and the one that stands out amongst everyone else bags the opportunity to work with them.

Essentially, businesses want efficient, reliable, and talented people that know exactly what to do in their fields. In fact, their main aim to find potential candidates online is to get quick and relevant results. So, if you build yourself as an honest and professional brand name, then you will most likely catch their attention.

All in all, to have your brand name and its content represent you as the most suitable personality in front of the hiring companies, you need to keep track of your brand’s reach and keep updating them.

Reason One – Improves your marketing influence

With the presence of social media and other online platforms, brands have to stay relevant today. Brand monitoring gives you the inside details of what your target audience likes, dislikes about your brand. This way, your brand can shape itself in a way that it connects more to the people.

By tracking reviews, comments, and mentions of your brand and its products, you can redesign your marketing strategies. And by doing so, you can make it more personal and influential.

To grasp people’s attention towards your brand more effectively, start by monitoring market trends. In addition, examine what your competitors are doing. As a result, you can improve on what your brand is missing out on.

Another way to improve your marketing impact is by measuring the results of your brand’s marketing campaigns. Analyze the impact of your campaign before and after it’s release by tracking your brand’s mentions. Figure out which aspects of your campaign attracted people the most and which ones did not. Accordingly, you can make changes to them and influence a larger audience next time. You can also reach out to social media influencers to maximize engagement. 

Reason Two – Helps you become more customer-centric

By monitoring the impact of your brand, you can get clarity on what interests your target audience more and what does not. Customers or possible clients are looking for the best version of the services that they need. If you track your brand’s presence online, then you can improve on your lapses and become a more consumer-centric brand. 

Moreover, online reviews and social media posts of your brand’s products can have a huge impact on the viewers. And this is why examining them can make your brand more relevant. So, collect their feedback and make the appropriate changes.

Look at the demographics of where and by whom you are being discussed and figure out your target audience. By keeping track of conversations around your brand, you can learn where your potential clients are most active. As a result, you can pick the most engaging channels to promote your brand.

Besides looking for the right audience, you can also collect the requests of your customers for certain features or products. This will help you to build a new and improved product that might attract a wide customer range.

Also, listen to what your industry has to say about your competitors. You can only overtake them if you know where their services are failing and improve yours in those areas.

Reason Three – Boosts customer service

It takes much more than just attracting clients to have a successful business. Your brand’s reliability depends on your customer services. People want to know that you will be there to help them out whenever they need it.

A good brand means an honest team that responds, listens, and acts on its consumer’s desires quickly. And a brand monitoring tool can help you do that efficiently.

A vast population now relies on social media for sharing their opinions. Therefore, your customer support team can benefit from monitoring social media activities related to your services. By tracking people’s inquiries and responding to them instantly can build a strong bond between you and your customers.

Most of the brands use multiple social media accounts to reach their audience. A brand monitoring tool helps you manage them from one single system and makes it easier for you to respond to customer queries. Additionally, monitoring tools also offer to delegate tasks to team members to guarantee customers with quicker responses.

By using an analytic tool, you get timely updates that give you a general idea of how satisfied your customers are with your brand. They also let you identify unhappy customers at an early stage and improvise on their requirements.

Reason Four – Increases sales

With a successful customer-centric brand, your product’s reputation will speak for itself. And consequently, your overall sales will increase. Brand monitoring tools can speed up the process by using its features to identify sales opportunities online.

Many people engage in online discussions about a brand and its products before they think of buying it. By finding these conversations, the monitoring tools can help you analyze them and increase your chances of sales.

You can even offer valuable help by interacting with customers and guiding them in their decision of buying your products. You can highlight the benefits of your brand’s services in their lives and help them close the deal. 

Many online companies provide a mediating platform to sell quality products to their buyers. Through the use of monitoring tools, you can research these potential resellers and connect with them. This gives you a chance to reach a new set of consumers.

Lastly, brand monitoring can help you recognize customers that are not happy with your competitors. As a result, it gives you an opportunity to engage them in your products. All you have to do is observe their discussions online and find out what they are looking for in a product.

Reason Five Inspires you for new content

To stay active in your industry, you need to come up with new and fresh ideas constantly. Monitoring reviews and discussions on your brand or other related brands can be a good way to brainstorm for designs.

Always be on the lookout for inspiration from social media platforms and blogs. By finding a new concept, you can instill some of them in your products to attract new clients.

Moreover, if you already have certain keywords in mind, then you can track their engagement rate online. And if they are reaching a large audience, then developing your services around them can be highly beneficial for your brand. Eventually, it will help increase your sales and brand reputation.

Brand monitoring collects data on emerging trends as well. Therefore, you can build new strategies around them and attract potential investors for your business.

What areas to monitor

A good brand monitoring can eventually lead to a much better success rate of your brand. To do that, you need to track your mentions and discussions about your brands on as many platforms and sources as possible.

Today, the online world has given opportunities for everyone to discuss and voice their opinions. Whether you are a freelancer, a start-up company, or run a large enterprise, there is a huge chance that you are being discussed right this second in someplace.

A few key areas to access to monitor your brands are

  • Online forums
  • Newspapers and magazines
  • Social media networks
  • Broadcast media
  • Online blogs
  • Review websites

Other than that, here are a few important areas that you need to keep track of.

1.     Your brand and products

Your brand is who you are, what your business values are, and, most importantly, what your products are. So making sure that you track where and when people are talking about your business and your products is the most crucial part. This is the most effective area of your brand monitoring process.

With the use of the right tracking tools, you can get an in-depth analysis of where discussions about your brand are taking place and how far your brand is and its products engaging people. These reports are usually sent to you in real-time and therefore helps you respond to mentions and reviews instantly.

2.     Major staff

If you run a multi-team member firm and have influential employees, then it can prove to be beneficial for your brand. Keep track of online conversations around such employees.

Analyze their followers and mentions on social media and find out what most people have to say about them. By doing so, you can design a marketing strategy surrounding them for a wider reach of your brand. The same can be done with C-level people who work for you.

A good publicity angle with these employees can attract more and more customers your way.

3.     Incoming links to your website

Many websites and blogs do not refer to your brand name while mentioning your brand’s links. Due to this, it can sometimes go unnoticed by you for your brand monitoring. As a result, it can majorly affect your SEO.

If you want to boost your SEO and even make Google take note of your brand, then tracking inbound links to your brand’s website is very important.

Building backlinks to your website is one of the best ways to increase traffic and ranking of your brand.

4.     Publications and influencers of your industry

Having a good reputation and reach amongst your industry holds even greater importance in terms of your brand’s success. Healthy conversations about you amongst industry professionals can essentially shape your career.

Hence, monitoring mentions and talks about you on online platforms that are specifically for your industry is necessary. Keep track of what authority figures and experts are saying about you and respond to those feedbacks as soon as possible.

If they have good things to say, then react to their views with positive replies. And if they are pointing out certain mistakes, then take note of them and turn it into a positive outcome.

How to maintain the relevance of your brand on search engines

Designing and constantly updating your brand name for search engine optimization is crucial. You can spend thousands on online advertisements for your brand awareness, but in the end, people will always rely on search engines to know your authenticity. 

Nowadays, the most reliable source of information is the Google search engine. And for Google to list your brand name on its first page, you need to follow certain guidelines. But one of the key factors that these search engines look for is the relevance of a brand’s content.

So to keep your brand name consistent on any search engine, follow these simple steps.

Step One – Use SEO strategy

SEO is the backbone of growing your brand’s presence online. To keep your brand name relevant, you need to make use of SEO rich keywords. And the more appropriate keywords you use, the more relevant you will stay on search engines.

Although keywords are essential, you should not think of it as your topmost priority. Your main focus should be on creating content that speaks to your audience. And if you keep your audience in mind while representing your brand name’s values, you will automatically instill the right keywords in your content.

However, an important step is to do thorough research on the most suitable words that best describe your brand. Almost all major social media platforms from Facebook to YouTube assess your brand’s relevance based on the keywords that you use. This is why your brand name must include the SEO element to remain on top.

Step Two – Focus on the audience’s needs

Attracting customers is the key to any brand’s success. And in today’s fast-paced, online driven world, people are constantly looking for a change. Their expectations are higher than ever, and their patience, on the other hand, is growing weary. So to maintain your brand’s relevance online, you need to update your brand’s content with all the emerging trends.

Let’s say that you are a fashion designer and want to optimize your brand name online to reach your target audience. Now, in the fashion industry, demands and trends keep changing every season. So to attract customers or fashion enterprises, you will have to redesign and include these fashion statements in your brand as well.

You need to keep analyzing purchase patterns. Also, go through company websites and see how they work before you pitch your brand’s name for a collaboration. And by building a brand that works to satisfy the people that matter in your field, and incorporating important features and keywords on your website can make you stay relevant on search engines.

Step Three – Make your brand stand out

Your brand name represents you. And every individual is unique. So, try to instill that uniqueness into your brand. A good brand reaches people when they remain genuine and original in their values.

There are hundreds and millions of brands out there that sell the same idea, and if you are one of them, then make use of your strengths and skills to stand out. Keep in mind that to compel people who are browsing through your profile, you have to find an angle that no one has ever used before to describe your brand.

Emphasize why your brand is different from the others. Most importantly, make it visible. Include it in your social media posts, your brand’s tagline on your website and advertise your originality. And this way, you can create engagement and get more traffic to your brand.

In addition to following these steps to stay relevant online, engage in having healthy customer relationships, and do guest blogging on other similar or famous websites. This way, you will be able to reach a wider audience of similar interests and have a higher chance of ranking high in the search results.

Tools to monitor your personal brand

Brand monitoring helps you stay updated with the reach of your brand by assessing mentions and reviews about it. From social media blogs to newspaper articles, if you are an up and coming label, then you will find yourself being mentioned almost everywhere.

By monitoring your brand’s presence online, you can respond to these mentions and observe how well your brand is doing. Although, this can be time-consuming if you start handling it manually. This is why there are many reliable tools available online to help you track your brand’s reach.

 

Tool 1 – Google Alerts

This is one of the primary tools online. Google Alerts is quick and easy to use and helps you analyze your brand’s influence. Also, it is completely free, which makes it even more accessible. From freelancers to large enterprises, using Google Alerts can help you promote and redesign your branding strategies with its insights.

This tool gives you a timely report of who is mentioning you and what they are saying about you in both good and bad terms. And because of its up-to-date analysis, you can quickly respond to and handle the feedback.

Another convenient feature of Google Alerts is its set up. All you have to do is log in with your Google account, write down the keywords that you want it to track, separated with commas, and you will receive all the updates regarding your brand via emails.

You can start by adding yours and your brand’s name at first. Then you can go on to include keyword phrases that are associated with your business. Google Alerts shares result from news articles, blogs, online discussion forums, and even videos. And you can also choose how often you want to receive these updates.

Now, these alerts can get a bit overwhelming sometimes and make it difficult for you to manage your responses. Therefore, it is best to select the most important keywords that will benefit your brand monitoring process the most.

Tool 2 – BrandChirps

The best choice for those looking for a simple and affordable solution that covers the ENTIRE web and more when it comes to finding mentions of your brand or keywords.

It offers features at $6.95 a month that solutions at $49 and $99 a month do not even offer.

You get world-class features like JSON API, exporting of data, 365 day history, sentiment analysis, reporting of metrics, alerting to RSS and multiple email address, multiple daily updates and real-time alerting, and a free trial.

Brandchirps is also the only tool built by a real ORM and SEO brand professional who has been helping companies online as a digital marketer for more than 20 years.

While Brandchirps is not free, it is only $6.95 or $15.95 a month, depending on how many keywords you would like to monitor AND it offers more features than free tools ( or tools priced at $49 and $99 a month ).

Tool 3 – Ahrefs

Primarily, Ahrefs is an SEO tool, but it is also one of the most used tools for brand monitoring. This online tool is not limited to just the Google search engine. It has a keyword explorer that analyses the traffic of your brand on platforms like YouTube, Yahoo, Amazon, and Bing.

This tool goes deeper into reporting about your brand, like the links that visit your site and what the strength of their domains was.

Ahrefs has a “SERP overview” analysis in its system. This reports the estimated organic search traffic of your page on a monthly basis. It also analyzes the SERP history of the keywords that you choose.

Ahrefs is the only tool available that updates you on the growth or decline of backlinks. It also sends a weekly update of all the keywords used by your brand that have ranked high on search engines.

Ahrefs, unfortunately, is not free but is an in-depth analytic tool that can be very useful to monitor your brand.

Tool 4 – TweetDeck

This tool specifically tracks your brand’s search and mentions on Twitter. It has an efficient feature with which you can set up search columns that give you live updates whenever your keywords are mentioned.

For brands that use Twitter more often, TweetDeck has a range of features to improve your account’s reach. It is a free online tool that can assess multiple streams of reports together.

A significant advantage of Tweetdeck is its ability to combine multiple accounts. If you have more than one Twitter profile and want to monitor them together, then rely on this online tool for quick and detailed management of them all.

You can download TweetDeck and use it to help you grasp your audience’s attention on Twitter with effective management.

Tool 5 – HootSuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool. It is one of the most popular online tools used by many companies to handle their social media traffic. Primarily, it keeps track of your brand’s social media platforms and manages them properly. It runs on a system that allows you to monitor your brand’s reviews and talks online with reliable analysis.

With HootSuite, you can manage a variety of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, and respond to alerts instantly. Moreover, it allows you to add more than one account of the same network.

HootSuite sends you weekly analytics reports through emails. These reports include the number of clicks per day on your brand, the geographical data of the people who visited your brand pages, top referrers, and the most popular links of your brand.

If you are a team of employees, then HootSuite has a team management facility that allows you to delegate tasks to each team member. By doing so, you can function as a brand more smoothly.

Since this is a free tool, you can use it to your utmost advantage and improve your brand name through their weekly overviews.

Tool 6 – Awario

This is by far, one of the best brand monitoring tools. In addition to keeping track of your brand mentions on social media platforms, Awario stands out for its reach on websites. Be it news sites, blogs, or forums, Awario can track your brand name anywhere!

If you make use of this tool, then you can monitor your brand’s engagement on thousands of platforms. This is possible due to its quick and up-to-date alerts that notify you of mentions, the moment someone talks about your brand. And because of it’s real-time updates, you can easily respond and converse with the people discussing you.

Moreover, it has an inbuilt browser that lets you react to interactions on the same application. Be it direct messages, tweets, or comments, you can do it all from this single platform.

The greatest feature of this tool is its “Reach” metric. It informs you about the level of authority of the person who is discussing your brand name. So, this way, you can prioritize your feedback responses to the most important people according to their ranking.

Awario is one of the most user-friendly analytic tools out there and also offers a 14 day free trial with all of its features.

Tool 7 – Talkwalker

Talkwalker is an analytics tool that you can use to optimize your brand name on social media platforms. Besides that, you can also use it to enhance your brand’s reputation online by helping you execute compelling marketing campaigns.

The Talkwalker tool offers detailed insights into what people are saying about your brand on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It functions on real-time analysis and gives you instant updates on how your posts and brand is performing overall. Therefore, using Talkwalker can be an ideal brand monitoring tool to boost your customer services and examine your engagement.

It has a “trending score” feature that displays the most viral trends. This provides details about the global trends that you can use to improve your social media marketing strategies.

Additionally, it has an “image recognition” function that analyzes your brand logo’s presence on social media. This feature is time-saving as it runs on a single platform with a database of over 30,000 brands.

Talkwalker examines over 150 million sites and over 185 languages to give you the most accurate details of your brand’s mentions. And it helps you widen your reach over ten popular social networking sites along with an automated translation ability.

Also, if you want to increase your sales, then use Talkwalker to provide you with engaging content that could magnify your brand’s identity on a global scale. With so many distinctive functions for effective brand monitoring, Talkwalker is amongst the most reliable tools that many international brands use to enhance their social media marketing.

Tool 8 – Sendible

If you want all your monitoring research in a dashboard solution, then Sendible is an ideal tool for you. It is a dashboard-based social media application. With this, you can get instant multiple account streams from the top most networking sites in one single platform.

Use Sendible to get automated records of your brand mentions and prioritize responses. This tool has highly functional management that helps ease your collaborations and assignment of tasks. 

The unique feature of Sendible is its easy-to-use software, which not only measures your brand’s engagement but also your ROI. Plus, it also has social CRM tools to generate leads.

Sendible allows you to post on different social networks from an individual interface. Furthermore, this platform gives a detailed record of your posts’ reach amongst your followers.

Sendible is, by far, one of the most easily accessible tools. It has a very flexible system that can quickly adapt to changing demands and meet the expectations of your brand. And the best part is that it has a customizable software that you can change according to your business rules.

It has a variety of plans that you can choose from for effective brand monitoring and social media management.