We all have often come across phrases such as ‘customer is king’ as well as ‘customer is always right,’ and that a brand should always embrace its customer feedback. Be it a rambling review or a pessimistic tweet, you should be well-acquainted with all conversation that surrounds your brand. Besides this, responding to some inevitable conversations is essential.
Many companies are of the view that online conversations only matter to the marketing team. But do not forget that for any business, customers are the source. Their opinions are important not just for PR or purpose of marketing but to each team – from development to sales. Consequently, keeping track of such conversations is crucial.
But sifting through so many irrelevant and unnecessary conversations can sometimes be overwhelming and result in draining time. This is where brand monitoring comes into play.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring means monitoring conversations about your business, industry, product as well as social and web media.
In other words, it is a process of tracking various channels to find mentions of your brand and analyzing what is said about it. This process is often referred to as web monitoring and social media listening.
When used strategically, brand monitoring can assist in attracting, acquiring, and retaining customers. Any brand can jump to good publicity and spot a crisis before it actually becomes a crisis. It is also good for receiving information about how your products and services are being viewed and talked about.
Why are Online Brand Monitoring Services Important?
When it comes to business intelligence strategy, brand monitoring takes the top seat regardless of the size of your business. Consumers voice their queries, complaints, concerns, opinions, and praise through various channels.
Finding and analyzing these conversations will help you to build a positive brand reputation, improve the quality of products and services, and prepare well for a possible crisis.
Here are some of the benefits of online brand monitoring services.
Improve the Marketing Impact
With increasing competition, marketers have to be more targeted for which customer information is the key. Preferences, intent, and sentiments – the more you know about your audience, the more specific you can be. Brand monitoring gives you these insights.
Develop a Customer-Centric Product
No matter how good your marketing game is, a business cannot sustain itself with a poor product. Gone are the days when customers used to wait for products that businesses decide to produce. Now, they wish to have a say and do not want to settle for anything.
Customers are very vocal about what they want on social media. This is no less than a golden opportunity for a brand to take cues and develop a better product.
Ameliorate Customer Support and Retention
For all those who believe that attracting customers is enough, it’s important to know that attracting customers is just going halfway. Keeping the customers loyal and satisfied is what keeps revenue coming.
Satisfying your customers includes listening, supporting, and reacting – all of which can be done through brand monitoring tools.
Augment Sales
A brand can have impactful marketing if all teams leverage brand monitoring successfully. Both the brand and product will speak for itself, and the sales team will automatically reap the benefits of the same.
A brand can use brand monitoring for actually creating leads by identifying sales opportunities, connecting and engaging with customers, finding potential resellers, and converting unhappy rival’s customers as your own customers.
Brand Monitoring Campaigns
As already covered, there is a lot that you can do with brand monitoring. The following are the top-recommended campaigns to run brand monitoring.
Reputation Management
Reputation Management is one of the most important elements of brand monitoring and can help you to quickly respond to feedback and reviews. An average customer reads up to seven reviews before building trust in a brand. What does this mean for a business?
Responding to reviews and feedback shows potential customers that you are available and listening. If there are some negative reviews, you have the chance to offer a solution and use the feedback for making necessary changes.
Sentiment Analysis
Defined as interpretation and classification of emotions with text data, sentiment analysis permits businesses to analyze customer sentiments towards their products, brand, and services. No matter how great your marketing is, at the end of the day, it’s all about people buying it or not.
This is where sentiment analysis comes into play. It takes an overall look at how the audience perceives your brand.
Customer Engagement
A very important part of online brand monitoring services includes customer engagement. Monitoring your brand gives you a chance to interact with customers.
Customers do not always directly tag the brand. Most of the time, they use hashtags or only write brand names in their posts. Keep searches saved in your preferred tool to monitor your brand and try to engage as much as possible with your audience.
Source Content
Content adds value and is essential to the reader’s life. Similarly, it adds value to a brand. But it is not always easy to come up with unique ideas. Brand monitoring comes to the rescue here as well.
For instance, if a blogger posts about your brand, you will want to know about it. Or if a festive gift list came out, you’ll want to know if your product was listed. Knowing when people are talking about you, especially if it’s in the positive light, gives you additional and unique content to share on your social media platforms.
Competitor Analysis
Lastly, brand monitoring includes analyzing what your competitors are up to and helps you keep on top of that. You can use similar strategies and tools that you use for your own brand. In some cases, you can also offer better solutions to an unhappy customer.
What Should a Brand Track?
One common question that is asked every now and then is about what to track actually. If we need to answer it in the simplest terms, it would be everything. Any brand should monitor as many places as possible.
Be it a tiny business or a multinational corporation, more and more people are finding their voice online and could be talking about your brand. Communication moves quickly, and a brand needs to keep up with it.
It’s obvious that you have to track your brand mentions, but there are definitely some other areas to consider as well. People don’t always talk directly about you, and general industry talk can have a secondary effect on your brand. So, here are a few things to track.
Brand Mention Monitoring
There are various reasons to track your brand mentions online. It not only assists you in spotting and preventing a reputation crisis but also lets you interact effectively with your followers.
By monitoring brand mentions, you can measure how effective your marketing campaigns are. More brand mentions equal to growing brand name.
Tracking Social Media Mentions
Almost every brand has some sort of social media presence these days. Believe us when we say that social listening can provide your brand insights about everything – from customer service and public relations to product and marketing.
Everyone is aware of the fact that mentions on social media are both positive and negative. It is the duty of a business to view each mention as a handsome opportunity to engage with your audience and alter their perception of your brand.
Incoming Links
An incoming or inbound link refers to a URL, an image, or a video on a site other than yours that will bring the user to your site. Anyone can refer to other websites very easily. You could be missing a lot of references, both good and bad, if you are not monitoring these links.
Novel Industry Related Terms, Publications
One of the most important things includes having a conversation within your industry. If there is a new trendy thing or concept and you don’t know about it, which is capable of damaging your brand even if your brand was not mentioned.
Looking at your industry beyond novel terms is equally essential. For instance, a crisis can cause damage by association. If there is a huge controversy involving similar brands as yours, the audience might question your brand as well.
Staff Mentions
Got some highly influential people in your team? Well, it’s time to track mentions about them as well and monitoring services around them. The same goes for any C-level person, if any, in your business. Usually, you will be hoping to know about how great they are, but monitoring staff mentions also helpful if any negative conversations are going around about them.
What are Brand Tracking Tools?
Until now, the importance of brand monitoring is clear. But how do you do that? Well, there is a huge list of brand monitoring tools on the market. You can use them to monitor your brand, respond to issues quickly, keep an eye on competitors, or simply generate leads. Here are our top brand tracking tool recommendations.
Google Alerts
A brand can use Google alerts to search results for a given query. In essence, setting up a Google alert saves you a lot of time because whenever your query shows up on the web, you instantly receive an email. Such web alerts are useful for various reasons, one of them being brand monitoring. With this free tool, brands can keep track of the mentions of their products.
Brandchirps
Best tool for those looking for value and a full set of features offered by bigger brands in this space.
After entering in the terms you want to monitor, Brandchirps will alert you in real-time via JSON and RSS. You will also get a daily summary email of alerts too for up to 3 people.
Includes sentiment analyses, exporting of data, an API, 365 days of history, and analytics – something that more expensive tools 10x the cost of Brandchirps don’t even include.
Ahrefs
An all in one SEO toolset, Ahrefs monitors your profile very deeply. You can actually view all the links coming to your website, the strength of anchor text, and the domain strength. This is extremely handy to track who is talking about you and your brand. Unlike google alerts, Ahrefs is not free, but it is truly worth the investment.
Social Insider
Making social media monitoring and hashtag monitoring easier than ever, Social Insider is one of the best online brand monitoring services. All you need to do is to add your social media profiles and your competitor’s profiles. This way, you can uncover loads of data that no other tool might help you with.
The data includes basics like growth and engagement metrics, but a brand can also know additional demographic data such as age, location, and gender. By using social insider, brands can also find out about the type of content that is benefitting their competitors.
Mention
Mention is another social media monitoring tool that assists in monitoring your brand as well as uncovering influencers. You can add simple alerts that track your brand, links to your site, and your Facebook/Twitter profile. You can also connect your social media handles directly.
As soon as your alerts are configured, you will be able to see all the mentions simply in an inbox. The inbox also lets you reply directly.
SEMrush
When talking about online brand monitoring services, how can we miss out on SEMrush. It is the leading SEO tool. Something that a lot of people tend to miss out is the fact that SEMrush is an all in one marketing suite that has a huge variety of tools. These tools include brand monitoring and social media tracker.
To get started, you just need to add your brand name, set inclusion/exclusions words, and customize report settings. The tool will track mentions of your brand across the web. With SEMrush, brands can find an overview of sentiment analysis, backlinks, estimated reach, and so much more.
How to Select a Brand Tracking Tool?
Online brand monitoring services are essential for companies of all sizes. But how do you choose a particular tool? With more than 200 brand monitoring tools available in the market, selecting one can be overwhelming.
Whether you have a whole team working on brand monitoring or the responsibility is delegated to you, there are some critical considerations to keep in mind while selecting a tool.
First and foremost, the range of coverage is an essential thing to consider. Almost every social media monitoring tool covers big social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Secondly, you must check for the frequency of alerts that a tool provides. Responding to every comment is not necessary, but leaving out important queries can create a negative image of the brand.
Additionally, you must also think about the value of the tool. No, we are not just talking about its price but the actual value that it brings to your brand. Bigger companies should also focus on the integration of monitoring tools with other applications.
Final Thoughts
Brand monitoring is becoming increasingly popular so that businesses can proactively and strategically monitor their brand reputation and growth. It can be done manually or with the help of some amazing and affordable tools that make the process easier than ever.
Brand monitoring lets you track where your brand is talked about and how people see it. With online brand monitoring services, you can find out new industry trends and always stay up to date. And with so many tools, all these have become super easy.
In case you haven’t tried monitoring your brand, try it today to improve your customer service, improve marketing impact, build a better product, and close deals in no time.