Once someone posts a comment on the internet, it leaves a gummy print in peoples’ minds that can take years to scrape off. The comment could be good or bad, true or untrue, but one fact remains. Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not there. Brand monitoring helps you:
- Measure and evaluate performance
- Improve your product or service
- Make comparisons
- Uncover new opportunities
- Share good news stories and reviews
- Monitor competitors
Let’s look at brand monitoring, what it entails, the benefits and some helpful tools you can check out.
What Is Brand Monitoring?
In simple terms, brand monitoring is about watching brand mentions. It is associated with tracking all the posts that talk about your brand or product and it brings meaningful data to help you take business decisions. You need to hear feedback from consumers and you can also learn how your competitors are faring too. Other benefits include seeking out brand ambassadors or influencers to work with… if they’re loving your product, you want to know about it right?
In the below IG post, Project Juice was tagged on the photo and in the location. Because of this, they were able to interact with someone who has 59k followers.
McDonald’s utilises brand monitoring to chip in on comments about their food. Like this one. Having conversations with customers on social media is important for building a relatable brand.
And you can pick up customer complaints or problems early on and step in to fix them like Google Drive. Speed is of the essence here as people experiencing tech problems, issues with flights, deliveries, orders etc really do expect a fast response or solution.
Why Does Brand Monitoring Matter?
Consumer perceptions of your brand can be the difference between:
- Instant trust or instant scepticism
- Abandoning a checkout cart
- Charging a premium or discounting your price
- Attracting A-level employees or B-level employees
- An upset customer and a lost forever customer
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” So, how do you expect to learn, evolve, and improve without listening to them? When brand monitoring is done right, it will help you to protect your brand reputation as well. You can proactively plan how to respond to negative comments, schedule marketing campaigns and answer frequently asked questions (or complaints).
What Should You Monitor?
You’ll want your brand monitoring to pick up useful mentions pertaining to your brand. BUT, you don’t want to hear about everything in your sector. Set your monitoring parameters to be too generic and your email inbox will be filled with irrelevant alerts.
Do Monitor
- Brand name, including common misspellings
- Brand product names
- Brand and campaign hashtags
- All mentions, comments, reviews and direct messages
- Reviews across various platforms
- Posts that tag you in their photo or checkin
Don’t Monitor
- Broad industry hashtags- eg #Finance or #Forex
- Everything related to all your competitors – instead choose their campaign hashtags and monitor those
- Every keyword associated with your brand – eg Marketing
Tools For Brand Monitoring
In the middle of 2021, there are countless social media channels, and therefore, manual tracking of every mention is impossible. Let’s make it simpler. You can always get assistance from an expert like Contentworks Agency, and they’ll do the hard work for you.
Did you know that:
- 59% of consumers reach out to brands on social because they had a great experience
- 47% of consumers reach out to brands on social because they have a product or service question
- 40% of consumers reach out to brands on social because they had a bad experience
Now, let’s look at those brand monitoring tools:
#1 Google Alerts
Free of cost, it works on the keywords you input. Google Alerts identifies all the news related to that keyword and sends you email alerts right on the spot when anything publishes on the internet. Being versatile, it can track anything. Be it a brand name or currency; it fetches all the data. Google Alerts is a must-have for new businesses but has a limited algorithm when it comes to analyzing. Don’t expect it to dig deeply into forums and social media platforms where, let’s be honest, most of the chatter is happening!
#2 SEMrush
SEMrush is another first choice of SEO experts. It offers an intuitive feed of mentions where you can work with individual posts and pages, tag or label them, and filter the results for a more precise picture. Another great thing about SEMrush is that it can effectively measure traffic from online mentions that contain links.
#3 Brandwatch Analytics
Brandwatch is a tool that helps you explore consumer behavior and feedback about your brand by tracking brand mentions on social media and around the web. It presents a comprehensive report including trending topics analysis, filtration by audience demographics, so you can focus on insights. The platform also helps you to create intelligent alerts that notify you of PR issues, marketing opportunities, and emerging market trends.
#4 TalkWater
Talkwalker is on the list of the top 10 because of its AI-based insights. The tool has all the features needed for marketing teams with several analytics dashboards. Talkwalker stands out among others because it can do visual recognition. It can discover your brand logo on images and in videos across the Internet. Additionally, this brand monitoring tool can analyse brand mentions for over two years.
#5 Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a powerful brand monitoring and social media listening tool that allows you to manage your brand’s social media channels easily. It integrates with all social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. Agorapulse has a combined inbox for all platforms and a publishing feature, along with features that allow you to easily identify top fans and brand ambassadors in addition to monitoring competitors!
#6 Buffer
Buffer is an affordable option for brands that are running on a low scale. Brilliantly, in a low-price range, this tool offers a 360-degree social media management solution that takes care of brand monitoring via integrating social listening platforms. More than this, Buffer allows you to publish content, respond to messages, and analyse brand mentions from a single screen.
#7 Brand24
Brand24 covers everything when it comes to brand mentions. From social platforms to news portals, blogs, forums, articles, and more. Brands24 is an incredible tool that collects the most accurate data from the official Facebook API. Businesses opting for Brands24 can get brand mentions, sentiment, customer interaction count, most active mention areas, influencers belonging to your niche, and the overall context behind the brand mention.
#8 Sentione
Sentione is an AI-based brand monitoring tool that takes sentiment tracking to the next level. It lets businesses keep track of what customers, potential audience, and competitors are saying about their brands across social media platforms and around the entire web.
93% of marketers agree that consumers trust content created by their peers more than content created by brands. Tap into user generated content, brand mentions and positive reviews by monitoring the online landscape. Brand monitoring is essential for businesses wanting to attract and retain the digitally savvy clients of today. Are you monitoring what people are saying about your brand? Tweet me @Charli_Says and share your thoughts.