What is Brand Monitoring And Why Is It Important?
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the process of tracking different channels to identify where your brand is mentioned. Knowing where and how people are talking about your brand will help you better understand how people perceive it, and lets you collect valuable feedback from your audience. You can also keep an eye on potential crises and respond to questions or criticism before they get out of control.
Why Brand Monitoring matters
As a brand, it’s important to care what the audience you’re serving thinks. You might not agree with some of the conversations you see around your brand, but this gives you an understanding of the general sentiment around your brand and products. Your public perception and how you respond to public feedback can play a huge role in brand growth.
In fact, according to our recent survey of 250 business executives, 72% are currently using social media as a source of data and insights to inform their company’s business marketing decisions.
What Should You Monitor?
Brand Mentions
Anytime someone mentions your company name or your brand, that’s a brand mention.
It’s easy to track brand mentions with Google Alert. Just input your brand as the keyword and monitor your inbox for any mentions. If you have a small brand with a niche audience, using branded keywords is relatively straightforward. Google scours the web and sends you an email every time it sees that someone else has mentioned your marketing brand.
Product Mentions
Similar to brand mentions are product mentions. These can be helpful to track if you want to track the buzz about a specific product you sell. Tracking multi-channel product mentions can be a helpful strategy for new product launches. Speculation before the launch might just inspire a new idea, while feedback after the fact can help you make adjustments.
Staff Mentions
Do you have Instagram influencers, micro-influencers, or well-known figures on your payroll? Is your C-suite fairly famous? If so, you might want to track mentions of their digital names.
Influential people doing good things can shine a spotlight on the companies they represent, even if their activities aren’t brand-related.
Backlinks
Direct mentions aren’t the only way people can call attention to your online reputation. Sometimes, they can simply link to your website and not mention your name or product at all.
Links to your website from a third-party source are called backlinks. Link building can be extremely helpful for helping you rank higher on SERPs and driving website traffic. Tracking these links is essential to brand monitoring so you can see which online publications are talking about you and sending you traffic.
Industry-Specific Publications
Wouldn’t you love to know if your new digital app appeared in TechCrunch or got recommended by someone on the Forbes tech council?
Unlinked mentions are where your brand mentioned but not linked to. Monitoring industry-specific publications ensures you can capitalize on this free press and share it with your own audience.
Advantages Of Brand Monitoring:
Improve Customer Service and Retention
Every successful business owner understands that attracting new customers is only half the work. Ensuring customer happiness and earning their loyalty is just as important, if not more so, to generate revenue consistently. For this, you need to listen to your customers, respond to their queries and complaints, and provide them with timely support.
Create a Better Product
Brand monitoring is a great way to collect feedback about your product. People may be writing online reviews and expressing their opinions on social media. Some of these opinions may even include smart ideas on how your product could be improved. This can help you identify ways in which your product is lacking so you can build a better product geared towards your customers.
Boost Your Sales
In addition to identifying customer service and product improvement opportunities, brand monitoring also helps you identify sales opportunities. Some people may be discussing a product online before they decide to buy it. They may even ask around for reviews and opinions within their circles, or asking for some clarifications.
Measure Your Marketing Impact
Another excellent way to use brand monitoring is by using it to measure how your marketing campaigns are performing. You’ll ideally have a name for your campaign, and you might even use that name as a hashtag for social media promotions. Track the use of your campaign name and hashtag to see how many impressions you’re getting on social media.