When it comes to managing your brand’s reputation, it’s important to listen to your customers and your audience.
This requires a holistic approach – looking at data from various sources, like customer surveys, support feedback, social media posts, and reviews.
Comparing these different inputs gives you a well-rounded understanding of customer sentiment, and even allows you to identify common praise or complaints that reveal patterns in how people perceive your brand.
This process is known as brand intelligence – identifying the key narratives around your brand being pushed by your main markets, using historic and real-time data. The insights found here help brands understand and improve the customer experience.
But how can you improve your brand intelligence strategy, using key insights to maintain your brand identity, protect your brand reputation, protect consumer trust in your brand, and meet consumer expectations?
It all starts with choosing the right brand intelligence solutions…
What is brand intelligence?
Brand intelligence involves the systematic monitoring of digital platforms and channels to collect and analyze data about a brand.
This data can encompass insights into consumer sentiment, brand mentions, potential abuse, cybersecurity threats, and counterfeiting activities.
By leveraging these real-time insights, companies can make informed decisions to enhance – and protect – their reputation. For example, refining brand messaging, optimizing customer support, and driving product development initiatives.
Let us consider a relevant example. In 2021, Samsung launched two new foldable Galaxy devices.
By closely monitoring conversations on X, it was evident that discussions surrounding these products were dominated by feedback on camera quality and battery life performance.
Conversations on X show how the camera is the most discussed feature of phones, followed by battery life – Mid-July 2021 to mid-August 2021.
This data-driven brand intelligence platform can empower businesses to better understand their market positioning, address consumer pain points, and implement proactive measures to safeguard their brand equity in the evolving digital landscape.
The latest global smartphone usage statistics show that people spend an average of nearly four hours per day on their mobile. Smart brands use this insight to understand why a consumer chooses one brand over another.
Following Samsung's announcement, there was a spike in conversation about the foldable feature.
With 15.3% positive sentiment, it’s clear consumers appreciate this feature. Conversations also covered screen flexibility, phone resistance, and the overall size of the device.
Samsung can be assured that it made the right decision with its new product but should continue to monitor online discourse if its product doesn't meet consumer expectations.
This example demonstrates the value available in social media listening. But where else can you find brand intelligence data? Valuable consumer data can be collected from:
- News outlets
- Blog comments
- Podcasts
- Review sites
- Industry forums
- Online surveys
- Social listening
The consumer data collected can then be used to drive:
- Awareness
- Protection
- Identity
- Nurturing
- Governance
- Advocacy
Social listening with Talkwalker
Talkwalker Social Listening provides valuable brand intelligence data to help businesses better understand their target audience, monitor their reputation, and stay ahead of industry trends.
By analyzing data across a wide range of social networks and online sources, Talkwalker's platform offers several key capabilities:
- Extensive Coverage: The platform covers over 150 million websites and 30 social networks globally, providing an in-depth view of conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry.
- Advanced Analytics: Talkwalker goes beyond simple keyword searches, using advanced boolean logic and AI-powered insights to uncover the most relevant and actionable data. The platform can analyze sentiment, identify key influencers, and track visual trends related to your brand.
- Customizable Dashboards: The platform allows you to transform complex data into visual, easy-to-understand insights through customizable dashboards. You can also use natural-language prompts to get AI-generated summaries of the most important information.
- Real-Time Alerts: Receive alerts for trends and potential issues related to your brand, enabling you to address challenges, mitigate risks, and capitalize on opportunities quickly.
The Talkwalker Social Listening platform is designed to help businesses of all sizes across various industries, from consumer goods and healthcare to media and technology.
By leveraging Talkwalker's advanced features, you can gain valuable brand intelligence to inform your marketing strategies, improve customer experience, and stay ahead of the competition.
How brands are using AI to enhance the customer experience?
An effective brand intelligence solutions strategy monitors every channel where consumers can share opinions, images, videos, and other digital content.
Combined, these public platforms give consumers a voice. But to monitor them manually would require an army of analysts.
Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform is powered by our own Blue Silk™ AI technology – arming you with text analysis, audio monitoring, image recognition, competitor analysis, sentiment analysis, and video analysis tools.
You’ll be able to identify positive and negative sentiments, new trends, PR crises before they hit, trademark infringement, and counterfeit products.
AI-enabled brand intelligence solutions give you the power to protect your brand and employees – with the additional benefit of knowing exactly what your customers want, resulting in a happy consumer experience.
Why should I use brand intelligence solutions?
Brand intelligence solutions identify sentiment towards your brand, including negative and positive mentions in online conversations.
It’s important to monitor your brand reputation and consumer sentiment, so you’re better equipped to improve your offerings and be the brand consumers want to engage with.
Some of the benefits of investing in a brand intelligence solutions strategy include:
Sentiment analysis
A brand intelligence solutions strategy that employs social media listening will help you grow a brand that consumers want to engage with.
Built-in AI-enabled sentiment analysis will determine whether the online exchanges surrounding your brand and products are positive or negative.
Targeted marketing
Your brand intelligence platforms will gather information relevant to your marketing team, customer service, product development, and sales.
Knowing how consumers are talking about your brand helps with the creation of targeted and personalized marketing messaging and ad campaigns – giving you a competitive advantage in your sector.
Using brand intelligence, you’ll be equipped to answer questions like:
- How many consumers are talking about your brand?
- Which channels are consumers using?
- Are your products and services easy to find?
- What journey do they take to find your products?
- Do your products meet consumer needs?
- Do you receive repeat purchases/subscription renewals?
Crisis management
Real-time brand intelligence will uncover potential crises – such as features not working, consumers unhappy with your new product, data leaks, and more.
Understanding customer satisfaction means you can make changes quickly to maintain trust and customer loyalty.
Competitive brand intelligence
Monitoring your competitors’ data must also be part of your brand intelligence solutions strategy – so, you don’t miss any opportunities to get in front of your audience.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are consumers saying about your competitors?
- What grievances are consumers sharing?
- How are their marketing campaigns being received?
- How are product launches performing?
- Which social media platforms are working for them?
For your company to compete with the best, you need to understand what’s happening in the wider industry.
Who are your current competitors? What products do they have and how are they received? How does this impact your strategy going forward?
The answers to these questions will help you better align your activity with the needs of your consumers, and make sure your competitors aren’t experiencing success in untapped markets.
Can brand intelligence solutions protect against brand abuse?
In an increasingly digital world, cybercrime is only on the rise.
Brand abuse can hit any company, regardless of size or industry – with criminals impersonating brands and products, stealing sensitive brand and consumer data, phishing, domain spoofing, and cybersquatting.
Year by year, this list only continues to grow.
Large brands have the resources to fight back and defend their assets, while smaller companies risk their reputation as they lose the trust of customers both loyal and prospective.
Comprehensive brand intelligence solutions include protection against brand abuse, helping companies uncover and deter cybercriminals.
Below are some of the potential threats your brand intelligence strategy will monitor for:
Cybersquatting
Cybersquatting, also known as domain squatting, is the unauthorized registration of a domain name that’s identical or similar to trademarked brands, products, or personal names.
The idea is that, when a user types the genuine website in their browser, they may make a spelling mistake that takes them to the unauthorized site.
The user will find either a clone of the genuine brand’s website that tries to steal their details or download malware to their computer.
Domain Spoofing
Domain spoofing is a form of phishing. A hacker impersonates a known brand or individual by creating a fake website or email and then tries to fool consumers into trusting and engaging with them.
The finance and banking industry is vulnerable to domain spoofing, with hackers creating a duplicate login page, and then sending phishing emails to customers.
Scammers do this in an attempt to trick vulnerable users into sharing their personal details – like banking information, personal information, or phone numbers, and other avenues for scamming.
URL spoofing threatens brands using online advertising and can result in huge revenue losses, as it can go undetected until a brand budget is depleted, with no return on investment for a brand campaign.
Brandjacking
Brandjacking is when a malicious actor acquires or assumes the online identity of a legitimate company brand, logo, or other digital assets.
The intention is to steal its brand equity, sensitive data, or sell counterfeit goods to the brand’s customer base.
Counterfeiting
Counterfeit goods have always existed, but with the growth of social media channels and eCommerce websites, the practice has only become more prevalent.
Talkwalker video analytics identifying counterfeit goods.
Counterfeiting is seriously damaging to for brands – especially small startups – as cybercriminals selling fake products are depriving the brand of revenue.
Plus, it’s incredibly damaging to brand reputation as customers are left with sub-standard products and may be unaware they aren’t authentic.
Talkwalker’s video analytics tool helps brands identify counterfeit goods online – so, they can intervene at the earliest opportunity and take back control of their reputation.
How should I track brand intelligence?
As more consumer journeys arise across a growing number of digital platforms, monitoring brand intelligence can be a challenge.
Having the best brand intelligence solution involves measuring the metrics that matter, reporting results over time, and translating those results into actionable insights.
A social listening strategy will help you understand your brand performance, consumer sentiment, competitors, marketing, and industry insights.
Below are some top tips for tracking brand intelligence:
Choose your brand intelligence platform
Choose a platform that provides insights about your brand across all digital touchpoints, including consumer habits, competitor strategies, social media engagements, and market trends.
Your brand intelligence platform can be tailored to your needs and will ensure your company is well-equipped to handle unexpected market events.
Brand intelligence example – sentiment analysis shows that brand A has more negative sentiment compared to its competitors.
Not only will you learn how consumers initially engaged with your brand, but also the route they took, be it on a social platform, your website, via a blog post and more.
You can also identify how consumers are using your products, where they’re using them, and which brands they’re partnered with.
Image recognition was used to monitor social media on World Cocktail Day, showing that the majority of the 9K posts shared images of cocktails being enjoyed in multiple settings.
Use the insights you find to ensure your marketing campaigns are targeted to the right audience that wants your products – and that your competitors aren’t starting to dominate the discussion in your industry.
Set your goals
Before launching your brand intelligence strategy, establish clear goals and objectives. Common goals include:
- Improving your brand reputation.
- Promoting new products/services.
- Driving new sales.
- Reducing customer churn.
Your brand intelligence solutions need to collect data regularly and in real-time – as consumer behavior and sentiment can change daily, in reaction to current events, such as the cost of living crisis or new industry trends.
Benchmark against competitors
It’s important to understand how your competitors are performing, and how they are getting consumers to buy their products.
It’s also important to understand how consumers view your competitors – and how this compares with how your brand is perceived.
With a deep understanding of your competition, you’ll be able to make sure your brand and products stand out in a crowded and competitive industry – making intelligent, data-led branding decisions rather than leaning on gut feel.
Performing trend analysis
Being able to spot emerging trends is a crucial part of your brand strategy. This involves understanding what consumers are talking about, and what products they want.
Trend analysis helps brands align their products with real consumer needs, as opposed to launching products that you think consumers want.
Competitive brand intelligence solutions ensure that your brand excels within its industry, and that your products differentiate you from the market. Lead, don’t follow.
Collect data
Brand intelligence tracking will surface real-time consumer data that’ll help you and your team improve your products, services, customer support, brand health, reputation, and paid, earned, and owned campaigns.
Actionable insights from real-time user feedback can also be implemented to enable data-driven business strategy decisions.
To understand your brand's strengths and weaknesses, there are several types of brand intelligence data to collect. The most common of these are listed below:
Qualitative data
Qualitative data cannot be counted or measured. This data includes anything non-numerical, like words and phrases that describe your brand, collected from text, images, and audio.
However, this information can be shared with data visualization tools to help bring the data to life in the form of graphs, infographics, word clouds, and more.
Talkwalker sentiment analysis data visualization.
Qualitative data represents the sentiment expressed by consumers towards your brand. It can be positive, negative, or neutral.
Quantitative data
Quantitative data is information that can be counted or measured. This primarily includes numerical and statistical data.
This data can also be tracked in your brand intelligence solution, such as the number of times your brand was mentioned, the number of website visits, email open rates, and clicks on your paid ads.
This information can be collected from blogs, social media, customer feedback, reviews, and news.
Real-time data
The drawback of qualitative and quantitative data is that it’s historical. This is why it’s important to use quantitative and qualitative data in tandem with valuable, real-time data to demonstrate the here and now.
Not only can you monitor your own brand mentions, but those of your competitors too.
Tools like Talkwalker Alerts allows you to create real-time notifications of your brand mentions – so, you can respond immediately to the data and take control of the changing narrative around your brand, instead of responding retroactively.
Competitor data
Both you and your competitors are in the same industry, talking to the same consumers. So, it makes sense to listen to consumer conversations about your competitors.
If you can provide a unique benefit to the consumer that they want – and that your competitor can't provide – then you have a competitive edge.
The data you collect, be it qualitative, quantitative, real-time, or competitor will give you the brand intelligence needed to understand how your brand is perceived.
Brand intelligence software solutions
Here, the experts at Talkwalker provide a comprehensive list of the best software solutions to help complete your brand intelligence strategy – including both free and paid options:
Talkwalker | Consumer Intelligence Platform
It’s time to move beyond traditional market research and embrace AI-enabled consumer intelligence.
Our consumer intelligence platform offers consumer behavior tracking, brand mentions, brand performance metrics, and competitor data.
Talkwalker is the best way to understand what’s happening in your industry – including how consumers feel about your brand and its competitors.
Use our consumer intelligence platform to track and analyze online conversations. Monitor specific brand names, sentiment, audience demographics, topics, trends, hashtags, specific accounts, and websites.
Our platform offers many different brand intelligence solutions to protect your identity, increase brand awareness, protect your online reputation, and detect a crisis.
Our most popular features include:
- Sentiment Analysis: Find and analyze consumer sentiment in 127+ languages, with up to an average of 90% accuracy.
- Quick Search: Our unique social media search engine analyzes billions of conversations.
- Image Recognition: The industry's largest database of 30,000+ logos, scenes, and objects.
- Video Analytics: An AI-enabled image analysis feature that captures 3x the number of mentions.
- Speech Analytics: Use speech-to-text technology to find previously hidden mentions, including podcast monitoring.
- Text Analytics: Collect unstructured data and identify patterns and trends. Text analysis tools can analyze the relationship between words by categorizing them.
- Predictive Analytics: Use AI technology to find patterns in data invisible to the human eye to forecast changes in consumer behavior.
Talkwalker Alerts | Free
Talkwalker Alerts is a free brand intelligence solution that monitors online mentions of your brand and keywords on news sites, blogs, websites, forums, review sites, and X.
You’ll receive notifications for every single mention directly to your email, either as they happen, or once a day.
Learn the most common – and trending – topics and keywords to target, with Boolean operators that narrow your search, so you receive only relevant mentions of your brand.
For more information, view our guide on how to monitor brand mentions with Talkwalker Alerts.
QuestionPro | Free (paid optional)
QuestionPro is a comprehensive platform that empowers businesses to gather valuable brand intelligence through customizable surveys and advanced research tools.
With its intuitive interface and robust features, QuestionPro enables users to gain deep insights into customer preferences, brand perception, and market trends.
From conjoint analysis to sentiment tracking, the platform provides a suite of solutions to help organizations make data-driven decisions and enhance their brand strategy.
QuestionPro's powerful analytics and reporting capabilities allow users to uncover actionable insights, driving informed decision-making and fostering stronger brand-customer relationships.
With its commitment to data security and compliance, QuestionPro is the trusted choice for enterprises seeking a versatile platform to support their brand intelligence initiatives.
Qualtrics | Paid
Qualtrics Experience Management empowers companies to deeply understand their customers, employees, and market.
With Qualtrics, businesses can design better products, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions that drive growth and innovation.
The platform's robust survey tools, predictive analytics, and automated action triggers enable companies to gather meaningful feedback, respond quickly to changing needs, and continuously optimize their brand strategy.
Qualtrics is the leading choice for 18,000+ global enterprises seeking to harness the power of experience management for sustainable competitive advantage.
Brand intelligence with Talkwalker
With so much real-time consumer insight and data now available, it’s never been more important to choose the right brand intelligence solution.
Our consumer intelligence platform offers enables real-time brand monitoring from social media, blogs, reviews, forums, broadcast, new sites, and more.
Collect and interpret the data that surrounds your brand, to understand consumer sentiment, and protect your brand reputation and your customer base.
Don’t let negative consumer sentiment – or positive competitor sentiment – get away from you. Take control today with real-time alerts across every digital platform, and get in front of trending stories.
