Why do you need to spend time with brand monitoring?
Imagine the scenario… a customer shares a great purchasing experience they had on their X (Twitter) account. They tag you. You find it. Say thanks.
Imagine an alternative scenario… a consumer shares the terrible purchasing experience they had on their X account.
They don’t name your brand. You don’t see it. You don’t apologize. You don’t offer help. It goes viral, with other unhappy users joining the conversation.
That is why brand monitoring is crucial. You’ll find all your brand mentions - - tagged or not tagged - to react quickly and avoid potential damage to your brand’s reputation.
This post will walk you through the benefits of brand monitoring. What you should monitor, and the brand monitoring tools for the job.
Before I forget, don’t think that you don’t need a brand monitoring strategy if you don’t have an online presence. It doesn’t make you immune to negative comments. Social media is a place where consumers love to share their opinions about everything. That includes complaining about your brand.
There are conversations taking place every day, about you, your industry, and your competitors. They’ll happen whether you’re listening or not. It’s your job to find them.
What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring is an analytics process to strategically monitor the reputation, growth, and trends associated with a brand. Monitor, measure, and report on the conversations from various channels. These can include blogs, social media, search engine results, review sites, forums, and newspapers.
This will bring insights into a company, its products and services, and its brand.
Monitoring your brand’s reputation and how consumers perceive it, gives you a clear picture of what’s said. Whether that’s about your brand, your competitors, or your industry. The positive and the negative.
You’ll be prepared if
- Your product launch fail
- A competitor breaks new ground
- A customer raves about your brand
- A crisis looms
Benefits of brand monitoring
Brand monitoring is an essential part of your business intelligence strategy, regardless of the size of your company. Through various online channels, consumers voice their opinions, concerns, complaints, and praise. Finding these conversations will help
- Build on your positive brand reputation
- Improve your products and services
- Prepare you for an oncoming crisis
What are the benefits of brand monitoring?
Identify rights infringement
Brandjacking, phishing, cybersquatting, or trademark infringement can seriously damage the health of your brand. An imitation of your logo is not the sincerest form of flattery. There is such a thing as bad publicity.
If you’re lucky enough to have a big, popular brand, there’ll be others looking to exploit your brand and domain.
Monitoring your mentions helps find infringers using tweaked versions of your brand and registrants of similar domain names.
Who?
Trademark your brand, products, logo, and tagline, so they remain unique to you. They’re your major assets, don’t lose them.
Create alerts to get a notification every time there’s an infringer trying to profit from your good reputation.
Use image recognition and video analytics in your brand monitoring strategy, and you’ll catch all those dodgy copies.
Find user-generated content
Did you read the awesome comments from that consumer? What about the industry influencer raving about your product? Or, negative comments about one of your competitors' products?
User-generated content... use it or lose it.
It’s vital you find this free advertising, the impact on your business could be immense. 90% of consumers say that UGC influences their purchasing decisions. Jump into these conversations and gently suggest your product.
Purrfect drink
Image recognition found this positive post that includes Coca-Cola, but no mention.
Improve product development
Listen to consumers and collect feedback about your products. You’ll learn what they want. Not what you think they want. You’ll discover what your product lacks and be able to improve.
Improve customer service and reduce churn
Keeping existing customers happy is good for business. You need to earn their loyalty and stop them from leaving for one of your competitors.
Your existing customer base is how you generate revenue consistently. Repeat sales, upselling, endorsements. U.S. companies could save over $35 billion per year by focusing on existing customers’ happiness.
To keep them happy - to keep them - you need to listen to their queries and gripes. You have to support them. With social media as the ideal platform, consumers will quickly post…
- Questions about a brand, service, product, feature
- Issues with a brand, service, product, feature
- Praise for a brand, service, product, feature
- Issues with an online/offline experience
- Praise for an online/offline experience
You have to interact, guys. Be responsive to their questions and issues. Ignoring them can bring about a negative impact on your brand’s reputation.
99% of consumers believe social can connect people. 78% want brands to use social media to bring them together.
Speak to your customers and ask questions. What do they think of your product? What are their goals? What are their pain points? Don’t ignore them
Your brand monitoring strategy will help you monitor conversations and find questions, complaints, issues, or good and bad reviews. This means you can respond quickly and efficiently. Great customer service. Reduced churn.
Fuel your content marketing
Looking for new content to share? Brand monitoring is a great way to find new content to present to consumers.
Use this content to inspire your content marketing strategy. Dig deeper and you’ll learn the terms and phrases used by your target audience so you can speak their language.
To find this content you’ll need some brand monitoring tools…
For an encompassing view of your brand online, you can use a paid option…
Quick Search is our powerful social search engine. It gives you an instant overview of your brand online. It offers extensive coverage of social media platforms, news sites, blogs, and forums. Allowing you to…
- Monitor and find the latest industry trends
- Find audience demographics
- Discover conversations surrounding your brand
- Find the influencers that are talking about you
Working in real-time, you can also enter multiple brands - your competitors - and compare sentiment, with 90% accuracy.
Quick Search is a social media search engine that analyzes billions of conversations.
Manage a crisis
Yep, brand monitoring is an essential part of crisis management.
You can’t avoid a crisis. However, you can minimize the potential damage to your reputation with brand monitoring.
When a crisis hits - listen, identify, review, respond.
You have to monitor brand mentions to identify how consumers feel about your brand. If you’re struggling to find this information, how will you know if sentiment is shifting towards negativity? If a customer is bad-mouthing your product? If an employee has gone off the rails?
Boost sales
You’ve improved your customer support and product development is getting better every day. Brand monitoring will also help you find new sales opportunities.
Use media monitoring to find consumers talking about a product or service online, that they’re considering buying. They could be asking for opinions from other consumers, reading reviews, or talking to your competitors.
If not talking about a particular product, they could be asking about a problem they want to resolve. A product that solves their issue.
Find these conversations and jump in. Offer a free demo of your product. Advice on which product they should purchase.
Brand monitoring campaigns
Don’t think for one moment that you can take a quick look at your brand reputation, then sit back and relax. No, no, no.
You have to measure it.
Brand monitoring is about finding conversations, engaging with consumers, crisis management, identifying sales opportunities, etc.
Measuring is all about the metrics over a particular period.
You need to prove that your brand reputation is healthy. Prove your brand monitoring is working. Tracking critical metrics will help you improve your brand monitoring strategy, and impress your boss.
Talkwalker - social media metrics tool to track and visualize social data.
You know the benefits of brand monitoring, now you need to know what to monitor.
Online reputation management
Brand monitoring is not only about finding all the nice stuff said about your brand and products. You must find the negative comments too. Protecting your brand reputation is crucial to your online brand monitoring strategy.
Creating positive awareness around your brand has taken you time and effort. You’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears maintaining its good reputation. Allow it to take damage, and it’ll take time to recover. If it’s not already too late.
You’ve got a funky website and your SEO is cracking. You post regular content that’s well-received. But, if a consumer searches your brand and finds negative reviews, what are you gonna do?
Online reputation management is all about strengthening your reputation and making it unimpeachable. You don’t bury negative comments.
Well you do, but not how you think.
Publish. Publish. Publish.
Generate awesome new content. Find good reviews of your products and share them on your website. Share them on social media. Never ignore a bad comment.
Show other consumers that you’re available and listening. Respond to unhappy consumers, and turn that frown upside down.
66% of consumers trust customer reviews 12x more than brand content
User social proof - customer reviews and testimonials are awesome social proof.
Sentiment analysis
It’s all very well churning out heaps of content and collecting brand mentions. But, if you don’t understand the sentiment behind the mentions, you’re flogging a dead horse.
Nice image.
Sentiment analysis as part of your brand monitoring strategy will separate the positive from the negative. Why is this important? Well, if you leave the negative unanswered, it’s going to fester and turn into something nasty.
Sentiment analysis digs into the emotion of consumer conversations, on social media, news sites, blogs, forums, and more.
Talkwalker’s sentiment analysis will find and analyze consumer sentiment with up to an average of 90% accuracy. It’ll determine attitude and contextual reactions in tweets, comments, and blog posts. It even understands sarcasm and irony.
Campaign names and hashtags
To measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, you should capture all social mentions of your campaign name. You can find it in conversations in blog posts, news reports, social media comments, press releases, and influencer posts.
Identify and analyze these discussions for a clear picture of how your campaign is working. Does it resonate with your target audience? You’ll be able to find what’s working and what isn’t. How you can improve, and what you should stop.
Quick Search highlights #ShareACoke, a lip-smacking user-generated campaign.
Share of voice (SOV)
Monitor how many people are talking about you on social media, compared with your competitors. SOV mentions include…
- Direct - @Talkwalker
- Indirect - Talkwalker
Analyzing your share of voice is not just about monitoring your own brand. It should also be part of your competitor analysis strategy, identifying how visible your brand is. How relevant is your brand in your industry?
Talkwalker Media Monitoring - share of voice.
Simulated social media report template.
How to measure your share of voice…
- Count all direct/indirect mentions of your brand across all your social media channels
- Count all direct/indirect mentions of your competitors’ brands for the same period of time
- Add up all the mentions, divide by the total, and multiply by 100 = social SOV percentage
Monitor competitor brands
Brand monitoring helps you keep track of your competitors and their online performance. Perform analysis on their brand keywords, and listen to what consumers are saying about them.
- Any big complaints?
- Are their customers happy with their purchasing experience?
- Are they launching something new?
- Any opportunities for you to engage with unhappy customers?
Ahrefs is the best brand monitoring tool for tracking backlinks and search results. You’ll be able to find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for in organic search, and whether they’re outranking you. Plus, how much traffic this is bringing them.
Ahrefs - SEO backlink checker.
Monitor what your competitors are doing. The campaigns they’re running. Events attended. Webinars. Content they’re publishing.
What’s working for them? Are you doing it too? Find inspiration from their strategies, and learn from their mistakes.
Simulated competitor analysis template for Coca-Cola.
Remember when you did a SWOT analysis for your brand? Now do it for your competitors. For each of your social media channels, track
- Are you missing countries that your competitors are targeting successfully?
- Do they work with influencers who would also work with your brand?
- Who are their followers?
- What are their engagement rates compared to yours?
Audience
You need to do more than just analyze age, gender, and geography. You need to go deeper and monitor behavior, perceptions, sentiment, and mindset. Then target these characteristics.
You might find that two people in two different demographics display similar behavior. Perfect for your campaign.
Model of consumer behavior.
Product names
Don’t bank on consumers always naming your product, even when they are talking about your brand.
It means that you have to monitor your product names along with your brand names.
Use brand monitoring to find issues with a product by using search terms that along with your product, include phrases like…
- Issue with…
- Don’t waste your money on…
- How to fix…
- Problem with update...
Product Features
Similar to above, where your product isn’t named, consumers may discuss needed product features or functions. Or, that they are unhappy with.
Monitor discussions with key features and functions that your brand offers.
- I want chicken pieces with the taste of 11 herbs and spices.
- I need a social listening tool that offers highly accurate sentiment analysis.
- I’m looking for image recognition tech. Any suggestions?
Influencers
Influencer marketing is huge. Its value increasing daily, due to the popularity of social media.
40% of consumers state that they would buy a product after seeing it used by an influencer.
A comprehensive brand monitoring strategy would include monitoring results from your influencer campaigns. How?
First up, set your SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based. Increasing brand awareness is too vague, and it’s hard to monitor and measure. Increasing your Twitter followers by 35% over the next eight months is SMART.
53% of marketers struggle with measuring the performance of their influencer campaigns. But with the right influencer marketing platform, it’s easy.
Place a value on each mention and engagement you get. You can then convert your campaign results into tangible ROI.
Key executives
This will depend on how active your C-level is. How much they’re in the public eye. If you have a CEO who’s active in your community and on social media, you should monitor their name. Acknowledge positive mentions, and use the content for your brand marketing where possible.
You’ll need damage control for anything negative, to lessen potential harm to your brand’s reputation.
Branded keywords
These include your brand name, slogan, tagline, catchphrases. For instance, Nike would track “Just Do It”. KFC would track “Colonel Quality, Guaranteed”. Remember to add any new ones that you create for new marketing campaigns.
Do consumers use variations of your brand name? An example would be Marks & Spencer, Marks and Spencer, M&S. Track those too.
What about spelling mistakes? Talkwater, Tallwalker, Talk Walker. Track those too.
Industry-specific keywords
There’s a lot of conversation and it won’t all include mentions of your brand or products, but is related to your industry. You must listen to these to learn about consumers and learn
- What they want
- What they need
- What they love
- What they hate
You’ll find out what’s trending. Identify new opportunities. What your competitors are talking about, and more.
What are your industry-specific keywords? I’m kinda assuming you know, and I won’t have to tell you. If I were to list some of Talkwalker’s, they would include…
- Social listening
- Social media analytics
- Social media
- Social media marketing
- Digital marketing
- And a whole lot more...
Talkwalker’s social media search engine - Quick Search.
To increase traffic to your website, create marketing campaigns or produce blog content on trending keywords in your industry that you find.
Takeaway
Brand monitoring is a crucial part of your job. To learn how to find every brand mention, across every media, click below.
