It is a strategy for strategically and proactively monitoring a brand or set of brands, including reputation, growth, and related topics.
On a day-to-day basis, brand monitoring involves discovering, reporting, and responding to different conversations and coverage happening around the brand: this can be done “manually” or through specialized tools.
Those brand monitoring tools, on which this article will focus, allow you to monitor websites, blogs, forums, blogs, articles, and social media content. Professionals can use them to get the full picture of what’s being said (and when) about their brands, competitors’, or clients (if they’re an agency).
Search engine results and links from other websites or circulating social media buzz are all channels tracked.
What are the benefits of brand monitoring?
If you don’t believe brand monitoring is a vital step you must take for the growth of your brand, then here are a few reasons to help you change your perspective. Essentially, the benefits of brand monitoring include:
- You can monitor your brand’s reputation through brand monitoring
- Be aware of negative sentiments your brand may be receiving, or plagiarism and rights infringements occurring
- Make use of insights about your brand’s perception when developing a new product, service, or good
- Including the management of crisis situations related to your brand or your competitors’
- Understanding how your brand is perceived on varying platforms
- Plan marketing and communication strategies based on understanding the audience discussing both your brand and category
Additionally, it used brand monitoring for a broader range of activities, such as market research to gather and analyze information about topics, keywords, and events in your industry.
Identify the average channel for your industry and compare yours to your competitors’.
This solution offers you the flexibility of setting up historical searches or recurring searches to continually monitor online discussions around a topic, phrase, account, website, or event.
Next, decide which audience segments are driving the conversations, when they communicate, and what language and behaviours they use. Your marketing, customer relations, and advertising campaigns will be improved because of these insights.
What key Areas Does Brand Monitoring Cover?
Brand monitoring ensures it addresses many key areas that can help your business grow and become highly effective. These areas include:
Topics and industry trends
It’s important to monitor the big picture of the topic you want to cover in this section. Look for relevant topics related to your brand. Get insights into what topics are important to your industry’s audience by seeing what phrases they use. Your content and marketing campaigns will benefit from being able to see trends.
To gain a better understanding of this, let’s take a look at your website analytics and search engine results.
Plugging in Google Analytics will also reveal the terms that drive traffic to your website.
Branded Keywords
Keeping tabs on your brand or your clients’ brand is the first thing to do. It’s imperative to track your brand name as well as special characters, misspellings, and phrase variations (particularly if it’s a word that is applicable in a range of contexts) and a description.
Influencers and industry micro-influencers
Although influencer marketing is fast becoming saturated, there is still plenty of room for micro-influencers – generally defined as people who have between 1000 and 10,000 followers on social media and speak to specific niches – to make an impact important to individual brand strategies, because they both exemplify and influence the behaviour of a typical member of a segment of your audience.
As a result, micro-influencer audience panels make perfect product testing and planning tools. You can identify micro-influencers by monitoring brand conversations to find out how your service is being talked about.
Brand Monitoring Tools
Brand monitoring tools are used by medium-sized, large, and enterprise-sized companies and agencies, and these platforms have multiple tools that integrate seamlessly with one another, including social media research, trend tracking, and image analysis. You can begin monitoring brands for free if you’re looking to just get started. Besides the ones mentioned in the post, you can find a few others here:
Google Alerts
It’s free and easy to sign up and you’ll receive email notifications when someone searches for that keyword. Aside from tracking brand names and currencies, it’s pretty versatile. Though not a thorough analysis nor a long-term overview, it presents mentions while not providing any analysis.
Mentionlytics
A social media monitoring tool, Mentionlytics provides publishing functionality along with brand monitoring capability. Both functions are performed extremely well by Mentionlytics.
Social media users can interact with it in real-time and jump into conversations it finds in real-time. More than 20 languages are supported and it can track your brand on both social media and the web.
The Social Intelligent Advisor is one of the unique features of Mentionlytics. It’s an AI service that derives actionable insights from social data. For example, if you’re monitoring your brand, it’s automatically able to find the main dissatisfactions of your customers.
Mentionlytics also provides analytics on reach and influence of found mentions, competitor monitoring, and Boolean search capabilities.
Google Marketing Platform
Besides brand monitoring, web analytics, and optimisation, Google offers several free tools and services. This has led to a single point of access for them. The Data Studio enables users to build dashboards to visualize the data from their web and search consoles.
It is crucial to analyze visitors’ sources of traffic, which phrases they use to come to your site, and how they behave once they are there with Google Analytics and Search Console.
Backlink Checker
Brand monitoring can also be achieved by looking at which websites are linking to your website, to gain insight into how your products and services are being mentioned. When it comes to search engine optimization, link building from reputable sites is crucial. There are several paid SEO tools available. Using a brand monitoring free tool such as Backlink Checker will assist you in getting started.
Awario
Awario is one of the brand monitoring tools that can monitor your keywords (including your brand name) in real-time. Besides offering powerful analytics, Awario is an excellent choice for small and medium businesses.
Your brand is indexed across Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, blogs, forums, and anywhere else that mentions it. You can also create very specific queries using the Boolean search mode, which provides more precision for your monitoring. Brand names that contain a common noun, like Apple, can help increase your search engine visibility.
Awario provides access to individual mentions online and the analytics behind them. Besides giving you demographic and behavioural data about the people mentioning your brand, the tool lets you compare your brand’s performance with that of your competitors and offers a report on Influencers.
As soon as a new mention occurs, Awario will deliver a notification via email, Slack, or push notifications.
Social Mention
When users use brand monitoring tools, they can find out what topics and phrases people are discussing online. Tools such as these are useful for identifying the peaks and troughs of social media trends in real-time or looking back at trends over 12 years.
There is, however, a free service called Socialmention.com which offers some of these features. This section explains how a phrase is used and where it appears in a post. However, it can be a useful tool if you only need to track short phrases.
Tweetdeck
You can manage Twitter more efficiently with Tweetdeck, an official tool from Twitter. Dashboard feeds are organized in streams, so you can monitor multiple accounts at once and receive notifications and mentions.
You can set up a “Seek” stream to monitor all mentions of your brand name or web page. You can choose the location, the authors, and the number of engagements for your brand monitoring settings in the same way as in Twitter’s Advanced Search.
With Tweetdeck, you can be confident that it will find ALL the mentions possible since it’s an official Twitter product. Twitter connection issues will never be an issue with Tweetdeck either.
Only one platform is supported, which is a downside. Tweetdeck is a great free monitoring tool if you have an established Twitter presence for your brand.
Conclusion
Brand monitoring is a necessity for any business, but the tools you choose depend entirely on you. Identify your goals, your budget and the platforms you want to cover.
Want to increase engagement with your customers through individual mentions? Want to improve your marketing strategy by analyzing your target audience? You may want to know what websites or review aggregators are providing feedback.
The good news is there is a tool for every need and budget out there, and a lot of them offer free versions or free trials, so take the time to find the one that fits your needs and test it out. However, if you’re facing a hard time figuring them out, book a Free Marketing Consultation with our team by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session” and let’s get started.
