Keeping an eye on your brand’s public perception is vital to its health and longevity. Your audience has more ways than ever to tell people about you, but fortunately, online brand monitoring makes it simple to monitor them. This allows you to understand how people view your brand.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the process of monitoring different channels to find conversations about your brand. You can reap the benefits of collecting valuable feedback from your audience by knowing where and how they talk about your brand.
Keeping an eye on potential crises and responding to questions or criticisms prior to them getting out of hand is another way to prevent them from getting out of hand.
What Makes Brand Monitoring Important?
The audience you’re serving should matter to you as a brand. Despite your disagreeing with certain conversations about your brand, this can give you a sense of general sentiments. It is crucial to your brand’s growth how you manage public perception and respond to feedback.
In fact, according to a 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 decisions.
Here are a few of how brand monitoring can impact your business.
A Sentimental Understanding
You can analyze brand sentiment through brand monitoring to better understand the overall sentiment towards your brand.
You can use sentiment analysis to analyze the specific language used in customer comments about your brand to determine whether they are talking about it positively, negatively, or neutrally.
A large-scale audience measurement tool such as this one is a great way to understand, on a large scale, how people are reacting to posts, campaigns, and your brand.
You can access detailed sentiment analysis with tools such as Sprout Social. With Sprout’s social listening tools, you can create a sentiment summary based on your post comments and mentions to know what your target market thinks of your brand.
Crisis Management and Reputation Management
Maintaining control over your brand helps you stay on top of your reputation and resolve any customer issues before they become a problem.
Reviewing and responding to reader feedback online can contribute to increase audience trust in your brand and showing a genuine concern for what customers have to say.
Identifying Issues and Improvements
Along with monitoring your brand’s reputation, it’s also crucial to watch for those comments that will provide useful insights into how to improve your product or service. Be sure to follow a wonderful process when soliciting feedback from your audience.
It is also vital that you have a system that will relay the feedback you receive online to the team within your organization, responsible for implementing these changes and updates.
Promoting Two-Way Communication
It is much easier to respond to people when you know where they talk about your brand. Your audience will notice you are active in listening to them when you respond to reviews or comments.
Your availability and willingness to assist customers are also demonstrated. It might seem that your brand is unavailable or not listening to comments when you fail to respond to questions or criticism online.
Determine What User-Generated Content Exists
Your content strategy can benefit from user-generated content. You can uncover the brands that are sharing content about your brand by monitoring your brand mentions. Creating an Influencers Network also allows you to find new influencers who represent your brand as true ambassadors and provide new content for your social media channels.
What Brand Elements Should You Monitor?
Monitor your brand everywhere it might be mentioned. This is tempting when monitoring your brand.
To do this well, take the time to decide what you want to watch and which channels to tune in to.
Having fewer data points results in an easier analysis of your findings since you won’t have an overwhelming amount of information.
Some of the main channels to monitor are:
- Online news media
- All social media platforms
- Online forums such as Reddit and Quora
- Online review sites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp
Be sure to track all elements of your brand that could lead to publicity, besides tracking the right channels. Choose metrics that relate to your brand and industry when choosing which elements to monitor. Check out the following key elements of your brand to monitor for mentions.
Variations in Names
Keep a list of the different ways that products are referred to. Including nicknames, blog names, and similar variations of words that are associated with your brand are examples of this.
You should keep track of all variations you know of your name, as some people may spell or abbreviate it differently. The words and phrases you used to search for your brand’s website in the results can help you identify any variations and common misspellings.
Along with tracking variations of your brand name, you should also monitor variations of your campaigns or product names in case you receive publicity or feedback regarding those specific aspects.
As a result, you will stay informed about what your audience is saying about your brand, even when they don’t directly mention your accounts.
Competitors
Be sure you keep up with your industry’s latest news by keeping tabs on your competitors and their audience. To determine how well your brand compares with others in your industry, you can benchmark against your competitors.
You can compare your social media activity to those of your competitors with online brand monitoring tools.
Brand monitoring can also provide insight into specific tactics, like influencer partnerships and marketing campaigns, incorporated into your larger strategy.
Industry Buzzwords and Trends
You should keep an eye out for industry trends or buzzwords if you’re in a particular field. While these discussions may not directly mention your brand, it’s good to be aware of how your industry is being discussed. As well as providing innovative ways to join the conversation, this can be a superb source of inspiration.
Taking part in conversations that don’t solely revolve around customer service or complaints means you are actively involved in your overall industry, just as your niche audience is concerned about the latest news.
Conclusion
You can use brand monitoring to better understand how people view your brand. Your marketing decisions can be informed by this information and can create campaigns the audience will love.
Positive feedback allows you to respond and offer assistance when negative comments are spotted. Your brand will look better against your competitors when you monitor it more often.
