Complete guide to Brand Monitoring

You worked hard to establish a brand, spread the word around it, and watched it grow. To take your brand to the next level, you need something more than new products or conquering a new market: you need to get inside your audience’s head and know exactly what they are saying about you. That’s what brand monitoring is all about.

No matter how small or big your brand is, people — especially your customers — are always talking about it. And that’s a goldmine of opportunity to find their true opinions and pain points when it comes to your brand and products.

It’s challenging to keep track of everything in the digital world. That’s why you need a smart strategy to monitor every move your brand takes, every bond it breaks, and every step it takes because you’ll be watching it!

In this article, we’re going to learn all about brand monitoring and strategies to grow your business, protect your online reputation, and spy on your competitors.

So, let’s get started!

What is Brand Monitoring?

Brand monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing online channels for brand mentions and conversations about its products and competitors. The goal of brand monitoring is to understand online brand perception and to identify customers’ pain points, opportunities for improvement, or potential issues with products. Brands can use monitoring to identify trends, maintain brand health, stay ahead of competitors, and engage with customers in real-time.

Why is Brand Monitoring Important?

Brand monitoring can fulfill multiple purposes. Let’s have a look at the reasons why it should be a part of your strategy.

Understanding Sentiments towards Brand

One of the key goals of brand monitoring is to understand customer feelings toward a brand. This process is known as sentiment analysis, which involves analyzing the tone and emotion behind users’ online mentions of a brand.

Understanding customer sentiment helps you identify what you’re doing right and what you need to work on. Additionally, sentiment analysis can help you spot potential issues before they get out of hand.

There are various tools available for sentiment analysis. These tools analyze your brands’ big data and categorize customer sentiment into positive, negative, and neutral.

If you analyze the sentiment of customer conversations, especially negative ones, you can gain valuable insights into customer needs and preferences. Then, using these insights, it’s much easier to improve your online reputation.

Measuring Brand Awareness & Reach 

Another important aspect of online brand monitoring is measuring your brand awareness and reach. By measuring these factors, you can determine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and how well you are reaching your target audience.

To measure your brand awareness, you can use metrics like mentions, number of followers, engagement, and website traffic. These metrics can help you identify trends in customer behavior and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly to reach a wider audience.

Higher Customer Satisfaction

Brand mention monitoring can make your customers happier!

With social media taking over the world, people now expect you to interact with them on social media. Studies show that 63% of customers expect brands to offer customer service through social media.

That means not only do you need to monitor what is being said about your brand, but also you need to reply to those comments and queries.

By finding each customer’s specific pain points, you can find ways to improve and fix any issues that they encounter.

With brand monitoring, you can spot common complaints and problems that customers have, such as bad service or low-quality products.

This will lead to a better overall experience for your customers and make them feel more satisfied.

Remember, it’s important to respond to customers’ questions and complaints on a timely basis.

British Airways is a good example of how businesses need to ensure active brand monitoring. Here is a snapshot of the company’s conversation with a customer.

By addressing these issues, you’ll make your customers happier and more likely to stick around. Plus, when you respond to customer feedback and reviews, it shows that you care about what they think and that you’re committed to making things right.

When customers are happier, they’re more likely to recommend your brand to others. So don’t overlook the importance of brand monitoring when it comes to keeping your customers happy!

Effective Market Research

Brand monitoring is a great way to improve your product development strategies. Instead of spending hours on research and resources, you can use brand monitoring to directly hear suggestions and feedback about your products.

This will ensure that future developments will actually work. And the best part? The money and time you’re investing are not going to waste.

In addition to monitoring customer feedback, brand monitoring can also help you stay up-to-date with niche trends.

Yes, brand monitoring is not just about your brand; it’s also about your competitors. It enables you to gather all the essential information about your competitors in one place.

Use that information to find out what new features they have added to their products. Or which new markets they’re trying to enter.

There’s another benefit to monitoring your competitors, which brings us to the next value of monitoring brands. Let’s find out.

Finding Partners & Collaborate Opportunities

Performing brand monitoring not only helps you improve your products and stay up-to-date with industry news, but it can also help you find potential partners and collaboration opportunities.

By monitoring your brand, you can discover other businesses or influencers who share similar values or have complementary products or services. These insights can lead to brand collaborations that benefit both parties.

For example, if you’re a cosmetics company and you notice that customers frequently mention a specific brand of hair care products in their social media posts, you could reach out to that company to explore a potential partnership.

This partnership could involve cross-promoting each other’s products or even developing a joint product that incorporates both companies’ offerings.

By using brand monitoring to identify these types of opportunities, you can expand your network and potentially increase your revenue streams.

Protect Reputation and Managing Crisis

Another value of brand monitoring is that it can help you protect your reputation and manage crises.

By reading what people are talking about your brand on social media, you can quickly spot any negative comments or reviews and address them before they blow up into a big issue.

You can also keep tabs on any rumors or trends that could potentially harm your brand’s reputation and take action to prevent them from spreading.

For example, if you notice that people on Twitter are spreading rumors about your new product being unsafe, you can use brand monitoring to identify the source of the rumors and address them directly.

Read more: 5 Most Crucial Steps of Crisis Management

What Exactly Should You Be Monitoring About Your Brand?

What you’re going to monitor about your brand depends partly on the nature of your business. However, there are some common aspects and factors that every brand should track, these are:

1- Your Brand Name

This includes your brand name and all its different variations such as branches’ names or social media handles. For example, if you have a separate Instagram page for your US and UK branch, you need to monitor both of these accounts.

Pro Tip: If your business name is commonly misspelled by your customers, it’s a good idea to track those words as well. Starbucks is a very good example here. Some people spell it as “Starbuck” or “Starbux”.

2- Product Names & Features

In some conversations, people do not necessarily mention the business name. So, if you are manufacturing different products, you should use the specific names of those products or services.

This way, if there are complaints relating to a particular product, you will be able to find out the issue.

For example, when referring to Apple devices, people might just use iPhone, or Mac instead. Therefore, if you are concerned about a certain product, also be aware of different alterations used when referring to the same product.

3- Your Competitors and Their Products

Keeping track of your competitors’ names and products can help you stay up-to-date on what they’re doing and how they’re positioning themselves in the market.

While reading mentions about your competitors, you might come across a product they are planning to launch. A counter-move will help you stay ahead of the industry.

Without keeping a close eye on the competitors, you might not be aware of the important industry trends. Social media brand monitoring has helped brands to prepare for competitive threats like price reductions.

4- The Industry Trends or Related Phrases

Tracking the industry news is more about staying on par with the trending news. Therefore, it is more about gathering the information that can be used when coming up with an important strategy.

Look at common industry news magazines to find out the buzzwords that you can use to track the conversations. The information gathered here gives you important insights regarding the current trends.

Scroll down to the customer comments to find out what people expect out of the products in your industry.

For instance, an airline company would want to target “cheap flights” when monitoring industry news.

5 Steps to Implement a Perfect Brand Monitoring Strategy

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Objectives

A successful brand monitoring strategy starts with defining your goals.

Ask yourself: What do you want to accomplish with brand monitoring? Are you looking to monitor social media to improve your customer service?

Or are you looking to track your competitors’ online activity?

By defining your goals and objectives, you’ll know what metrics to track and how to measure success.

This brings us to the second step…

Step 2: Identify Key Metrics and KPIs

Next, decide which metrics you want to track. Some common metrics to monitor include:

• Mentions of your brand,
• sentiment analysis,
• share of voice, and
• engagement rates.

Determining what exactly you want to measure helps you to decide which channel and brand monitoring tool are the best fit for you.

Pro Tip: If you have an international audience base, try monitoring keywords in multiple languages.

Step 3: Choose a Brand Monitoring Tool

The goal of brand monitoring is to paint a bigger picture of your brand and that’s not possible without using brand monitoring tools.

There are many options to choose from, however, the important thing to consider is to what extent your tool covers the KPIs you want to track.

Mentionlytics is a brand monitoring tool that is specialized in Social Listening and offers several advanced features.

One of its key benefits is its versatility – it can monitor various online channels such as social media platforms, news sites, review sites, forums, and even the web.

This comprehensive approach enables users to get a complete picture of how their brand is being talked about.

Additionally, Mentionlytics uses advanced algorithms to analyze and categorize the data it collects, which allows users to quickly identify positive, negative, or neutral sentiments.

Mentionlytics provides real-time alerts, which allows users to respond promptly to important mentions.

Mentionlytics’ Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA) offers tailor-made recommendations for a better experience in monitoring your brand. This unique feature can help you to save lots of time.

Here are some of the other features:

• Supports 24 languages
• Advanced Boolean Search
• Social Media Scheduler
• Report Builder

Want to try Mentionlytics for free and learn about monitoring your brand from an expert? Book a live demo now!

Step 4: Analyze Your Data

Once you’ve collected data about your brand, it’s time to analyze it.

Look for patterns and trends in the data, and use this information to inform your marketing and customer service strategies.

If you notice a lot of negative sentiment around a particular product or service, for example, you may need to make changes to gain the trust of your audience.

Step 5: Create a Brand Monitoring Report

The final step of monitoring the brand is to present the results!

Now, how can you manage to organize so much data in an informative and compact way, without missing out on the important points?

Well, the best solution is to use a report builder. Most brand monitoring tools should have this feature.

Using Mentionlytics, for example, you can create eye-catching and informative reports with just a couple of clicks.

To Sum Up

Brand monitoring is essential in today’s business world. It can be really effective when done properly, making the right measurements, as we have seen extensively in this article.

However, not all tools available will provide resourceful information. Mentionlytics provides an AI-enabled tool that can be used to effectively monitor your brand online. Take advantage of the Artificial Intelligence enhanced techniques to the brand monitoring tool and further improve your online presence.