What Is Brand Monitoring And Why Is It Important
Public perception of a brand plays a critical role in the well-being and sustainability of a business. Thanks to the emergence and development of social networks, people have more opportunities to talk about companies than ever before. Social media audiences are sure to talk about your brand. They can make it viral before you even know it.
The easiest way to track mentions of your company is to conduct brand monitoring. This way you can better understand how users of various online platforms feel about you. This article is the perfect guide for those who want to learn about the benefits of brand monitoring and learn how to do it. Let’s begin!
WHAT IS BRAND MONITORING?
Brand monitoring is a business analysis technique for monitoring various channels for any mention of a brand. It is also called “social listening” and “web monitoring“. Using it, you can get an idea of what people think about you or your company. Building awareness and effective brand management is the key to successful web monitoring. It will also help you deal with any potential reputation crisis or criticism before things get out of hand.
Also Read: 7 TIPS FOR BUILDING A STRONG BRAND WITH A GOOD REPUTATION
Brand monitoring allows you to get useful feedback from the target audience. With it, you can find ways to improve the quality of service and outshine the competition. Let’s see, “what exactly does monitoring require”?
Here are some channels worth following for effective brand monitoring:
- social networks, including, VKontakte Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.
- Internet blogs and articles.
- web forums.
- offline media platforms – television, newspapers, and magazines.
- review sites, including Yelp, Google Reviews, Tripadvisor, and Trustpilot.
- broadcast media.
WHAT TO TRACK IN THE BRAND MONITORING PROCESS?
Just following the mentions of a name online is a highly inefficient approach. Every brand looking for long-term success must consider other areas as well. The audience on different channels will not always talk about you or your company directly. Chances are that general conversations about the industry will have a secondary impact on your business. Thus, during web monitoring, brands should track the following points:
- Name Variations – Make a list of all the names that people associate with you. It should include account names and blog names associated with your brand. It’s also a good idea to keep track of product and campaign names to stay up to date.
- Industry Trends & Buzzwords – Track buzzwords and trends in your niche industry. This is a good source of inspiration when creating interesting content and finding new ways to participate in public discussion.
- Brand Mentions – Make sure you know when people are talking about your company and its products as this is essential for brand monitoring. This way you will definitely not miss a lot of direct and indirect mentions, for example, among influencers and celebrities.
- Competitor Analysis – Analyze your competitors to establish a benchmark for evaluating your performance against similar brands in the same industry. This will help you stay up to date with the latest trends.
WHY IS BRAND MONITORING IMPORTANT?
According to statistics, not responding to complaints or inquiries can increase customer churn by a whopping 15%. Thus, public opinion and your reaction to feedback play a huge role in brand strengthening. Social listening will help you detect and respond in a timely manner to certain opinions of people about your business.
Here are the main benefits of monitoring that are important for effective brand management:
Creation of customer-oriented products
Don’t expect customers to quickly adapt to whatever product your brand makes. Instead, they require you to come up with solutions that are best for them. As a rule, they comment and share their opinion about the brand’s products on social networks. Monitoring helps you find those comments and change your products accordingly. There are many ways to track brand benefits:
- Development strategy development;
- Tracking product requirements;
- Search for new target markets;
- Taking into account the needs of customers;
- Close monitoring of product performance.
Strengthening the marketing strategy
In recent times, marketers have been demanding to be as focused and relevant as possible. Customer information is vital for this purpose. Effective marketing involves analyzing demographics, sentiment, likes, and dislikes for your brand. Social listening is the perfect way to gain insight into your customers. To conduct useful brand monitoring, remember the following:
- Define your target audience;
- Listen to your customers;
- Track the channels in which customers talk about the brand;
- Follow market trends;
- Track your advertising campaigns;
- Look for influencers.
Building reputation and crisis management
Web monitoring can help you maintain a good reputation. It allows you to solve user problems before they have a negative impact on your brand. Listen to the reviews and feedback of your customers on the Internet. Develop a strategic response and problem-solving process.
This will instantly increase audience confidence in your brand. In addition, you will prove that the opinion of customers about your brand is important to you.
Identification and elimination of deficiencies
The most effective organizations understand the importance of feedback. They listen carefully to their customers. Monitoring forms are required to obtain feedback that may require changes to products or services. This way you will not only collect useful information but also be able to measure customer satisfaction. Create an effective feedback mechanism to receive timely and honest feedback.
Customer retention and satisfaction
Attracting customers is only half the battle in effective brand management. Maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty is equally important to earning a steady income. Evaluating users requires listening, responding, and providing support, which can be done with any brand monitoring tool.
You can increase the effectiveness of social listening in the following ways:
- Track requests on social networks;
- Track social media channels from one place;
- Be sure to evaluate customer reviews;
- Try to identify customers at risk;
- Plan ways to respond to customer complaints.
Increasing brand sales
The development of customer-oriented products and efficient service will quickly make the monitoring process more convenient. Your products and brand will speak for themselves, and sales will bring profit. Use web monitoring to generate leads and increase sales in the following ways:
- Track and identify sales opportunities;
- Interact and communicate with customers;
- Try to find potential resellers;
- Develop effective marketing strategies to lure customers from competitors.
What tools to use for brand monitoring?
There are many brand monitoring tools available. Here are some of them:
- Google Search Console
- Google Alerts;
- TweetDeck;
- Mention;
- Brandwatch Analytics;
- Hootsuite;
- LexisNexis;
- BuzzSumo.
CONCLUSION
Brand monitoring has become an important aspect of a successful business. It helps to better understand not only the audience but also the product. Monitoring also determines what your brand represents and how well it is represented. You can greatly improve your profit and communication strategy from marketing with effective monitoring. So use social listening to stay ahead of the competition and get real-time analytics.
