Brand monitoring has become an essential practice for businesses looking to understand their reputation, improve customer experiences, and outperform their competitors. This comprehensive guide will teach you everything you need to know to leverage brand monitoring for success.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring refers to the practice of tracking mentions of your brand, products, services, and keywords across the web and social media. By setting up a monitoring system, you can detect brand mentions in real-time and gather data to analyze brand health, sentiment, reach, competitors, trends, and more.
Why is Brand Monitoring Important?
Here are some of the key reasons brand monitoring is a crucial activity:
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Understand brand reputation – Monitoring provides insight into what customers and prospects say about your company. This allows you to manage reputation and address issues early.
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Improve products and services – Customer feedback shared online is invaluable for improving offerings. Brand monitoring tools surface honest opinions you may not hear otherwise.
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Beat the competition – Keep tabs on competitor brand perception, product launches, campaigns, and more with monitoring. This competitive intelligence helps you differentiate.
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Protect trademarks – Monitoring tools can catch improper or unauthorized usage of trademarks like brand names and logos online and on social.
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Manage PR crises – Being alerted to negative press or damaging rumors online early allows you to respond swiftly to mitigate the impact.
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Enhance customer service – By tracking customer questions and complaints online, you can address issues quicker and improve support.
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Determine influencer partnerships– Monitoring reveals potential brand evangelists and influencer partnership opportunities.
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Drive business decisions – The market intelligence gathered through monitoring provides powerful data to drive everything from product roadmaps to marketing campaigns.
Types of Brand Monitoring
There are several major forms of brand monitoring companies should have in place:
Social Media Monitoring
Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more are essential brand monitoring channels. Tools can track brand mentions and hashtags, interact with followers, analyze performance, and more. For example, businesses can monitor discussions happening in Facebook Groups relevant to their industry.
Web Monitoring
This monitors what people say about your business beyond social media, on blogs, forums, news sites, review platforms, and more across the web. For example, monitoring Reddit subreddit discussions around your products.
Review Monitoring
Customer reviews on sites like Yelp, G2, and Amazon contain extremely valuable visitor feedback. Sentiment analysis tools classify reviews as positive, negative or neutral and allow prompt responses.
Search Engine Monitoring
Tracking search engine results for brand name keywords can detect issues like negative articles ranking on the first page. Search monitoring also helps discover sites improperly using your trademarks.
Surveys and Feedback Monitoring
Many brands proactively survey customers and monitor feedback forms/portals to capture voice-of-customer data. This outbound monitoring complements inbound monitoring.
Core Capabilities of Brand Monitoring Software
Leading brand monitoring platforms offer a robust set of capabilities to track mentions, simplify reporting, and help act on data:
Configurable Alerts
Alerts notify teams of important brand mentions in real-time based on customizable rules like keywords, authors, sites, sentiment, volume thresholds, etc.
Comprehensive Data
Robust monitoring tools scour millions of public online sources beyond just social media, across news, blogs, forums, reviews, video, search engines, and more.
Sentiment Analysis
AI automatically classifies sentiment of mentions as positive, negative or neutral. Some tools display overall brand sentiment scores over time.
Comparison Benchmarking
Compare your brand’s performance to competitors and industry averages for key metrics like volume, reach, sentiment, response times and more.
Audiences and Demographics
Leading solutions provide audience analysis – who is talking about your brand, where they are located, interests, gender, followers count, influence, and more.
Historical Data and Trends
Tools store years of archives of brand mention data, allowing you to analyze historical trends on graphs and charts for metrics like volume, sentiment, response times, domains, keywords, etc.
Reporting and Analytics
Custom reports and executive dashboards spotlight key brand health metrics, trends, competitive benchmarking, crisis alerts, influencer analysis, opportunities, and more.
Collaboration Tools
FEATURES like saved searches, tagged mentions, shared projects, assigned responses, and annotate tools foster brand monitoring collaboration across teams.
API Integrations
APIs allow connecting brand monitoring data with other martech systems like social management, CRM, analytics, survey, and support tools for a comprehensive view of customer data.
Setting Up Effective Brand Monitoring
Follow this step-by-step guide to properly configure your brand monitoring initiative:
1. Determine business goals
Define the specific business objectives your brand monitoring aims to achieve, like improving NPS scores, increasing awareness, driving customer retention, boosting sales, etc. These goals should guide tool selection and dashboard design.
2. Identify target keywords
Create a comprehensive list of relevant keywords and phrases to monitor like brand name, products, slogans, executives, awards, major customers, top landing pages, common misspellings, and more.
3. Select online sources
Choose high priority online channels and properties to monitor, across social media, news, video, blogs, forums, reviews, search engines, ecommerce sites, competitors’ sites, and anywhere your buyers are having relevant conversations.
4. Configure monitoring rules
Set up rules defining what types of brand mentions to capture like positive and negative sentiment, certain authors, languages, sites, topics, volumes, geographies, etc. This avoids alert overload.
5. Integrate with workflows
Connect monitoring tools with your social management, community platform, VOIP, and CRM systems to efficiently track and respond to mentions across departments.
6. Build executive dashboards
Design customized dashboards spotlighting key metrics and trends vital for stakeholders and decision makers across PR, product, marketing, CX, and sales teams.
7. Train response processes
Document and train scalable processes for responding to common mention types – like customer questions, complaints, partnership inquiries, press commentary, unauthorized usage issues, etc.
8. Review data regularly
Routinely review reporting during team meetings to discuss trends, issues, crises, opportunities uncovered, campaigns needed, new optimization tactics, and performance benchmarks.
Free vs. Paid Brand Monitoring Tools
Free Tools
Many free brand monitoring tools can provide basic coverage:
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Google Alerts – Get email notifications for chosen keywords and URLs. Limited to Google index so misses much social media.
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Social Searcher – Search tool reveals mentions of your brand across social media, blogs, and news sites. No alerts or analytics.
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Social Mention – Searches social networks, blogs, comments, bookmarks more for brand mentions. Basic free reporting.
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BrandsMentioned – Allows tracking brands across Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Limited data history and no sentiment analysis.
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HowSociable – Displays social media statistics for a brand including followers, tweets, retweets, and more.
Paid Monitoring Tools
Robust paid tools offer advanced capabilities tailored for brands:
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Meltwater – Leading media monitoring platform tracking online news, social media, blogs, forums, trends, and more.
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Talkwalker – Social listening and analytics tool offering AI-powered sentiment analysis and image monitoring.
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SproutSocial – Popular platform for social media monitoring, engagement, reporting, and analytics.
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Critical Mention – Monitors broadcast, print and social media sources for brand mentions in real time.
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Nuvi – Real-time social dashboard revealing brand’s social performance across channels.
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Awario – Powerful web monitoring and analytics for brands across all types of web properties and languages.
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Brand24 – Affordable brand monitoring platform for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, forums, and news.
Brand Monitoring Use Cases
Here are examples of impactful ways leading brands leverage monitoring tools:
Monitoring Customer Feedback
Leading hotel chain Marriott monitors social media, reviews, guest satisfaction surveys, post-stay emails, focus groups, and other channels to understand ever-changing customer needs and sentiment towards its 30 brands. This led to launching new premium bedding, eco-friendly policies, mobile concierge features, and contactless innovations.
Informing Business Decisions
Global computer technology company Lenovo tracks its brand health metrics across channels on executive dashboards used by stakeholders across the organization to spot trends and issues impacting marketing, sales, product development, and HR decisions.
Driving Advocacy Programs
Apparel retailer lululemon’s monitoring program tracks social media advocates and loyalists showing authentic love for their brand. By identifying and engaging these passionate customers, they fuel authentic word-of-mouth marketing across digital channels.
Managing PR Crises
When BBC aired controversial allegations against leading food chain Chipotle, their monitoring tools quickly flagged the brewing media crisis. This enabled their PR team to issue a public statement within hours countering the claims before major brand damage occurred.
Improving Customer Support
Global sporting goods giant Nike monitors customer questions and complaints on social media and integrates this data with their customer service platform. This gives support agents relevant context to resolve issues faster and aids future policy changes.
Expert Tips for Getting Started with Brand Monitoring
We asked leading brand monitoring experts to share their top tips for customer-focused brands looking to get started:
Simon Walker, Head of Insights at Awario, recommends “defining a clear objective for your brand monitoring initiative before purchasing any tools. Know specifically if you are trying to protect reputation, improve products, reveal trends, identify opportunities, or support reporting. This guides tool selection and setup.”
Aaron Lee, CMO at Critical Mention, suggests, “new brands should begin monitoring their name across local or industry forums and blogs where early adopters reference you, before expanding to broader news and social media sources as awareness and budgets grow over time.”
Jenn Herman, Social Media Consultant, proposes, “be sure to include common misspellings, abbreviated names, competitors, executive names, and top products in initial keyword selection, as conversation volume is lower for new brands and you want to capture everything relevant.”
Lisa D’Annunzio, head of public relations for Talkwalker, says, “review monitoring data at least weekly in the beginning to become familiar with core topics, key influencers, customer issues, vision-critical trends, and media outlets driving discussion around your brand.”
Key Elements to Look for in Paid Tools
With many paid platforms on the market, focus selection based on these essential elements:
Social media integration – Look for robust Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube integration
Web coverage – Tools should monitor blogs, news, forums, reviews beyond just social
Sentiment analysis – Essential for grasping brand perception over time
Real-time alerts – Critical for responding urgently to crises
Custom analytics – Needed to benchmark performance versus competitors
Audience insights – Discovering who influences your brand and buyers matters
Reporting – Dashboard displaying metrics aligned to business goals
Data exports – Requires ability to export mention data to other systems
APIs and CRM integrations – Support seamlessly combining monitoring data with existing martech stack
Image monitoring – Necessary for tracking visual brand usage online
Historical data – Discovering long-term trends requires sufficient archives
5 Things NOT to Do with Brand Monitoring
Steer clear of these common brand monitoring pitfalls:
1. Information Overload
Tracking too many non-relevant keywords across too many data sources causes information overload. Prioritize monitoring domains actually impacting goals.
2. Alert Fatigue
When every mention triggers company-wide alerts, response times slow and alert efficacy drops. Customize fewer action-oriented alerts per team instead.
3. Data Silos
Data living in a brand monitoring platform silo limits the value. Integrate and align monitoring with your social, community, CX, and analytics tools.
4. Ignoring Data
Monitoring is useless if insights are neglected. Review analysis to identify positive and negative trends and their implications regularly.
5. Disconnected Processes
With no defined workflow for handling different mention types across functions, brand monitoring value diminishes over time. Coordinate processes across PR, CX, and product teams.
The Future of Brand Monitoring
Advances in AI, computer vision, NLP, and analytics will continue expanding brand monitoring capabilities for organizations:
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More sophisticated natural language processing to interpret complex sentiment, emotions, urgency, and intention within mentions.
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Expanded image and video analysis to provide details on visual branding usage and context.
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AI assistants that can recommend response templates to common brand mention types to save time.
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Tighter platform integrations that align voice-of-customer data from surveys, support cases, and monitoring into unified CX profiles.
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Predictive analytics that forecasts potential viral crises, traction for launches, competitor vulnerability periods, and core customer needs ahead of time.
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Further automation of report generation, assigning mentions to correct teams, and alerting based on designated rules.
The growing ability for brands to track and analyze data from potential prospects researching products months before they convert gives monitoring added impact across the customer lifecycle.
Wrap Up
Brand monitoring generates actionable voice-of-customer intelligence unavailable through any other method. By tracking explicit mentions and sentiment from buyers, critics, and the general public discussing your brand online, companies gain an invaluable feedback loop to continually hone products, services, messaging, and experiences. This guide detailed what brand monitoring entails, top use cases, core features of leading tools, setup best practices, and key elements that enable deriving maximum value from monitoring.
