What Is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the act of tracking brand mentions across as many online channels as possible, whether social or non-social. In the process, you're not just tracking mentions, likes, and comments. You are utilizing tools to discover brand mentions and conversations surrounding your company all over the web. It belongs to your online reputation management plan, and your goal is to understand how your audience feels about you. At the same time, you identify bad experiences and negative reviews that can potentially harm your future. Remember that B2B buyers usually check reviews and testimonials before making a purchase. Seeing too many negative reviews without any reply from you sends a bad message.
Setting brand mention alerts through your chosen brand monitoring tool is essential to keep track of everything. When you pay attention to what people are saying, you understand your disadvantages and mistakes. Therefore, you can make improvements and reduce customer churn. Don't treat bad reviews as your enemy, but as your vehicle to getting better.
In This Guide, You Will Find...
- Why Is Brand Monitoring Crucial For Your Business?
- What Should You Monitor?
- Channels To Watch For Brand Mentions Online
- 5 Ways To Monitor Brand Mentions
- How Can You Choose The Right Tool?
- The Best Brand Monitoring Tools To Try Out
Why Is Brand Monitoring Crucial For Your Business?
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Crisis Management
Your brand isn't perfect. You might take a wrong turn and disappoint a client enough that they feel the need to go online and write a negative review. Something that simple can easily escalate and create an entire wave against your brand. That's why you shouldn't miss your chance to answer early and tidy the situation before it gets out of hand. So, set keywords and brand mentions as alerts so you know when someone talks about you on social media and in feedback forms.
In these situations, many companies often create press releases to address issues and calm the sentiment toward their brand. The benefit of using press releases is that they are affordable and have a great reach when published on niche platforms.
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Address Pain Points
When you monitor review mentions and social media posts, you understand your target audience's challenges and goals. Sure, you've already done your market intelligence report and might have a pretty good idea of what your buyers need, but hearing directly from them is priceless. Their reviews might help you understand what more you can do to help them achieve their objectives and which part of the buyer's journey needs improvement. Additionally, brand mentions show you what people are most interested in. Maybe they want a simpler onboarding process and easily accessible feedback forms. Showing how much you care will help you generate more targeted leads.
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Build Relationships
One of the main benefits of customer testimonials and online brand mentions is that they help you understand what your clients want. When you listen to their needs and do your best to improve based on their feedback, it shows them that you care and value their viewpoints. Therefore, they tag you on their posts, leave comments under yours, and involve you in online conversations. The more you engage with them, the more they feel a sense of community. You are not a faceless online account but a personality ready to engage and get involved. This is how you can improve your customer lifetime value.
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Strengthen Brand Reputation
Your reputation is your core value. It takes time to cultivate and grow, but it can be destroyed quickly. Brand monitoring tools help you ensure that no bad review goes unanswered. Plus, by engaging with your audience, you show that you care about them and spend time discussing their issues and interests. To further strengthen your online presence, you should learn how to ask for reviews. You're not begging people to give a simple star rating. You explain why their input is invaluable to your brand's whole existence. Therefore, new prospects can see how positive your brand reputation is and what nice things existing clients have to say.
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Understand The Competition
What are your core competitors doing to track their brand reputation? How do they engage with their audience online? Let's say you have created payroll software and want to see what your competitors' clients talk about online. Their discussions shed light on their challenges, needs, and preferences. You may identify a gap that gives you a competitive advantage over other companies and allows you to try and "steal" customers. Additionally, this tactic helps you identify new players in your field as they emerge.
What Should You Monitor?
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Brand Mentions
The most obvious online brand monitoring aspect is brand mentions. When your product offers value and you have cultivated wonderful customer relationships, clients are likely to tag and mention you on their posts. They might thank you for your product's benefits or simply try to engage you in the comments. However, you should go beyond this easy brand mention monitoring technique. You should also track product names, brand names, taglines or slogans, and branded hashtags. For instance, someone may mention your brand name without tagging you. Using keyword combinations to monitor your brand sentiment through a brand mentions tool is essential.
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Reviews
If you pay a visit to a competitor's Google profile, you may see that they answer every review. Customer testimonials and reviews are necessary for you to receive good publicity. Yet, sometimes these reviews aren't positive. Whether good or bad, you should always reply to people and address issues before they turn into a crisis. Your brand monitoring tool can make this process easy by alerting you every time you have a new review. Make sure to reply respectfully, no matter how bitter the review is, to show people that you value their feedback and own up to your wrongdoings.
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Competitor Updates
One of the most valuable digital marketing tips and tricks we can offer you is to start tracking competitor news and updates. Staying ahead of the competition isn't easy. Sometimes you need to study what others have started doing to identify emerging trends and regulatory changes. For example, in the SEO world, AI has completely changed the ranking rules. Now, companies that want to get indexed have to optimize their content by adding FAQs and Q&As and using an effective structure. Similarly, brand mention monitoring gives a peek into what your competitors do and how it appeals to their clients. This way, you can make improvements and take inspiration from the social media strategies.
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Influencer Mentions
We are not talking about making a paid collaboration with an influencer. We are talking about organic mentions from influential figures in your niche. They could be vendors, company spokespeople, suppliers, and even shipping companies. Just one positive brand mention from such figures can do more good to your reputation than any promotional campaign. But how will influencers even know about your brand? You may contact them and offer them a free trial of your product in exchange for their honest opinion. This is tricky, though, as you can't be sure about whether they'll like your services. Still, if you truly believe in yourself, go for it.
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Keywords
An SEO competitor analysis can really benefit your brand monitoring process. For starters, feed your mention tracking software with keywords your competitors use often. Maybe they have created customer keywords you need to pay attention to. It's best to focus on direct competitors who offer exactly the same products as yours and are at the same level as you. You don't need to focus that much on smaller fish. Monitor when they take action and how they use their online management strategy to strengthen their reputation.
Apart from competitor keywords, you should also monitor industry keywords. Make a list of your niche's buzzwords, hashtags, words and phrases, and thought leaders' names. They will give you a wide look into what's happening in your industry and which trends are taking off.
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Sentiment
You've probably heard of and even performed a sentiment analysis. How can it be used in your brand monitoring workflow? Well, the best brand monitoring tools often offer text parsing to detect sentiment or natural language. Sometimes it's not what people say in their reviews but the tone they use. This can indicate whether they are happy, neutral, or negative toward your brand. Based on your analysis results, you can craft a strategy to improve your product and remarket it to show the renewed version.
Channels To Watch For Brand Mentions Online
- Social media
- Forums
- News sites
- Print media
- Review sites
- Blog sites, newsletters, and podcasts
5 Ways To Monitor Brand Mentions
1. Use Brand Monitoring Tools
While manual brand monitoring is possible, it is seriously time-consuming, as you'll need to monitor all social media and other websites for brand mentions. That's why delegating this process to a tool is your best option. These tools use advanced algorithms to scan millions of data points and identify whatever you want to track. They can also locate brand mentions on high-authority websites, which are great opportunities for your link building plan.
Before you start using your brand monitoring tool, make sure to set your filter, including brand URL, countries, languages, and the date range. Then, you have to choose which social media platforms and websites you want the tool to analyze.
2. Monitor Review Sites And Forums
Forums like Reddit and Quora are two of the most popular places for B2B buyers to share their opinions and find answers. People may mention your brand or ask others about your products, seeking genuine viewpoints. Not paying attention to these sites means that you lose the opportunity to reply to negative or neutral opinions, which may escalate further. Your brand monitoring software usually offers you a summary, the number of mentions, and an analysis of the online mentions you get.
The data gives you a sentiment score and the most popular talking trends within your audience. You can even find the links that are most often shared through your audience's posts, understanding what type of content they like and read.
3. Check Your Backlink Profile
Sometimes, these brand monitoring tools don't catch brand mentions embedded in links to your site. To fill in this gap, you should analyze your backlink profile. Using an analytics tool like Semrush Brand Monitoring gives you an overview of the number of links you get and your authority. It's important to know how often others talk about your brand and how authoritative you are in their eyes. Quality backlinks are hard to get, though. Most companies outsource backlink building to ensure they end up on credible and trustworthy sites. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you have 100 low-quality backlinks.
4. Structure Your Alerts
Brand monitoring tools go hand-in-hand with alerts. However, it's impossible to act upon each and every one of them on a daily basis. You should prioritize certain alerts over others based on their level of emergency. For example, real-time sentiment dips or crises should be at the top of your list. Also, make sure to receive daily summaries about your own brand mentions and your competitors. Weekly or monthly roundups are equally important for you to strategize based on successful themes and emerging trends.
5. Use Boolean Operators
Boolean operators are the "ANDs," "ORs," and "NOTs" and are powerful tools in brand monitoring. By combining keywords strategically, you can filter relevant mentions, exclude unrelated content, and broaden or narrow search results. For example, using "brand name AND review" identifies specific feedback, while "brand name NOT job" removes recruitment-related posts. Quotation marks ensure exact phrase matching, helping capture accurate brand mentions. This level of control enhances sentiment analysis, competitor tracking, and customer engagement insights. This is also important for PPC brand monitoring tools, as you need to track the reviews you get on various directory submission sites.
How Can You Choose The Right Brand Monitoring Tool?
- Broad coverage
- Real-time alerts
- Sentiment analysis
- Keyword and hashtag tracking
- Reporting
The Best Brand Monitoring Tools To Try Out
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Google Alerts
It only takes about five minutes to set up Google Alerts, and it's fine if you are just starting out. However, it doesn't go in much depth when it comes to brand mentions. You can set up daily alerts even if you are using another brand monitoring tool.
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BrandMentions
Its free version is very easy to use and set up. Many users mention how great the customer service and communication are. It also offers wonderful customization and comprehensive metrics.
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Mentionlytics
A great free option for social media tracking. It doesn't offer sentiment analysis or hashtag tracking, but its interface appears to be one of its top features.
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TalkWalker
This one is quite similar to Google Alerts, though it appears to dig deeper, collecting data from a wider range of sources. You can choose from various alert criteria and set up your summary frequency.
Paid Tools
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Hootsuite
Mostly known for social media management, Hootsuite also tracks your brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags. Its advanced analytics help you identify the overall sentiment around your brand and how you can improve.
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Brandwatch
Its key features include consumer intelligence, social media management, and multichannel influencer marketing. You can analyze customer feedback with the help of their experts, organize your social media posts, and track mentions across all platforms.
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Meltwater
This is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in the game. With over nine years in the field, they claim to be the only brand tracking online, social, and print mentions. However, there is no free trial, and prices are bespoke to each client.
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BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo was initially created so users could track how engaging their content is. It also features brand monitoring capabilities. You simply choose certain keywords you want the tool to track and are informed every time someone mentions one of them.
Key Takeaway
Brand monitoring is a proactive strategy you should enforce way before negative reviews and bad press come your way. It's a process that helps you identify all brand mentions and overall sentiment toward your company. Thanks to advanced brand awareness monitoring, you can understand your drawbacks and work hard to improve. Even if you are facing a crisis, it's good to know about it before it gets out of hand. You can take a look at the best press release examples to get an idea of how you can handle these situations. But what should you mention? Your brand name, competitor, and industry keywords, hashtags, reviews, and influencer mentions are equally important.
The reason you are doing this is to understand the sentiment toward your business, directly address people's pain points, and strengthen your customer relationships. Websites like Quora, Reddit, and other forums are ideal for interacting with your audience and improving your brand image. To do all that, you can rely on a brand monitoring tool, whether free or paid. Obviously, paid tools offer a wider range of features, while free software usually offers limited opportunities.
