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Your business’s health and longevity mean keeping a watchful eye on the public perception of your brand. There are more ways than ever for your audience to talk about you. Still, luckily, it’s never been easier to track your brand monitoring  mentions online and have a comprehensive understanding of how people feel about your brand.

What is brand monitoring?

Brand monitoring is tracking different channels to identify where your brand is mentioned. Knowing where and how people are talking about your brand will help you better understand how people perceive it and let you collect valuable feedback from your audience. You can also keep an eye on potential crises and respond to questions or criticism before they get out of control.

Brand monitoring vs social monitoring

Whereas social monitoring focuses on your brand’s social media coverage, brand monitoring encompasses social media and everywhere else people are talking about your brand. Brand monitoring combines social monitoring, listening, and tracking brand mentions on other non-social media channels to collect audience insights.

Why brand monitoring matters

Your public perception and how you respond to public feedback can greatly influence brand growth. As a brand, it’s important to care what the audience you’re serving thinks. You might not agree with some of the conversations you see around your brand, but this gives you an understanding of the general sentiment around your brand and products.

In fact, according to our 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 the ways that brand monitoring service can have an impact on your business

Improve your marketing impact

Marketers have to be more relevant and targeted than ever. And customer information is key. Demographics, intent, sentiment, likes, and dislikes – the more you know, the more personal you can be. Brand monitoring gives you those insights into customers.

Some specific ways monitoring helps maximize your marketing efforts:

• Listen to your customers: The best marketing method is to speak to your customers’ core interests. Listen to their discussions. The simplest way to know what they want?
• Know your customers: Targeting is impossible if you don’t know who you’re marketing to. Find your target customers by looking at the demographics of discussions around your brand and industry.
• Go where your customers are: Picking the right channels is essential for marketing, whether for a Twitter chat or paid social campaigns. By monitoring conversations around your brand, you’ll learn which platforms your customers are most active on and where you should invest the most.
• Monitor market trends: If you’re Apple, you’d want to know what Samsung is doing. In addition to your mentions, monitor your competitors.
• Track campaign impact: Find out when your brand is mentioned in the news and see how well your marketing campaigns perform by measuring mentions before and after campaigns.
• Find influencers: Reach out to top influencers talking about your brand or industry to maximize the reach of your campaigns.

Keywords to monitor

• Your brand, product, or service name (e.g. Apple, iPhone, Macbook, Genius Bar)
• Variations and common misspellings (e.g. Apple. inc, Applle)
• Industry-specific keywords (e.g. iOS, Android)
• Competitors’ names and products (e.g. Samsung, Galaxy 6S)
• Campaign names and keywords (e.g. Apple Music trial, Apple Reuse and Recycling)

Create a customer-centric product

As smart as your marketing may be, you can’t sustain your business with a poor product.

Customers no longer just sit and wait for products we decide to produce for them. They want their say. They don’t want to settle and will look for the best choice. Moreover, They read and write online reviews and speak up on social media.

And those are all opportunities to learn from them, collect product feedback, and build a better product.

Some concrete ways your product team can benefit from monitoring:

• Keep track of product and feature requests: You need customer insights. Document feature requests online to guide product development strategy.
• Monitor live feedback: Getting live feedback about your product is critical. Customers often find problems before you do.
• Monitor launches: Your team works hard on launches; find out how your audiences are reacting and measure the reach and performance of your launch.
• Benchmark against competitors’ products: You can’t beat the competition if you don’t know what they’re doing. Listen to what your industry thinks about your competitors. 
• Monitor specific demographics: If your market spans multiple languages or countries, filtering mentions by language and country can tell you a lot about how well you’re localizing your product and exploring new markets to target.

Keywords to monitor

• Brand and product name
• Product launch name (e.g. iPhone 7, iOS 10)
• Competitors’ product names
• Feature names
• Product functions (e.g. Voice recognition, delocalization)

Improve your customer support and retention

Attracting customers is just half of the work. Keeping them happy and loyal is what keeps revenue coming. Customer success includes listening, reacting, and supporting – all of which you can do with a brand monitoring tool.

How your customer support or community management team can benefit from monitoring:

• Track social support inquiries: Many customers turn to social media for support. A monitoring tool will track these mentions and ensure no customers are left hanging.
• Monitor social media channels from one place: Most brands use multiple social channels. Managing one instead of five different accounts is much easier, especially if you have a small team.  
• Collaborate efficiently: Monitoring tools often offer team collaboration features. Assign mentions to the best person for each query to ensure quick responses.
• Evaluate customer satisfaction: Get a general idea of how happy your customers are about your brand and products with sentiment analysis.
• Identify at-risk customers: Unhappy customers are unlikely to buy from you again. Identify them at the early stage and offer help.

Keywords to monitor

• Product and brand name
• Variations and common misspellings
• Product/brand name + issue/problem, e.g. iPhone 7 + broken, iPhone 7 + not working
• Industry-specific keywords

 Increase sales

If all other teams successfully leverage brand monitoring, you’ll have impactful marketing for a customer-centric product with exceptional customer support. Your brand and product will speak for themselves, and your sales team will naturally reap the benefits of their hard work.

But brand monitoring can be used to generate leads and speed up closing in the following ways:

• Identify sales opportunities: People often discuss a product online before buying. Find sales opportunities by profiling those discussions.
• Connect and engage with customers: If done well, offering valuable help when a customer makes a decision will help close the deal.
• Find potential resellers: Many companies look for great products to sell to their customers. Research resellers for your product, and find out whenever relevant conversations pop up online.  
• Convert competitors’ customers: Unhappy customers of your competitors are more likely to buy from you. Monitor their discussions and engage when the opportunity is right.

Keywords to monitor

• Product and brand name
• Competitor name + alternative
• Competitor name + problem
• Industry-specific keywords

 Leading C-Level Strategy

Apart from overseeing brand monitoring strategy, you can monitor your overall brand performance or industry trends and use the data collected to make informed decisions.

Here are four ways you can leverage monitoring to guide your strategic decision-making:

• Monitor brand reputation: Have a clear idea of your brand’s perception. Keep an eye on brand sentiment, and look out for online crises.
• Track industry trends: Discover what’s new and benchmark your brand against your competitors.
• Improve team communication: Stay on top of how team members work together with the collaboration features.
• Measure performance: Evaluate marketing and PR campaign impact, customer support efficiency, etc.

Start Monitoring

Many companies think brand monitoring is reserved for tech-savvy marketing teams with elaborate PR campaigns. But the truth is, every department – in companies of all sizes – can benefit from more customer insights.

With the right tools and strategy, your teams can build a better product, improve customer service, and close more deals quickly.