Brand monitoring is the process of tracking brand mentions about your products or services on different channels. It could be news about mergers and launches in the print media or complaints on social media platforms.
Companies do brand monitoring to jump on any good publicity or spot and address any criticism before it becomes a problem. Businesses can learn how the audience perceives their products or services.
Online brand monitoring tools help you track your business’s online activity and monitor your reputation.
Importance of brand monitoring
Brand monitoring allows you –
- Understanding your target audience– You can use online brand monitoring tools to learn more about your target audience – their preferred social media platforms, the websites visited, the languages used, their online preferences, and their location.
- Realize your brand’s strengths and weaknesses – Brand monitoring provides you with customer feedback. You can learn what features they like, their complaints, and how you can improve your product and services. The information is available on social media, forums, and complaint websites.
- Safeguard your brand reputation against PR crisis – You can find the negative brand mentions and deal with them before it affects your brand reputation.
- Find market opportunities – Companies can find new platforms, websites, backlinks, communities, and opportunities to market their product.
- Discover influencers – you can find potential influencers to collaborate with to market your product.
- Protect from infringers – Brand infringers are companies who use your company’s name and popularity to make more sales. Some companies may make unauthorized use of trademark or service marks or create confusion about your brand. There are trademark laws to protect your brand from any unauthorized use of your brand. You can use online brand monitoring tools to enforce this.
- Monitor competitor’s reactions – You can monitor competition representations of your brand by way of comparative advertising and negative reviews.
What do you monitor?
Online media has given people a voice, they can talk about your brand anywhere, anytime using various devices. Ideally, businesses should monitor their brand in as many places as possible.
Here are a few channels and areas you should monitor–
- Print media (newspaper and magazines)
- Online blogs and publications
- Forums
- Social media platform
- Review sites
- Broadcast media
What do you track?
While making your brand monitoring plan, you need a concrete strategy. You can start by tracking direct brand mentions. Remember that people do not always directly talk about you and your brand, and general industry talk can impact your business.
Here are a few things you need to track –
- Brand and product mention – When people are talking about your brand or company.
- Major staff mentions – If have any well-known and influential employees in your firm, you should monitor the conversation around them. The same goes for C-level people in your business.
- Incoming links to your website – People online can refer to a website without mentioning the name. Start by tracking inbound links to your website. Inbound links can affect your SEO score.
- Industry-related publications and influencers– you need to be aware of conversations within your industry. It is vital to keep up with the latest trends prevalent in the industry. Beyond, your immediate industry looks for related terms in the press. You may have to deal with a crisis because of association.
Also, see How to do Sentiment Analysis and best tools to use?
Best Brand Monitoring Software
We have created a list of the top brand monitoring tools you can use-
Google Alerts
Google Alert is the perfect online brand monitoring tool to start your online journey. Google alerts are free and user-friendly. Enter the keyword you want to monitor across the web in the search bar with your email address.
You will receive email notifications every time someone uses the keyword. Google Alerts only works for predefined words.
Some of the major drawbacks of Google Alerts is you will not get any advanced analytics or reports. Google Alerts does not monitor social media mentions.
Brandwatch Analytics
Brandwatch Analytics is a great online brand monitoring tool. It offers extensive data analytics and business intelligence.
Brandwatch offers historical data and has an algorithm based on machine learning. You can set up queries to track mentions of any keyword or phrase anywhere on the web.
The powerful algorithm will slice and dice data to provide –
- Accurate and insightful information about your target audience.
- Segmenting the data into relevant categories will help build the perfect customer persona.
Brandwatch provides live data reports and real-time displays. You can use the social listening result to boost your online presence and stay updated with the latest industrial trends.
Brandwatch has various pricing models, including one dedicated to large companies.
Social Mentions
Social Mentions is a free online brand monitoring tool and is similar to Google Search Engine. You need to enter the keywords you need to track in the search bar. You can define the sources you want to monitor – blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, videos, and questions. Social Mentions does not follow social media websites.
Social Mentions provides useful analytics to boost your business with details like –
- Reach
- Sentiment analysis
- Top keywords
- Top users
- Top hashtags
- Sources
Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a social management tool to monitor your brand monitoring. You can use it to publish your content and interact with your audiences on your social media platforms in real-time.
You can use Mentionyltics can track your social media and web in multiple languages. Social Intelligence Advisor AI is a unique feature of Mentionyltics as it offers actionable insight from social data.
Mentionylitcs offers analytics to improve the reach and influence of brand mentions, competitors monitoring, and Boolean search mode.
Brand 24
Brand24 is one of the strongest online brand monitoring tools available. It publicly collects data from sources like social media, blogs, forums, review sites, news sites, podcasts, newsletters, and other mentions.
Brand 24 is a perfect mix of social listening and brand tracking. Businesses using the tool will get a lot of information on how their brand is perceived online and what people say about the brand.
Brand24 is user-friendly and starts collecting data immediately.
It gives you data like –
- The volume of mentions
- The sentiment
- Type and number of interactions
- The most active location of keyword usage on Twitter
- Context of discussion
- Prominent influencers in your industry niche.
Additionally, you can compare two projects simultaneously. You can use this feature to monitor your competitor’s performance or have two products. Brand 24 also gives detailed social media KPIs over time.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best social media management tools, and you can use the tool to schedule your social media post. It is a great online brand management tool.
Hootsuite gathers brand mentions online. You can monitor it to monitor your social media conversation and predefined keywords.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content management and brand management tool. It is a fantastic tool if you plan to prioritize your content.
BuzzSumo is an effective online brand monitoring tool, capable of spotting all relevant mentions including –
- Keyword and brand alerts
- Domain alerts- notifies you whenever there is new content published in your domain
- Social media alerts – number of shares, likes, views, and clicks.
- Author alert – notification when an author publishes new content.
- Link alert – notification when there are new backlinks to your website.
- Personalized dashboard
- Real-time notifications
- Filter content to get precise notifications.
Ahref
Ahref is an SEO tool with limiting brand monitoring. You can use Ahref to let you follow backlinks to your website. It is one of the best tools to find links to improve your SEO score.
It can help you find the best keywords and your website’s Google rank.
Awario
Awario is a social listening tool allowing users to monitor keywords in real-time. Awario has affordable and is perfect for small and medium enterprises or marketing firms.
The tool can find brand mentions across various social media platforms, media outlets, blogs, forums, and the web. You can use Awario’s filters to make your monitoring more precise and Boolean search node for specific queries.
Awario gives details about individual online mentions and the analytics of these mentions. You can use the tool to get demographic and behavioral data on the people discussing your brand. Awario can send you mentions by email, Slack, or push notifications.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a tool that focuses on Twitter. You can customize your TweetDeck dashboard at your convenience. You can use TweetDeck to follow hashtags and take part in conversations. TweetDeck is a free online branding monitoring tool.
Also, see 13 Compelling Twitter Marketing Tools You Need In 2022
