![What is Brand Monitoring + Best Free Tools [2024 Updated]](https://blogcontents.mandalasystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/what-is-brand-monitoring.png)
In business operations, the cultivation of a positive brand image holds immense significance. Especially, within today’s borderless communication landscape, customers can effortlessly shape the brand image, whether favorable or unfavorable.
Considering the swift dissemination of online information, these opinions yield considerable impact.
This is when brand monitoring becomes a vital player. Businesses must understand how their customers perceive and feel about their brand. After all, every brand strives to build a positive connection with its target audience.
In this blog, we will acquaint you with brand monitoring, elucidate its significance, furnish instances of practical brand monitoring applications, and delve deeper. All these efforts are aimed at assisting marketers and businesses in sculpting a favorable brand perception within the eyes of their target audiences.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the process of tracking mentions of your brand across the internet, including social media channels, review sites, news articles, blog posts, forums, and so on.
It’s an ongoing process that allows businesses to attain a deeper understanding of their brand’s standing among customers, and to proactively spot potential issues before they escalate.
In essence, it mirrors the brand reputation management. Given that your online standing holds the potential to influence aspects ranging from customer viewpoints to search engine rankings, it becomes paramount to vigilantly track the discourse surrounding your brand.
Why Brand Monitoring Matters?
Keeping all ears in what people say and how they perceive your brand is critical to understanding customer sentiment – what they like about it, and what needs improvement.
Beyond this, brand monitoring also furnishes businesses with insights into prevailing market perceptions. It’s not only what customers say about your brand that matters, but also what your competitors are doing, how your industry is evolving, and what your target audience is interested in.
Through brand surveillance, you can keep track of your audience, and competitors, analyze market trends, and enhance your offerings with a competitive edge.
Plus, detrimental references to a brand can significantly impact its reputation. Recent studies indicate that nearly 90% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase.
This means even a single adverse comment can erode trust and sway customer decisions. Negative reviews can also create a snowball effect, leading to more negative reviews and irreparable damage. Proactive brand monitoring is essential to stay ahead of negative mentions.
Waiting for a crisis or negative comment to arise before engaging with customers is not ideal. Brands that invest in brand monitoring have a better chance to address negative mentions and mitigate the damage, thereby transforming challenges into opportunities for positive change.
This approach bolsters customer loyalty, cultivates a favorable impression, and elevates their standing.
Key Features of Effective Brand Monitoring
After getting to know its definition and its significance, you might wonder how to monitor brands effectively. Here are the key features you need:
1. Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring stands out as a crucial feature of effective brand monitoring. This is because social media platforms serve as significant channels where customers frequently voice their opinions and share experiences.
Moreover, here’s a notable statistic: 90% of businesses align with the notion that their success hinges on skillfully leveraging social media data and insights to mold their business strategies.
Through vigilant monitoring of social media platforms, enterprises can identify and tackle customer concerns before they escalate into major challenges.
Furthermore, social media monitoring facilitates a deeper understanding of customer sentiments regarding your products or services. It also aids in pinpointing key influencers within your industry niche. Armed with this wealth of data, you can craft informed decisions and foster a favorable brand image.
2. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis entails examining the tone and context embedded within customer feedback or reviews. Also, employing specialized sentiment analysis tools empowers businesses to discern whether customers are conveying positive, negative, or neutral sentiments in relation to the brand.
This process also assists in spotting crucial challenges that customers encounter, enabling businesses to strategically address these matters. Ultimately, sentiment analysis augments the depth of brand monitoring by furnishing a holistic grasp of how your brand connects with the target audience.
3. Competitor Tracking
The comprehensive monitoring of competitors represents an additional pivotal element within a successful brand monitoring strategy. Through the observation of your rivals’ digital presence, enterprises can amass valuable insights into their marketing tactics, offerings, and customer sentiments.
Also, it allows you to establish a benchmark for evaluating how your brand stacks up against comparable brands within your industry. For instance, businesses can meticulously track competitors’ social media profiles to dissect their follower base, engagement metrics, and content strategies.
How to Implement Brand Monitoring
Now you’re probably starting to grasp the idea of brand monitoring. The next move is to dive into how to actually put brand monitoring into action, step by step.
Step 1: Select Monitoring Tools
Choose reliable monitoring tools that suit your needs. There are various options available, from free tools to more comprehensive paid platforms depending on your brand budget.
Step 2: Choose Keywords and Phrases
Identify keywords, phrases, and hashtags related to your brand, products, industry, and competitors.
These will serve as the foundation for tracking online conversations. Plus, configure alerts in your chosen monitoring tools. These alerts will notify you when your defined keywords or phrases are mentioned online.
Step 3: Choose Platforms to Monitor
Determine the social media platforms, review sites, news outlets, forums, and blogs you want to monitor.
Focus on the platforms where your target audience is active. If your marketing employs multiple channels, there are tools available to streamline monitoring across various platforms.
Step 4: Analyze Sentiment
Use sentiment analysis tools to gauge the emotional tone of mentions—whether they are positive, negative, or neutral.
Step 5: Respond and Engage
Engage with positive mentions to foster positive relationships. Address negative mentions promptly and professionally to show your commitment to resolving concerns.
Step 6: Adjust and Refine
Over time, refine your monitoring strategy based on what you learn. Adjust keywords, platforms, and goals to align with your evolving business needs.
3 Useful Tools for Brand Monitoring
1. Mandala Analytics
Mandala Analytics is a sophisticated social listening tool meticulously designed to cater to the needs of content creators, marketing teams, businesses, enterprises, research firms, and agencies.
This comprehensive tool serves as a catalyst for insight discovery, streamlined content creation, and proactive social listening.
Key features of Mandala Analytics helping your brand monitoring are:
Sentiment Analysis: Gain a comprehensive understanding of the prevailing sentiment surrounding your business.
Whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral sentiment, this analysis aids in refining your brand perception and resonating effectively with your audience.
Mention Category: Delve into the nature of mentions to discern the essence of interactions transpiring on social media. Instantly recognize potential PR emergencies within seconds, enabling swift and targeted responses.
Question Analytics: Classify a wide array of questions emanating from social media and the web. Whether they’re inquiries of doubt, general queries, location-based, or time-sensitive questions, this feature empowers you to identify areas of improvement and discern the information your audience is seeking from you.
Mandala Analytics offers even more advanced features that provide your business with valuable insights. Those features will help you make strategic decisions, boost interactions, and polish your online image.
Besides, you can also use Mandala Cosmos along with Mandala Analytics to maximize your strategic efficiency in brand monitoring.
Mandala Cosmos serves as a comprehensive solution for monitoring multiple social media posts and profiles, all conveniently displayed within a unified dashboard.
This tool equips users with valuable data that can be harnessed for benchmarking purposes and crafting insightful competitive analyses.
2. Ahref
Ahrefs is a widely used and comprehensive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool that provides a suite of features designed to help individuals, businesses, and digital marketers improve their online visibility, analyze website performance, and enhance their search engine rankings.
Some features that help you in monitoring brands are:
Content Explorer: This feature helps you discover where your brand is being mentioned across the internet. By searching for your brand name or related keywords, you can find articles, blog posts, and social media posts that reference your brand.
Site Explorer: Monitoring backlinks to your website can also include tracking where those backlinks come from. This can help you identify potential brand mentions on other websites.
3. TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a social media management tool primarily designed for Twitter. While it doesn’t offer the comprehensive features as dedicated brand monitoring tools, it can still be effective for monitoring brand-related conversations and engaging with your audience on Twitter. Here are some ways TweetDeck’s features can assist in monitoring your brand:
Keyword and Hashtag Tracking: You can set up columns to track your brand name, product name, relevant keywords, and industry-specific hashtags. This allows you to follow conversations where your brand is mentioned or relevant discussions are happening.
Customized Columns: You can create customized columns for specific searches, making it easy to keep track of brand-specific conversations and mentions in one place.
Engagement and Interaction: TweetDeck lets you engage with your audience by replying, retweeting, liking, and following relevant users directly from the dashboard.
Real-Life Success Stories
As you navigate through this paragraph, if you’re pondering the integration of brand monitoring into your marketing strategy, consider these case studies from renowned brands that enhanced their brand reputation through adept monitoring strategies.
Airbnb
Airbnb, the online marketplace for vacation rentals, faced criticism for safety and discrimination issues in 2016. Its social listening strategy was a vital element in understanding how people felt about the brand.
The company monitored social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, for mentions of its brand, as well as keywords related to the criticisms it was facing.
The company responded by launching an anti-discrimination policy and imposing strict penalties on offenders. Airbnb also implemented a review system where both hosts and guests could rate each other, which helped improve safety and transparency.
The company’s efforts to address customer concerns and respond proactively helped it regain customer trust and improve its brand reputation.
Domino’s Pizza
Domino’s Pizza’s stock value plummeted in 2009 when a viral video showed employees violating health regulations and serving contaminated ingredients.
To address this problem, Domino’s developed a social listening strategy to monitor what its customers were saying about the brand on social media.
Then the company responded by releasing a video apology and implementing changes to their products and recipes. Additionally, to regain customers’ trust, they created a platform that allowed customers to track their orders in real-time.
They also installed cameras in kitchen facilities that allowed customers to watch their order being prepared. The monitoring strategy gave customers confidence in their food’s quality and helped regain the company’s reputation.
Adidas
In 2020, Adidas faced backlash on social media when rumors circulated that the company had threatened to terminate sponsorship deals of athletes participating in the Black Lives Matter protests.
The brand quickly responded with a statement that they were committed to supporting their athletes regardless of their views. They also used social listening tools to monitor conversations about the situation and engaged with users to resolve any complaints.
Adidas’s effective monitoring strategy not only improved their brand reputation, but also demonstrated their responsiveness and commitment to diversity and inclusion.
5 Actionable Tips for Brand Monitoring
1. Enhancing Customer Experience and Amplifying Interaction
Brand monitoring is not just about detecting negative feedback; it encompasses recognizing positive input and harnessing it to elevate customer contentment and loyalty.
Leverage brand monitoring tools to track customer sentiments and behaviors, crafting audience personas for a tailored approach to communication and marketing tactics aimed at your target audience. Also, foster engagement with your clients on social media by promptly addressing comments, engaging with posts, and sharing user-generated content.
Employ feedback surveys and online polls to garner customer insights and enhance your product or service offerings in line with their preferences. When customers are satisfied with your brand movement, it augments the efficacy of brand monitoring in yielding favorable outcomes.
2. Spotting Collaborative Prospects
Brand monitoring enables the detection of voids in your brand messaging and customer interaction. By tuning in to customer discussions and feedback, you unearth customer preferences, dislikes, and requirements from your business.
This insight can be valuable in pinpointing suitable partnerships with influencers, bloggers, or endorsers whose ethos resonates with your brand and is favored by your audience.
Such collaborations can be employed for events or campaigns that invite audience engagement, thereby elevating your online presence and cultivating positive brand mentions.
3. Crisis Detection and Mitigation
Brand crises can inflict significant harm on brand standing and customer loyalty. To forestall and address crises before they gain momentum, conduct vigilant scrutiny of social media comments, posts, and reviews.
Swiftly and courteously respond to adverse feedback, proposing resolutions to mollify customer discontent. Take a proactive approach to crisis management by creating a crisis communication plan and training your staff to handle potential scenarios.
Use social media listening tools to monitor brand keywords and industry trends and receive real-time notifications of critical conversations and feedback. This approach ensures that your brand sustains favorable brand mentions.
4. Evaluating Campaign Achievement
Through the monitoring of crucial performance metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can ascertain the efficacy of your branding endeavors and fine-tune your strategies as needed.
Utilize analytics tools to collect insights on your audience’s demographics, preferences, and behaviors.
Leverage this data to refine your marketing campaigns and enhance your return on investment. This practice further amplifies the effectiveness of your brand monitoring efforts.
5. Report and Share Insights
Regularly report your findings to relevant teams within your organization. Share insights on customer sentiment, competitor activities, and emerging trends.
Importantly, stay current with changes in your industry, online trends, and new monitoring tools to ensure your brand monitoring process remains effective.
Remember, brand monitoring is an ongoing process. Consistently gathering insights and acting on them can help your brand stay ahead and maintain a positive online reputation.
Start Monitoring Your Brand Now
Brand monitoring holds immense significance within the framework of business strategy. As we’ve highlighted numerous times, the rapid sharing of information by netizens can effortlessly take place.
By monitoring and analyzing your brand’s online mentions, you can extract invaluable insights from customer feedback. This process not only facilitates the enhancement of your brand’s reputation but also provides a competitive edge, bolstering your customer engagement strategies.
Plus, the availability of tools allows businesses to seamlessly initiate their brand monitoring journey. Armed with these tools, businesses can delve into data-driven decisions that amplify their online presence.
And remember to follow the 5 actionable tips for effective brand monitoring in mind. Adhering to these guidelines will ensure that your brand monitoring endeavors yield optimal results.
