In the world of business analytics, brand monitoring wears the crown. Many potential challenges you may face as you develop and grow your business can be overcome with brand monitoring.
Even better, brand monitoring raises red flags before they develop into serious problems that might affect your bottom line, and signals at opportunities to play to your strengths.
What is brand monitoring?
In all fairness, it’s hard to keep up with all the marketing concepts that arise. The field evolves at the same pace as the digital world – you might be forgiven, if the line appears blurry between all the different types of monitoring and listening.
In short, brand monitoring contains all activities in following and analyzing information centered around your brand, branded products and your specific sector. Every company wants to if not rule their market, then cut out a sizable niche into the industry and dominate there. That’s how to make those ambitions real.
You approach brand monitoring in your backyard so to speak – direct messages, engagement with your content and posts tagging you. However, that’s only your starting point. Brand monitoring combs through the Internet every time your name gets mentioned – a forum post, reviews, articles on news sites, industry reports or journalistic analysis.
Why is it important for your business?
In the 2020s, the idea of a storefront is outdated. Everything from ordering a product to spreading word of mouth takes place online. Companies are now digital entities first and everything else second. What your reputation is online determines your longevity.
That’s why brand monitoring should be practiced in every company. Size, industry and niche don’t matter. Brand monitoring allows you to secure a better position in relation to your competitors. It is the bedrock of solid customer service and strong relationship with your audience. There’s a lot of power in knowing what people think and say about your brand.
Namely, it gives you the ability to switch directions. Remember, the one in control of the narrative has the upper hand. Don’t let those be your customers and competitors.
Monitor your overall online presence
A natural byproduct of dedicated brand monitoring is bringing awareness to your online presence, especially on social media. Social media has become the vehicle for most promotional campaigns and major announcements. Social search is at an all-time high at every platform when it comes to learning more about a brand. There’s also the matter of direct interaction with customers on your accounts.
There are still companies who treat social media as nothing more than a dumping ground for their press materials and nothing else. They don’t necessarily check on what mentions they receive and don’t respond to their customers. Brand monitoring brings specific attention to your presence on social media.
Build a community and attract more customers
Sales mean nothing, if you can’t keep customers after the initial purchase. The reasons for this can be three-fold:
· You have a bad product, in which case no marketing can help you.
· You are not quite there in terms of customer support.
· You are missing something crucial about your audience.
Brand monitoring helps with the latter two. Take for instance customer support. Good customer service is what everyone dreams in this life. Quick to respond to your complaint. Quick to answer any questions. Quick to help. In fact, it’s so important that customers are more than willing to just switch companies as quick as a snap over bad customer service.
Through brand monitoring you’re not neglecting social mention, even when you’re not tagged. It also feeds you information on what matters to your target customers, how they use your products and what they need.
See what the audience think of your brand
The more you pay attention to every mention of your brand name, the better you understand your customer base. Perhaps you’ve started with one brand persona, but can now identify two or maybe even three. Each is going to have their specific opinions.
What makes them happy? What are your weaknesses? What do they want in an existing product or a brand new one?
Track your competition
It’s not just important to know whether you’re doing well, but whether you’re doing well when compared to your direct competitors. Remember no one stands by themselves. You’re probably aware of your standing in the general hierarchy, but deeper observation is needed, if you want to climb up that ladder.
You’re likely to share a significant audience with your direct competitors so most of your non-branded keywords are going to be quite useful to apply. Seeking out how your competition moves in the industry gives you insights as to what to steal for your own marketing and campaigns, and what to avoid as a general faux pas.
RSS feed readers can help you with that
RSS feed readers have been made for information gathering and storage. Modern RSS readers are quite powerful and versatile in what they can offer companies. It goes beyond following multiple blogs and news sites all at once.
Take, for instance, market trends. If you’re researching innovations and advancements in your particular field, RSS can help you with discovering more. Readers like Inoreader have made quite the leap into content discovery. As a user you have access to the most popular and trustworthy sources on the Internet organized neatly in 50 categories.
Whenever you encounter an article that’s super interesting, you can save it to your Inoreader via the browser extension. The extension is a must-have edition to your RSS experience as it allows you to subscribe to any existing RSS feed detected on a given site. Or you can check on updates from your existing subscriptions. RSS readers have a lot more features. They can syndicate Google Alerts and newsletters. You’re able to subscribe to social media accounts and searches. The sky’s the limit really.
