Online Brand Monitoring – Your Brand’s Lifeline

Your brand goes well beyond the variety or quality of the products you sell. It represents your particular identity, your message and values, and an entity with which customers can identify and follow. If you market your products online, the Internet offers you a wide range of opportunities to stand out and go viral. But in some cases, damage can be caused to your brand’s reputation, so you must remain continuously vigilant. In any event, brand monitoring is crucial to your enterprise’s success. 

5 Key brand monitoring methods and the benefits they provide

Follow mentions of your brand on every channel

Your brand may be mentioned in a wide range of channels including blog posts, social media, product reviews, forums and newspapers. Follow them closely, and in the event of a negative mention, take action to mitigate the damage. By responding to criticism, you are showing that your brand cares and takes responsibility for its deficiencies. 

Listen carefully to what customers are saying

Aside from preventing damage, ongoing monitoring can give your brand valuable feedback. What do your customers like about your brand? What are they criticizing? Use this criticism to improve your weak points, whether it is less than satisfactory customer service or lack of product variety. You can also use this input to develop new products or added services.

Follow influencers, industry-related publications and competitors

Keep a close eye on what is happening in your industry and what influencers are saying. Is there something happening in your sector that you are unaware of? Are your competitors making a name for themselves with new offerings? Is your brand about to be affected by emerging trends? Be sure to monitor where your brand stands in relationship to all of these factors.

Gain better understanding of your target audience

Monitoring what people are saying and where they are saying it gives you a deeper understanding of the audience discussing your brand. Using these insights, you can plan future marketing and communication strategies based on customized content and favorite social media locations. In order to connect emotionally and practically with targeted customers, brands must generate an ongoing personal relationship.

Track marketing campaign impacts

You can judge how effective your latest marketing campaign was by monitoring mentions of your brand in advance and afterwards. By gauging where your brand was mentioned and by whom, you will gain important insights that can be used to tweak messages, locations and target audiences.  

Considering the colossal size of the Internet and social media, it is impossible to manually locate each mention of your brand in every channel. Today, there is a wide range of automated monitoring tools to help you keep an eye on your brand at all times and at every location.