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A highly creative storyteller who can come up with inspired ideas and turn them into even more amazing marketing campaigns, TJ Kiely leads Meltwater's global content efforts. For the past 10 years, he has been executing marketing campaigns and content programs that drive measurable results for some of the world's largest brands. 

Director of Corporate Marketing & Global Content

See all blogs written by TJ Kiely, Director of Corporate Marketing & Global Content at Meltwater. Social media management ★ digital marketing ★ ...

Author: TJ Kiely

How a business communicates with its audience is just as important as what the business says. It’s useless to craft a great message if the right audience won’t see or hear it. That’s why choosing the best communication channels is a key part of your messaging strategy.

A communication channel is any medium that carries a message to an audience. In some cases, that audience will be your own workforce. For example, you might share a company-wide organizational update with your employees. In other cases, the audience will be prospective or existing customers. For example, you may send a marketing message selling a new product to prospective customers. Or you may send existing customers a thank-you message. No matter the message, you need an effective channel to communicate with your audience.

You can choose from a variety of channels of communication. Some are better suited for certain use cases than others. The trick is to find and use the best distribution channel for each message.

Let's review the most common internal and external channels of communication for formal and informal communication. We'll also explore how to use them in your communication channel strategy.

Common Internal and External Communication Channels for Businesses

Why Are Business Communication Channels Important?

Tips for Building a Good Communication Strategy

What Are the Best Communication Channels for Businesses?

Before we dive into strategy, let’s review some of the most common channels of communication. Your strategy may include some or all these channels. You should think about how to best use each channel before building it into your strategy:

One of the most common internal communication channels is direct, face-to-face communication. Use this verbal channel for current and prospective employees, vendors, and other organizational shareholders. Use your tone, body language, and facial expressions to support your message. With face-to-face communication, you have the advantage of seeing your audience's reaction. That way, you can gauge your message's effectiveness and ask for feedback during your interaction.

Use internal and external mobile communication to share quick thoughts and private messages. You can also use mobile to share personalized offers. Retailers can send push notifications to users with special offers or sales. These just-in-time messages encourage retail conversions. Or, to provide private details to a team, you can use quick messaging tools such as Slack or SMS text. This helps you to avoid having to set up a face-to-face meeting.

Digital communication refers to any type of channel that uses digital technology. This includes email, social media, the company intranet, and websites, for example. For message distribution, digital tools are easy and cost-effective. Plus, they allow you to reach a wide audience in a short amount of time.

Social media is an example of an informal channel. It is a great external marketing channel because it helps customers connect with brands on a human level. Consider using discussion forums to hear the voice of your customers. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is the social media platform of choice. You may also find Facebook and Twitter to be useful channels of communication.

Written material is often viewed as a formal communication channel. Communications might include employee handbooks, newsletters & newsfeeds, policies, and notices, for example. Many businesses reserve written material for critical information to save on printing costs.

Sending a message by the wrong channel or at a bad time frustrates the recipient. Worse yet, it leaves them with a poor impression of your brand. It is not effective communication.

Consider the context of the message you are trying to convey. Which channels of communication will ensure your message has the desired effect? When can you send the message to best meet your objectives?

For example, if your message is technical or lengthy, use a channel that enables the recipient to ask clarifying questions. 

Marketing messages have great potential to shape your brand image. They can also promote your value proposition, boost conversions, and create top-of-mind awareness. You can only achieve these results when your communication is clear. Using the wrong channel might cloud your entire message.

The same holds true with your internal audience. You don’t market to them in the same way, but you do need to keep them engaged with your organization. Your success depends on their buy-in to your mission and company vision.

Any message worth sharing must be shared in a way that will be well-received by its audience.

To build a good communication strategy, determine your chosen communication channels. Then, decide when to use each one. Here are some tips to help you build your strategy:

Assign Someone to Be in Charge of Each Communication Channel

To be effective, business communications need governance. Appoint a person to be responsible for each communication channel.

This person can take charge of a specific channel. You might have one person in charge of social media, another person in charge of email, and another in charge of written communications. In smaller organizations, this person might be the same for all channels.

Consistency is important. A designated person for each channel can ensure each message conforms to your company’s brand, tone, and style.

Some channels are better suited for certain communications than others. You wouldn’t want to announce mass layoffs or poor company performance via text or email. But you also don’t need to call each employee to tell them about a changed meeting time.

Having more than one channel in your communication strategy allows you to choose the best fit for the message you need to share. This gives you control over how and when and to whom communication flows.

Create Customer Segments for Your Communications

Some communications are one-size-fits-all, but many messages are not. Employee and customer segmentation should be part of your communications strategy. Effective segmentation helps you send information only to the people who need it.

Assign Someone to Follow Up On Communication Flows

Whether you’re using social media, email, messaging apps, or written documents, make sure to include follow-up in your plan. Sending the message isn’t always the final step.

In some cases, you need to be available to take questions or clarify information for your audience. Track engagement on social media to see how many people your message reached and how people responded. Prepare to respond when necessary to ensure your communication is effective.

As you’re developing your communication plan, make sure you document every detail. Don’t leave this step to chance. Your team needs consistent guidelines that align with your brand on how to share internal and external information.

Having a documented plan gives everyone on your team a go-to resource for how to handle business communications. Keep this document up-to-date as you start using new channels or make changes to your comms strategy.

How will you communicate with your customers, employees, and company stakeholders? The answer depends on why you're sharing information in the first place. For example, channel marketing has different requirements than organizational communication.

The distribution strategy is different, too. Do you need to use formal channels? Should you consider indirect channels?

These key communication channels should be part of your strategy:

Email works well as an internal and external communication one-to-many channel. You can send messages en masse for a very low cost. This method works across many use cases, from your internal sales team to customers to stakeholders. This method works best if you are sending it to people who are familiar with your brand.

The main downside is that your email may get lost in the inbox or go unread. More than 319.6 billion emails are sent each day. Another downside to email is that it is not always an interactive communication channel. You lose the advantage of nonverbal cues when recipients open and read your email without responding.

Interested in exploring new channels of communications? Here's our guide on how to create an internal newsletter.

A social media channel gives brands a way to meet their audience where their audience already is. Brands like Nike and Xbox use social media as ready-made customer service networks. This aligns with customer expectations of receiving a response from brands within 60 minutes of contact on social.

Social media is a popular internal communication channel to improve employee engagement. Platforms like Facebook and IG are informal channels employees are likely already using for other things. Companies can meet employees wherever they are to increase engagement.

For example, you might create private Facebook groups to recognize employees’ accomplishments. Or you might establish social channels geared toward prospective employees.

Messaging apps such as Slack or project management tools like Asana and Basecamp can be as segmented or as broad as you need. They make it easy to tailor your internal communications to the right end-user and share information quickly. Send messages to individuals, teams, groups, or the entire company with ease. Plus, these apps are geared toward mobile users, ensuring users get important information as quickly as possible.

Another benefit of project management apps is the cost. Small businesses with small budgets can take advantage of free or low-cost apps and use them throughout the workplace.

Employees and customers alike rely on your website as an intermediary of information. Many companies have a portal for employees to view internal communications. Employee communication portals are cost-effective and easy to update. They are also a great single source of information for your workforce.

Customers use your website when they have questions, need troubleshooting, or want help with a product or service. You can create a better experience by having an internal blog, FAQS, or other resources clearly marked and organized on your website.

Your business communications strategy is always evolving. Information becomes outdated, new information becomes available, and new channels emerge. For help fine-tuning your strategy or building one from the ground up, contact Meltwater today!

Choosing channels of communication for your business is a key step in making sure your message is received and heard. What’s your strategy?

The Best Communication Channels for Businesses

Reach and impressions are two marketing metrics that show you how many people are seeing your content. These metrics don’t tell the full story of your content’s impact, but both give you an idea of how many eyeballs you attract.

Let’s face it: Social media content can’t benefit your business unless someone sees it. Measuring reach and impressions is a baseline aspect of social media management so you know that your content is showing up on social channels, which opens the doors to likes, shares, comments, and clicks.

Here’s a rundown on the differences between reach vs. impressions and how to measure and use these metrics in your social media marketing.

Key Differences Between Reach and Impressions

Importance of Reach and Impressions in Marketing

Measuring Reach and Impressions on Different Platforms 

Choosing the Right Metric for Your Marketing Goals

Best Practices for Tracking and Analyzing Reach and Impressions 

Understanding the Value of Reach and Impressions with Meltwater

Reach vs. impressions are similar but measure slightly different things:

Reach: The number of unique users who saw your content.

Impressions: The total number of times your content has been viewed.

Focusing on reach and impressions together will give you an idea of whether people are seeing your content and how often it appears in their feeds.

When reviewing the data, impressions are always equal to or greater than than reach.

It’s because the same person might see your content more than once. Let’s look at some scenarios:

<ul class=”medium”>
	<li>100 users view your content once</li>
    	<ul>
		<li>Reach: 100</li>
		<li>Impressions: 100</li>
	</ul>
	<li>50 users view your content twice</li>
	<ul>
		<li>Reach: 50</li>
		<li>Impressions: 100</li>
	</ul>
	<li>100 users view your content once; 50 additional users view your content twice</li>
    <ul>
		<li>Reach: 150</li>
		<li>Impressions: 200</li>
	</ul>	
</ul>

Social media reach vs. impressions can mean different things on different channels, too. For example, Facebook defines reach as the number of people who saw content posted from your Facebook page and the posts you are tagged in. We’ll dig into these details more in a moment.

You might think that your reach would be the same as the number of followers you have. If they’re following you, then they’re going to see your content, right?

Neither reach nor impressions are limited to those who follow you on social media. Social channels use complex algorithms to show your content to people who are most likely to be interested in it.

This is ultimately a good thing. It lets you get in front of people who aren’t following you but still might be interested in your posts. That means new opportunities to grow your audience!

If reach and impressions are roughly equal, that means people are only seeing your post one time (on average). This could indicate people aren’t finding your posts engaging (e.g., they’re not coming back to view the post) or that you’re not reaching the right people.

If you notice a low reach but a comparatively high number of impressions, that’s a good sign. It means the same people are viewing your content over and over again, which helps build familiarity with your brand. It also indicates they found your content to be valuable, which can help you sniff out what type of content your audience likes best.

TIP: Did you know AI tools can help you grow your social channels' reach? Check out our free Ultimate Guide to AI for Social Media Management for plenty of tips, tricks, and prompts!

Reach vs. impressions on social media can vary by channel. Get familiar with how your channel tracks reach and impressions so you can understand the full scope of your metrics. 

Instagram is pretty straightforward when it comes to impressions vs. reach. Instagram impressions refer to the number of times your content was seen. Reach reflects the number of unique accounts that see your content.

Using Instagram analytics, you can filter impressions vs. reach by duration (e.g., the past 7, 30, or 90 days) and by audience demographics, such as gender or age.

Twitter impressions and reach are a little different than Instagram. For starters, Twitter doesn’t calculate reach.

For impressions, Twitter calculates the number of times your Tweet appears in user feeds. As with other social media channels, these are not unique views. 

You can view impressions in your Twitter analytics, which you’ll need to activate first. From there, you can see impressions per Tweet or for Tweets over the last 30 days.

Facebook measures reach by calculating how many people saw content posted directly from your Facebook page and posts you’re tagged in. So, if other accounts are tagging you, views of those posts will appear in your analytics.

The same is true for impressions. This is the number of times people see content from your page or posts you’re tagged in. 

Facebook adds an extra layer of visibility if you’re running paid ads. You can see reach and impressions for paid vs. organic content, which can give you unique perspectives on what’s working and what isn’t in your social marketing.

TikTok’s Research Audience shows you how many unique users have viewed your content. This is the same as reach on other social media channels.

Total Video Views is the same as impressions. It tells you how many times your video has been viewed but doesn’t differentiate between unique viewers.

Similar to X, there is no Reach metric on LinkedIn. The platform does offer total post impressions, which you can access from your analytics. 

You can also see impressions for a specific piece of content by clicking on the post. The number of impressions will appear at the bottom of the post.

There is an Impressions metric, though. This illustrates how many times your video thumbnail appears in user feeds or search results. 

Other metrics include total clicks, total video views, and the amount of watch time your videos receive.

Meltwater can help you track your social media metrics from one central solution. See how by clicking here and filling out the form below for a demo from one of our experts!

A key part of social media management is understanding which metrics to measure and why they matter. 

It’s a good idea to track both reach and impressions, as each adds context to the other:

Measure reach when you want to know how far your content is traveling on social media. 

Measure impressions when you want to know if people find your content engaging or whether the algorithm is homing in on your target audience.

Reach and impressions are just two of many metrics that you can track. While helpful, they’re not enough on their own to reach your marketing goals.

That’s why you need another key piece of the puzzle: reach vs. impressions vs. engagement. 

Engagement refers to any type of action a user takes on your post. It might be a like, comment, share, or even a click on your link. 

For example, you might have a high number of impressions but very low engagement. This might indicate that you’re missing your target audience; your content isn’t connecting with relevant users. 

If you’re running a paid ad, low engagement might be due to ad fatigue. People are seeing your ad over and over again and have become immune to it.

Or it could mean something else entirely. That’s why context matters. The more you know, the better you can connect the dots and figure out how to improve your results.

Combined, these metrics can tell a much bigger story about your social media content and its impact. Ideally, you’ll have a big reach, an even higher impression count, and high engagements — the trifecta that shows that people see and enjoy your posts.

Each channel’s built-in social media analytics tools are a good starting point. They do the heavy lifting of aggregating reach and impressions across all of your posts on that channel. 

To gain even more value from marketing reach vs. impressions, follow these best practices:

Connect unique impressions vs. reach with your content strategy. For example, if you’re using social listening to decide what to post, see how impressions vs reach improve compared to historical data.

Track your results over time. Industry averages are helpful, but take them with a grain of salt and define your own benchmarks using your own data.

Use third-party platforms like Meltwater for a centralized view. Aggregated marketing reach vs. impressions gives you a more complete story of how your efforts are paying off.

Following these best practices will help you understand how reach and impressions affect your performance and how to use these metrics to improve over time.

Meltwater’s social media management tool gives you a bird’s eye view of all of your social media posts and analytics. Track performance from a single place so you can see what’s working in your social strategy and where you can improve. Meltwater automatically pulls reach, impressions, and engagement data from all of your connected channels for holistic and granular insights.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below!

Learn the difference between reach and impressions and why each metric matters. Get insights on tracking, analyzing, and optimizing them for better results.

Reach vs. Impressions: Understanding the Difference

At a time when brands are constantly vying for attention and consumers are spoiled for choice, it has become more crucial than ever for businesses to have a strong and well-defined brand. But managing a brand can be a complex task — it requires the careful coordination of messaging, visual identity, and customer perception. That’s why more companies are choosing brand management software that gives them a bird’s eye view of every aspect of their brand. 

By centralizing all aspects of brand management, companies can monitor their brand’s performance, maintain consistency across all channels, and make informed decisions that align with their overall marketing strategy. With the power to streamline processes and enhance efficiency, brand management software has become an essential tool for businesses to thrive among their competition.

There are brand management platforms, tools, and software for businesses of all sizes and budgets. Let’s explore the nine best options to help you stay organized and give you deeper insights into your brand’s performance.

What to Look For in Brand Management Software

10 Best Brand Management Software on the Market

Gain Control with of Meltwater's Brand Management Software

Tip: Learn more about brand tracking, brand monitoring, brand monitoring tools, and brand tracking software.

Brand management software is a powerful tool that allows companies to manage various aspects of their brand. This software helps to streamline workflows, handle team communications, assign tasks to the right people, and collaborate on branding activities.

The goal is to keep important parts of a brand in one place for easier management, organization, and consistency. 

Brand management is a core piece of an overarching marketing strategy, so it’s essential to find tools and software that fit within your marketing ecosystem. Ultimately, brand management is about maintaining alignment within the brand, communicating your brand to your customers, protecting your reputation, and keeping up with trends or news that may impact your brand.

To address all of the above, brand management software and tools may include:

Brand asset management to centralize digital content

Project management tools to assign branding tasks

Media mentions to see who’s talking about you and where conversations happen

Sentiment analysis to see how customers think and feel about your brand

Version control to ensure a consistent brand image

Data analytics and reporting capabilities

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it does highlight the power and scope of a brand management platform. Every brand management tool offers unique features, benefits, and interfaces to help you get exactly what you need from your branding efforts.

Now that you know a little more about the role of brand management, let’s dive deeper into the best brand management tools and software.

Use these tools to make branding a cornerstone of your marketing strategy:

The Meltwater suite includes comprehensive media intelligence and brand management tools that give you greater visibility into brand performance. Its quintessential features lie in media monitoring and public relations, both of which are critical to brand management.

The Meltwater Media Intelligence suite gives you a clear view of what people are talking about and where your brand is being mentioned in the media. This helps your brand take a strategic approach to gaining media attention to grow your share of voice. 

Meltwater also offers customer sentiment analysis so you can learn more about how people feel toward your brand. Shifts in sentiment can help you get ahead of potential crises and preserve your reputation. 

As part of your brand management strategy, Meltwater monitors unlimited keywords on your behalf and sends real-time alerts regarding mentions and social media shares. You can compile these insights into automated reports that demonstrate the ROI of your earned media and PR efforts.

Get a free demo of the Meltwater brand management software today!

With many branding efforts taking place on social channels, it’s important to see how your social performance stacks up. That’s where Sprout Social shines brightest.

This social media management platform offers helpful tools to build and maintain a social media strategy. Brands can monitor posts and engagement, schedule content to be posted, and manage their inboxes from a central platform. It also offers insights into audience growth, engagement rates over time, and other data and analytics to see how your social presence evolves.

Collaboration tools make it easy for teams to create on-brand content and gain approval before publishing. You can publish to multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, from within the platform and see optimal send times to maximize visibility. 

Compared to other social media management platforms, Sprout Social is on the more expensive side. It also doesn’t support the full branding picture outside of social media, so you may need other tools to complement your strategy.

Tip: Take a look at the best social media management tools on the market.

HubSpot is one of the most recognized names in customer relationship management, and for good reason. This CRM software is an excellent tool for nurturing customer relationships.

This inbound marketing and sales platform offers unified features for sales, marketing, and customer service. CRM features allow you to maintain records of all customer interactions and history so you can maintain a consistent customer experience.

HubSpot's content management system (CMS) helps you create, publish, and manage web content, including blog posts, landing pages, and website pages. Email marketing tools enable you to design and create branded email campaigns that maintain consistent branding your leads and customers will see. Automation features allow you to personalize communications at scale based on user behaviors and preferences.  Centralizing these assets ensures your online presence follows your brand guidelines. 

Your brand is the sum total of all interactions a customer has with your company, so pulling as many of these aspects as possible into the same arena makes it easier to boost your professional image.

Brand24 offers a combination of social media management and reputation monitoring, both of which are critical to brand management. It monitors your social channels in real time to help you stay up to date on conversations as they happen. You can also monitor competitor mentions to see what others are saying about your competitors and see how your brand compares.

While not a full social media management tool, Brand24 allows you to engage with social media conversations directly from the platform, making it easy to maintain an active presence and consistent messaging.

Tip: Take a look at some more Brand24 alternatives.

Bynder is a brand asset management system that helps you stay organized with your branded materials. As teams create more content, asset libraries proliferate and make it harder to find the content you need. It can also lead to creating duplicate content if you don’t know what you already have.

That’s why a brand asset management platform like Bynder is so beneficial. The tool automatically generates metadata for your assets to make them searchable. You can store all of your brand-related assets, like style guides, logos, color palettes, and images in one place.

No matter who is creating content for your brand, they’ll have access to the right assets to keep your brand on point.

Companies aren’t the only ones responsible for branding. Your customers and prospects can also affect how others perceive your brand, from the reviews they leave to the content they create on your behalf. To capitalize on what other people are saying and doing, Yotpo offers some helpful features.

This cloud-based app automatically collects user-generated content and allows you to store, reshare, and respond to it. UGC is a huge trust-builder, as it gives a peek inside other customers’ experiences with your brand. You can use Yotpo’s content curation tools to boost your brand visibility, earn new customers, and retain existing ones by showing you’re a fan of what they created.

Tip: Take a look at the best user-generated content examples

Monday.com is primarily a project management tool, but it makes an impact in the brand management space, too. Because branding is a team effort, this project-focused platform can help keep everyone on the same page in a predictable, systematized manner.

You can assign tasks and deadlines to team members, create project timelines for completing brand activities, and maintain calendars to highlight your top priorities. This is a highly visual tool, allowing you to see what’s in your branding pipeline at all times. Ready-made templates take the guesswork out of creating systems and processes so your team can get right to work.

Frontify is a brand asset management solution loved by designers, brand managers, and content creators alike. Organize your content assets in a way that works for you. Upload existing files, then share with teammates to collect feedback and detailed revision notes.

It’s also one of the only brand management tools that offer a completely free plan. You can get your feet wet with basic features as you learn more about your needs. Paid plans start at $79 per month.

For teams who rely on extensive collaboration, ClickUp offers an excellent suite of features that can be applied to just about any use case, including brand management. The platform is highly customizable to fit the way you work, making it easy to add to your overall marketing strategies and activities.

Build approval processes and workflows to keep in-house teams and freelancers on the same page. Tie brand management tasks into the rest of your marketing initiatives so that everything works together as a system. You’ll have greater visibility into your branding efforts and how they impact other areas of your sales and marketing.

Bonsai is a unified project management tool that also covers client, resource, and financial management. This tool is tailored for agencies, making it an ideal solution for managing branding projects. Designed to streamline workflows, Bonsai keeps your team organized, aligned, and focused on delivering high-quality, on-brand work to clients.

With features like task management, project timelines, and resource planning, Bonsai ensures projects stay on track and on budget. Built-in tools for time tracking, budget forecasting, and reporting provide clear insights into progress and profitability. By centralizing everything in one platform, Bonsai makes it easy to manage deadlines, collaborate seamlessly with clients, and scale your agency’s branding efforts efficiently.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and Meltwater helps you measure more aspects of your brand than any other tool.

Gain insights into everywhere your brand is, including social media, podcasts, newspapers, blogs, and offline sources. We help you conduct brand tracking, as well as track mentions of your brand and competitors, customer sentiments, share of voice, and key trends so you can get ahead of your competitors and be the master of your brand conversations.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below.

Brand management software helps you cover every aspect of the brand journey. Discover the 9 best software, platforms, and tools for managing your brand.

Top 10 Best Brand Management Software and Tools (2025)

The 10 Best Brand Management Software and Tools

It takes years of dedicated, consistent efforts to build a strong brand but just seconds to destroy it. A digital marketing campaign that doesn’t align with your values or core audience can cause brands to lose favor with their followers. Knowing these brand management risks is the first step of brand safety — the act of protecting your brand’s reputation across channels.

People have certain expectations of the brands they do business with. When a brand fails to deliver on those expectations, your brand’s image is at risk. 

Marketers take conscious efforts to protect brands from negative reviews and viral content. But they often lack control when it comes to advertising. Automated processes mean you’re not choosing where your digital ads appear, which means your content might appear in places that don’t align with your brand.

Let’s explore the role of brand safety in marketing and how you can take steps to protect your brand.

What Is Brand Safety and Why Does It Matter?

Brand Safety Risks in the Digital Landscape

Brand Safety Best Practices for Businesses

Tips for Managing Brand Safety on Social Media

Brand Safety Definition: The act of protecting a brand’s image in the context of advertising, specifically in preventing it from being associated with inappropriate content.

You’ve probably seen ad fails that clearly that don’t belong together, like this one:

Brands face the same risks in digital advertising, too. 

In digital advertising, you can’t always predict where your ads will land. Automated processes take the guesswork out of online advertising and reduce the stress of having to research and choose specific websites, pages, or channels.

However, this process also increases the risks to brand safety. With little control over where your ads appear, your ad could end up next to other content that might influence viewers’ perceptions of your brand.

That’s why brand safety is an essential part of any brand strategy. More than half of U.S. consumers consider a brand’s reputation and values when choosing who to buy from. 

It’s essential to maintain their trust by ensuring your ads reflect your brand properly. Otherwise, you risk turning off your customer base or giving them the wrong impression.

You can’t escape digital ads online — they’re everywhere. Many sites use tracking pixels to display ads that are relevant according to your browsing history and known interests. Despite good intentions, this can pose a challenge to maintaining brand safety.

Let’s look at some brand safety examples and why they create headaches for marketers.

Ads that appear in the wrong context can confuse audiences, which reduces the ad’s effectiveness. For example, an ad for a children’s toy that appears in an article about economic recession likely won’t catch the reader’s attention.

Ads can sometimes appear alongside harmful or controversial content, such as hate speech, violence, or adult material. This can damage a brand’s reputation by making it appear as though you share these values.

For example, a food ad placed alongside graphic content about animal cruelty could make the viewer think the food company doesn’t have humane practices.

User intent is everything in SEO. But sometimes, keywords can have different meanings or intentions. Broad or poorly defined keywords can lead your ads to show up in the wrong places.

For example, a skincare brand targets the keyword “acne,” and its ads appear next to negative reviews about its own products.

Sites involving gambling, content piracy, or adult content can erode brand trust if your ad appears here and doesn’t pertain to the site’s topic. For example, a church building its image on trust and transparency wouldn’t want to appear on a website promoting content piracy.

Social media and user-generated content risks

User-generated content (UGC) can be a boon for brands. It’s essentially free advertising and can influence others’ perceptions in an authentic way. 

However, ads placed near controversial or offensive UGC can negatively affect brand perception. For example, a family-oriented snack brand promotes itself on social media and appears near a user-generated video filled with profanity or explicit content.

Consumers are ultra wary these days, with nine out of 10 saying they fact-check their news. Half of consumers also say they trust news and content on social media less than they did a year ago. 

Ads that appear to be associated with the spread of misinformation can erode consumer trust and harm a brand’s credibility. For example, a pharmaceutical company’s ad could appear on a website spreading misinformation about vaccine safety. This might cause the reader to think the company supports or funds the misinformation.

TIP: Not sure where to start with brand monitoring solutions? Check out our full breakdown of the best brand monitoring tools on the market!

Ensure brand protection in the digital age. This essential guide covers everything you need to know about brand safety and reputation management

TJ Kiely

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