Brand monitoring is easy when your customers tag you in their posts or contact you directly about an issue. But true measurement of your brand mentions is a lot more complicated.
Your customers are talking about your brand across a variety of channels, whether you realize it or not. What’s more, they have the potential to reach a massive audience every time they mention your name.
While you can’t control what they’re saying about you, you can observe the conversations — and even join them — when you are proactively monitoring your brand.
Let’s look at some specifics on brand monitoring and how you can keep track of your brand mentions.
Table of Contents
What Is Brand Monitoring?
Why Is Brand Monitoring Important?
What Should You Monitor?
Brand Monitoring vs. Social Monitoring
Best Practices for Monitoring Brand Mentions
What Is Brand Monitoring?
The ultimate goal of brand monitoring (also known as brand tracking or media monitoring) is having the ability and resources to respond to any conversation happening about your brand. In some cases, you might further some favorable publicity by sharing a positive review or commenting on a complimentary thread. Or in other cases, you can mitigate the spread of negative press and the damage it can cause to your brand.
Successful brand monitoring takes two formats: offline and online brand monitoring.
Conversations are happening all over the place, so all possibilities should be on your radar.
Why Is Brand Monitoring Important?
Let’s say you own a restaurant. You overhear a customer saying they wish you offered a soup and salad option for a faster lunch. Later, you overhear another customer telling their friend your bathroom is always dirty when they come in to eat.
Even though they’re not talking to you directly, your customers are telling you exactly how they feel about their experience. You now have reliable data that can help you make changes in your business that will put your brand in a positive light.
Obviously you can't depend on chance encounters and overhearing customer remarks to gain meaningful insights. So brand monitoring is the process of uncovering these insights at scale, (and in a less ad-hoc manner).
Your customers are your best resource to learn how people feel about your brand, what they like and don’t like, and what they want to see from you. That’s why brand monitoring is so crucial to any marketing or PR strategy. The more you can get inside your customers’ minds (and the minds of a prospective audience), the more you can rely on actual data instead of guesswork when it comes to tactics for growing your brand.
Customers are willingly sharing their feelings. Your job is to figure out where to look.
Social media is among the lowest-hanging fruit. You can easily scan your social media channels to check out posts you’re tagged in.
You can also keep tabs on a keyword, such as your brand name. Just go to Google Alerts, type in the keyword, and get notifications every time your keyword pops up in the media.
This method involves a lot of manual work, however, and can become cumbersome. A social listening solution is a highly recommended alternative that can do all of the above on your behalf. Use your media monitoring service to track brand mentions, collect analytics on user mentions and behaviors, and gain deeper insight into your audiences’ sentiments.
Check out the top social monitoring tools and the top brand monitoring tools if you're tired of manually scrolling to find that post that mentioned you.
What Should You Monitor?
There are seemingly infinite choices when it comes to monitoring your brand mentions online. Narrow the focus to what is actually important to know. Here’s what we suggest tracking:
Brand mentions
Anytime someone mentions your company name or your brand, that’s a brand mention.
It’s easy to track brand mentions with Google Alert. Just input your brand as the keyword and monitor your inbox for any mentions.
If you have a small brand with a niche audience, using branded keywords is relatively straightforward. Google scours the web and sends you an email every time it sees that someone else has mentioned your brand.
But if your brand is a household name, like McDonald's, you might not want to track brand mentions this way.
McDonald's gets thousands of brand mentions every day, and an email for each of them simply isn’t feasible. Brands should look into a professional media monitoring service that can track brand mentions on a large scale. Plus, services like Google Alerts do not monitor all of the places where your brand may be mentioned, like social media platforms, podcasts, TV broadcasts, print, radio, podcasts etc. That's where a media monitoring and social listening provider can help.
To see what this looks like in action, read our media monitoring guide or for a walkthrough with one of our product experts!
Product Mentions
Product mentions can be helpful to track if you want to track the buzz about a specific product you sell.
For example, Apple received more than 140,000 social media product mentions for the iPhone 8 and 150,000 product mentions for the iPhone X. In one day, the company saw more than 239,000 mentions of the word “Apple.” This was around the time the company was launching a new iteration of its ever-popular smartphone. Rumors had been swirling for weeks prior.
Tracking multi-channel product mentions can be a helpful strategy for new product launches. Speculation before the launch might just inspire a new idea, while feedback after the fact can help you make adjustments.
Enlist the help of a media monitoring tool to automate this insight and get real-time analysis.
Staff Mentions
Do you have Instagram influencers, micro-influencers, or well-known figures on your payroll? Is your C-suite well known? If so, you might want to track mentions of their names.
Influential people doing good things can shine a spotlight on the companies they represent, even if their activities aren't brand-related.
For example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates appears in the news often for his charitable contributions. Even if Microsoft isn’t mentioned, Gates’ generous actions can still reflect favorably on the company.
Backlinks
Direct mentions aren’t the only way people can call attention to your online reputation. Sometimes, they can simply link to your website and not mention your name or product at all.
Links to your website from a third-party source are called backlinks. Link building can be extremely helpful for helping you rank higher on SERPs and driving website traffic. Tracking these brand mentions for SEO is essential to brand monitoring so you can see which online publications are talking about you and sending you traffic.
From there, you can respond accordingly. Send an outreach email to build a relationship with the publishers who mentioned you in a positive light. Or, start a conversation if you got negative reviews to see what you can do to improve the situation.
All-in-one SEO tools like Ahrefs can monitor your backlink profile on your behalf to see who’s linking to you and where those links go.
Industry-Specific Publications
Wouldn’t you love to know if your new app appeared in TechCrunch or got recommended by someone on the Forbes tech council?
Unlinked mentions are where your brand is mentioned in an article but not linked. Monitoring industry-specific publications ensures you can capitalize on this free press and share it with your own audience.
Brand Monitoring vs. Social Monitoring
Brand monitoring isn’t to be confused with social media monitoring. Rather, social media monitoring can be considered as part of an overarching multichannel monitoring strategy.
That’s because brand monitoring takes place across a variety of channels, not just social media. It’s a blend of social media monitoring, social listening, and brand monitoring on non-social media channels to get a more comprehensive picture of what people are talking about and why. At Meltwater, we pride ourselves on being a one-stop shop for all your media monitoring needs, that’s why including channels like podcasts, broadcast news, and print monitoring.
When performed in real-time, brand monitoring can be a powerful force in helping you take control of conversations and perceptions in a timely manner.
Best Practices for Monitoring Brand Mentions
We’ve talked about the what and why of brand monitoring. Now, how do you go about building a brand mention marketing strategy? Let’s review our best practices for monitoring your brand reputation:
Set up alerts using name variations
How do people refer to your brand? Do they always spell it correctly? Does your product or brand have a nickname (e.g. "Coke" vs "Coca-Cola")?
It’s a good idea to set up alerts in your brand tracking software for any name variations. People may be talking about you and you’d never know it if they misspell your brand or refer to you as something other than your official given name.
Track industry buzzwords
People might not mention your company or product but have feelings about your industry as a whole or an influencer commonly referenced in your space. For starters, this might help you anticipate any negative publicity and give you a chance to set the record straight.
It can also inspire some of the content you create.
For example, let’s say you sell cloud phone systems. If someone mentions how terrible the call quality is on cloud phone systems, you might create blog posts explaining how call quality is determined and ways to improve it.
Set up alerts for negative brand mentions
While brands want to hear all the good things that people are saying about them, negative mentions require a timelier response. You can set up your alerts to track brand mentions that center around a certain problem.
Using this formula, [brand name] + [specific issue], your negative brand mention alert might like something like this:
Company XYZ Broken Item
Once you get an alert, you can respond quickly and hopefully repair any negative customer perceptions.
You can also use this strategy to track negative mentions about a competitor. Learn what they’re not doing well and make it a point to be better at those things.
Establish processes on what to do next
Once you set up brand mentions, it’s important to know how to take the next step. Knowing how to respond to mentions, good or bad, is key in taking control of your brand image.
Clothing company Zulily is highly responsive to social media posts on Facebook and reaches out quickly to customer comments and concerns with a resolution. In this example, the customer service team showed the customer the best way to contact them for more information regarding an order’s status.
Getting Started With Brand Monitoring
Knowing what's being said about your company and where, is an essential component of a brand management strategy. Armed with this type of information, you can proactively fend off a crisis or identify influencers sharing UGC around your products.
And although you might not always like what you hear, rest assured you need to hear it so you can take charge of building the brand image you deserve.
If you'd like assistance setting up your brand monitoring strategy, get in touch with us below. As the #1 media monitoring platform in the world, we can help make sure you never miss a mention.
