Brand Monitoring For Beginners

Part of running a successful brand is getting the conversation going about you- who you are, what you do, and why you do it. Once you start growing, your public perception will grow as well. Monitoring what people are saying about you is important for your growth and brand image. While it feels great to read happy customer reviews, not everyone is going to love you. Keeping up with brand monitoring helps give you a deeper understanding of how people view your brand, and what you can improve on.

What Is Brand Monitoring?

Brand monitoring is simply keeping track of where your brand is mentioned. This applies to online and offline conversations- anywhere people are talking about you. This is important because it gives you insight as to how your audience views you- both the good and the bad. Keeping tabs on what people are saying can alert you of issues that you might not have known about, or positive things that you didn’t realize your audience enjoyed so much.

Don’t confuse brand monitoring with social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is a part of brand monitoring but only includes social media. Social media monitoring will likely take up a lot of your brand monitoring, with customers frequently asking questions or posting reviews online, but keep in mind there are other areas where your audience will be mentioning you.

Why Brand Monitoring Is Important:

Brand monitoring can help you interact with your customers. By finding where people are talking about you, you have more opportunities to thank them for using your product, clear up confusion, and even pull positive reviews to display on your website or social media. This also helps you maintain your reputation, and allows you to clear up any negativity quickly.

Brand monitoring shows you not only what people are saying about you, but how they are saying it. You can see how often you are the topic of conversation, the type of information they share, and where they are talking about you.

What To Look For:

The most obvious thing to keep an eye out for is your brand’s name or your product’s name. Use a website like Mention to add important keywords, and common misspellings, to get alerts.

If you choose to use a website that helps you track keywords, you can also set alerts for your competitors. While it is important to see what people are saying about you, it can also be extremely helpful to see what customers are saying about them. Use the information that you find to help improve your own brand strategy. If your competitor’s audience loves something that they are doing, see if you can incorporate that into your message and branding. If they are doing something that has been receiving negative attention, advertise how you can better solve the audience’s problem.

If you are looking to grow your brand to a wider audience, see if there are any influencers you can partner with. Often, influencers will post about brands or products that they love. See if there are any influencers that mention your products and if you think they could help you grow, reach out to partner with them. If they genuinely love your products, they will be happy to share what makes them so great, and convince their followers to try them out as well!

Brand monitoring is a great tool to help you identify where you stand with your audience and their overall view of you. It can provide you with valuable information to help you keep growing and improving, and how you stand against your competitors. Do you use brand monitoring? What tips and tricks have been the most helpful?