The importance of Brand Monitoring
20 February 2023Taking an interest in what the public thinks of our company, like where and what they say about it, is fundamental for the growth of our business: it helps us to understand how our company and our products are perceived: a very important first step to make the right business choices, like anticipating possible frictions and crises or responding promptly to questions or problems before they get out of control.
‘Brand Monitoring’ is all about this. It is the process of monitoring different channels, online and offline, to identify mentions, conversations and the sentiment related to a brand, product or service. The concept is often associated with social media marketing, but in reality the monitoring must encompass any ‘place’ where people talk about an organization or product. These include direct reviews in own e-commerce platform, Google, Amazon, comments in industry forums, articles in print or digital media: everything must be followed carefully.
The advantages brought by brand monitoring are many. Here are the top 4:
Understanding of Customers’ Sentiment: monitoring your brand can help you better understand the general perception that people have about your company or a specific product. A sentiment analysis is done with ad hoc tools that examine the specific language used in comments and can reveal if people talk about you and your products with a positive, negative or neutral tone. It’s a great way to “read between the lines” and observe, on a large scale, how people react to certain posts and campaigns.
Properly Manage Reputation and Crises: band monitoring is crucial in managing brand reputation and in managing problems before they become unmanageable. Listening to online reviews and feedback and having an effective response and management process in place can increase public trust and prevent/avert crises.
Identify Problems and Improvements: Monitoring the brand is not just a matter of protecting the reputation. It is also very useful for collecting feedback that helps understanding how to improve a product or service and formulating an offer based on the real needs of consumers.
Identify User-Generated Content: User Generated Content can be a great complement to your company’s content marketing strategy. By monitoring mentions, you can find, among other things, new creators to work with, who can become true ambassadors and sources of new UGC.
At this point someone may ask: what should be monitored to best protect an entity’s own brand? If a few fragmented information are not enough, too much data can also be counterproductive. The best solution is to identify macro-areas on which to concentrate, and these could be the following:
Online media, i.e. all social media platforms, online forums and review sites, news sites and blogs within the sector of interest as well as generalist and trade media outlets.
Print media: if you have the necessary resources to actively control the relevant publications it means that you can rely on special tools or press offices, to actively monitor national and/or international newspapers, trade magazines, newspapers and news agencies.
Name variations: make a list of all the different ways people refer to your brand, including nicknames, diminutives, and other word variations your brand is associated with. Some people may use different spellings or abbreviations of your brand, so it’s important to keep track of all the variations. Some ‘misspellings’ could be so widespread that they become real buzzwords that are more useful to monitor, paradoxically, than the real brand name.
Competitors: it’s good to know what competitors are doing and what their audience is talking about to make sure you’re up to date on the latest industry news. You can analyze competitors to establish a benchmark, intercept trends and understand if the sentiment towards them is more or less positive than that towards yours. Many online brand monitoring tools allow you to perform a competitor analysis to measure how your business compares to others.
CEOs and Public Figures: it is also essential to operate a correct personal branding when this is linked to public figures, if in fact they become testimonials or spokespersons of your brand, even if they have only been chosen for a specific campaign. Also be sure to monitor conversations related to your CEO or other prominent figures in the company. Even if news about the person is not directly related to the company’s activities, the way a well-known face representing the company is portrayed in the media and/or perceived by people, can have an impact on the perception of the brand as a whole.
Oscar Giacomin / General Manager, Facto Edizioni
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