Monitoring your brand is not just about paying attention to the online conversations, but also about actively seeking out instances in which your business, your startup, your brand is mentioned. Brand reputation grows in the online marketing world through mentions or citations. And mentions are seeds planted by other people to grow your brand/business.
Why Is Brand Monitoring So Important?
By fitting brand monitoring into your marketing strategy you save yourself the headache of getting stuck and pushed to the wall when realizing how much valuable and authentic information you’ve been missing out from the web and social channels, and there’s little else you can do now.
The benefits to reap are considerable: you get feedback on your ideas (maybe some of them are plain bad), you get the chance to have a voice (even in writing), it gives you a head start when managing crisis situations, spot new trends, find out more about the competition, discover influencers, etc.
If you’re not convinced of the importance of brand monitoring, here are some advantages you’ll get by keeping track of your brand’s mentions:
- By doing brand monitoring, you’ll gain new business ideas.
- Brand monitoring helps you share positive mentions promptly, and deal with the negative ones as quickly as possible.
- By constantly monitoring the web, both for your brand and your competitors, you’ll get to cover unexplored fields such as trending topics, mutual concerns your customers share across the web, overly repeated keywords, questions nobody has an answer to (not even your Q&A web page)
- By doing brand monitoring, you can provide better support & manage your online reputation.
- Brand mentions provide opportunities for link building in the sense of making people know and learn from each other more.
- Brand monitoring can help you build a community around your brand.
But even though we can all agree on the reasons why this is important, it often seems like a daunting task that few seem to do right and even when brands try to be active listeners, they can still fail miserably. So why is it so hard to have an accurate picture of what others think about you online?
How Can You Efficiently Monitor Your Brand?
Let’s face it: it’s too complicated and, actually, impossible to manually track all your brand’ records and activity.
Social listening tools are not at all a marketer’s whim born from the will to fit the trends and be seen using loads of apps or engaging in hectic marketing strategies. On the contrary, real-time brand monitoring is a definite must and need for the everyday marketer.
Mentions about your brand can happen all over the internet in places you have no idea about. There are places where you could trace the leads of your brand, and there are some others you’ll never know about their existence. I bet you have received some that you have no clue about. And here is where tools like Brand Mentions are really helpful. The tool automatically detects everything that is being said about a startup or any brand and offers you a daily list of mentions which you can manage and analyze.
Running an in-depth brand mentions analysis for your own startup or for your competitors could help you make sure that you are not overlooking any efficient strategies that might be working wonders for you.
How Do You Build a Better Brand Reputation for Your Startup?
The simple answer would be: by becoming a better listener. It’s certainly going to be difficult at first since most of us have been raised in the business by being told about the importance of self-presentation. And how else can we introduce ourselves but by talking about us over and over and over again?
Yet, we need to stop and listen to what people have to say about our business and react on the spot. Because all it takes to ruin everything is to be a little slow, be a little late, just once..
And how do you do that? Through brand monitoring and through brand monitoring tools designed especially for this. A brand mention monitoring tool is not something extra, but something to start with on your digital marketing journey.
There are a lot of brand tracking tools available on the market. All are promising improved social media monitoring, sharing their success stories, and promising better search results. And while monitoring tools like Brand Mentions can save tons of time and energy, the key is to understand the data and the context you’re working in.
By deploying digital brand monitoring, you’ll be able to improve your marketing impact on your audience, widen your perspective over niche keywords, create a customer-centric product and services, and eventually increase sales. And why not, even catch your brand infringers.
Bottom Line – In Order to Hear Everything, You Have to Be Everywhere
There are 1,709,962,556 websites online right now and it is growing every second.
Monitoring at least 1% of these, the most popular media platforms, still seems to be a huge effort. In this case, a smart move would be using a tool that can monitor keywords relevant for your brand and send you real-time alerts about any words you track on the all accessible sites such as social media channels, forums, blogs, news, etc.
Even though people don’t usually talk to brands, it doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate an intervention from the brand. In fact, the reason people might not talk directly to a brand could be that they don’t expect the brand to reply. It’s estimated that of the messages posted about a brand, four out of 10 would need a response from the brand. And yet, seven out of eight messages for brands go unanswered.
With the increase of users’ expectations to be able to engage in dialogue with the brand over social networks, comes an increasingly difficult task for companies to meet those expectations. Even when they do get to answer, the reply can come way too late in an age where people are quicker to reply to Facebook or WhatsApp conversations than to mobile texts.
The solution? Monitor your brand’s mentions again and again and again…