How to keep an eye on your brands, a step by step guide to Brand Monitoring
If you own a company then you probably also own a brand or multiple brands. It costs a lot of time, effort and serious money to build a brand, but even the most resilient of brands can be tarnished in a heartbeat. Brand Monitoring will help you keep a watching eye on them.
Why Use Brand Monitoring?
1. Reputation Management
People often talk about brands online and if you care about the reputation of your brand then you will want to know what they are saying. Once you start Brand Monitoring then if someone says something bad about the brand you can to be the first to respond by either correcting errors or countering any misconceptions with positive comments. On the flipside, if you read something good about your brand then you can respond with thanks in a timely manner and point out any other area's in which your product or brand could assist.
2. Customer Engagement
In addition to protecting your brand this a great opportunity to engage with your customers and continue to improve your brand. Interact to find out what they like about your brand and how they think it could be improved. Also, don't be afraid to ask for negative feedback, has any brand experience been less than positive and why?
3. Sentiment Analysis
What is the overall feeling associated with your Brand, are your customers happy with the products you provide or the services you deliver? How can you improve? Where are your customers' pain points? How do your recent customer interactions compare with their historical perception of your company?
4. Sourcing of Content
A useful side product of Brand Monitoring is often the discovery of new content. Spot something interesting when searching for data regarding your brand? Dependent upon the relevance of the content, share it with either your colleagues or your social audience.
Ok, so you have decided to start monitoring your brand, what it the best way of finding out what is being said?
Searching is the obvious answer, but where and for what?
Where to Search
1. Brand Monitoring using Search Engines
The main search engines to check are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can perform straightforward searches for your brands on these engines, but it is wise to use the advanced search capabilities of each of these engines in order to make the results as relevant as possible.
2. Brand Monitoring Using Social Media
The big three are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Anothers which could yield good results are Reddit and Pinterest.
3. Brand Monitoring on Review Sites
The review sites to target will depend upon the sector in which you operate. If you run a restaurant or takeaway then you need to monitor Tripadvisor, Yelp, and OpenTable. Sell consumer products? then you need to be checking your Amazon reviews.
What to Brand Monitor?
1. Brands
The obvious and simplest thing to search for is your brand or brands, however, there are other terms to consider.
2. Products
You want to keep a check on all your product names and associated product codes
3. Brand Ambassadors
If you, or another member of your company or someone outside your company is a brand ambassador, like, for instance, Richard Branson is for Virgin, they will need to be monitored as well. You don't want to be the last to find out if someone you use to market your brand is in a spot of trouble or has said something publically which doesn't align well with your brand.
4. Company Executives
You also want to check on any members of the company who are known with the industry or run popular blogs either within the industry or as a hobby or sideline.
5. Slogans
If you have any slogans that are known within your industry or by the general public then keep an eye on these, any subsections of the slogan or slang terms associated with the slogan.
6. Keywords and phrases
If your brand or product dominates or has ambitions to dominate any popular search keyword or term then you want to keep a regular eye on this. This may already be monitored if you have someone who looks after your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but you may want to reach out and include a summary with your Brand Monitoring output.
7. Hashtags
Monitor any hashtags that you have created about your brand plus any that your customers or the media have linked to your brand. If you spot a new hashtag then add it to your monitoring list.
8. Misspellings
No-one is perfect, so make sure you also search for popular misspellings of all these search terms
Don't forget your Competitors
It is almost as important to track your main competitors in the same manner as you track yourself. If they experience a spot of bother with a product, a brand ambassador then this is an opportunity for you to position your brand as a suitable alternative. So you need to repeat all the above monitoring steps for the competitors that matter.
Use a Checklist
It is important to follow a set process when monitoring a brand so that the process is repeatable and the results can be stored, correlated and analysed in order to identify new trends and compare current results against historical outcomes.
The Next Steps
Once you have defined, documented and tested your Brand Monitoring process, it is possible to look for ways to automate parts of this process in order to save time and cost. In our next article in this series we will look at the options available.