Why Brand Monitoring is Important for Your Business
Why Brand Monitoring Is Important for Your Business
What do people think of your brand? Back in the day, the only way to answer this question was to guess (or spend a lot of money on focus groups). Now, we have something called brand monitoring to make our lives easier.
What Is Brand Monitoring?
Perhaps the best way to define this term is to say that it isn't social listening or social media monitoring. While the former listens to conversations about an industry and brand on social media, the latter listens exclusively to discussions about the brand itself. With broader brand monitoring, the aim is to learn about a brand. So rather than restricting yourself to social media, you're going to use all the tools available to see what people think (and are saying) about your brand.
Types of Brand Monitoring
Of course, social media is one of the most popular areas to focus brand efforts. The fact that you can type your name as a hashtag and find immediate results is particularly rewarding. However, monitoring only social media is a recipe for missing crucially important information about your brand. (Your executives and investors will notice!
Brand monitoring goes beyond social media. Examples include online news, Reddit and other forums, review websites such as TripAdvisor, print media, YouTube, podcasts, and more. Are people discussing your products in a particular subreddit? Has a newspaper written an article about your business? Can you see lots of reviews on TripAdvisor or Glassdoor?
The Essential Stages of Brand Monitoring
Reputation Review
It’s simple: brand monitoring allows you to learn what people generally think of your brand. Are comments overwhelmingly positive? Do they love certain products? Is there an area of the business that gets more attention than the others? Are conversations overwhelmingly negative?
You might wonder why one product is generating no sales only to find that the item is suffering an onslaught of negative sentiment on Reddit. Alternatively, an online article you missed may have said some negative things about the brand.
Reputation Management
After reviewing your reputation, your next job is to manage it. This means responding to positive comments and addressing negative comments. Responding to positivity can boost the brand's image, while responding to negativity demonstrates to customers that you care about their concerns. You can explain misunderstandings and show your desire to repair mistakes.
Research
Another reason to pay attention to brand monitoring is that it is easy research for the brand (basically a free, huge focus group). How are people reacting to posts? How are they responding to new products? By monitoring the brand across the digital and physical worlds, you'll gather insights. Soon enough, you'll identify opportunities to create content that resonates with your audience and develop products that your audience will love (and that surpass the competition).
Encourage User-Generated Content
In many cases, you can use positivity in your favor through user-generated content. People are tired of hearing brands waxing lyrical about their products and services, so why not get others to do it for you? You might collect lots of positive feedback and imagery and share it online (or even put it on the packaging of your products to encourage even more user-generated content).
After reading this, hopefully you understand why more brands are prioritizing in-depth brand monitoring strategies. You can manage crises, improve your reputation, identity opportunities, fix problems, understand customer and employee sentiment, create a two-way channel of communication, and learn more about what people like or dislike about your brand.
If you implement these insights properly, you can build a name for yourself, reduce wastage, and develop winning content and products!
Want to learn how we’d approach it for your brand? Reach out to shout@luminodigital.com!