The Ultimate Guide To Brand Monitoring
We currently live in a hyper-connected world where consumers wield the power to shape the narrative surrounding brands. From social media conversations to online reviews, every interaction leaves a digital footprint that can either build or undermine your brand’s reputation.
As such, monitoring how consumers perceive your brand has become more critical than ever before. Enter brand monitoring.
So, what is brand monitoring?
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll dive deep into the concept of brand monitoring, exploring its importance and the brand elements to monitor regularly. Additionally, we’ll explore how media monitoring can unveil valuable link-building opportunities to boost your SEO.
But let’s start with the basics.
What Is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is a strategic approach to tracking and analyzing mentions, sentiments, and conversations surrounding your brand across various online channels.
However, brand monitoring is not to be confused with social monitoring. While social monitoring focuses on social media coverage alone, online brand monitoring encompasses every channel where people talk about your brand. These channels include social media platforms, news sites, blogs, online forums, and even review sites.
What Is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is essential for various reasons, including:
Crisis Prevention and Management
By continuously monitoring online conversations and mentions, you catch potential crises, such as negative reviews, customer complaints, or viral social media posts, before they escalate.
This early detection enables you to respond promptly, address the issue, and ensure a positive brand reputation.
Competitive Analysis
Brand monitoring provides the perfect opportunity to research and understand your competitors’ online activities, sentiments, and marketing campaign strategies. This gives you valuable insights into market trends, consumer preferences, and areas where your brand can improve or differentiate itself.
Reputation Management
Successful brand monitoring allows you to proactively manage your online reputation since you’re constantly informed about what people are saying about your brand, products, and services. You identify and address any negative feedback or misconceptions early on, which mitigates reputational damage and maintains a positive brand image.
Customer Insights
Analyzing online conversations, reviews, and social media interactions helps you understand your target audience’s needs, pain points, and preferences. This data can inform essential components like your B2B strategies, product development processes, and even customer engagement initiatives.
5 Essential Brand Elements to Monitor Regularly
To get the most from brand monitoring, there are essential brand elements you should pay close attention to. They include:
1. Brand Mentions, Products, and Services
Brand mentions, products, and services are the most obvious elements to monitor. You basically identify any instance where your brand name, products, or services are referenced or discussed.
Monitoring brand mentions actively gives you a comprehensive understanding of your brand perception in the market. Positive mentions indicate satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy among customers, while negative mentions highlight areas for improvement. Neutral mentions mainly provide insight into brand awareness and visibility.
Additionally, analyzing direct mentions will help you identify trends, patterns, and common themes in customer feedback and customer sentiment. You can track recurring compliments or negative sentiments about specific products or services to guide you on what to improve or fix to enhance the overall customer experience.
For example, just from the comments in the post below, DoorDash can tell something is off with their app.
Check for all variations, abbreviations, nicknames, and even misspellings of your brand and product name to accurately assess your mentions, products, and services.
2. Industry-Specific Terms and Keywords
Monitoring industry-specific terms and keywords relevant to your niche keeps you informed about industry trends, topics of interest, and emerging conversations.
Whether it’s new technologies, regulatory changes, or consumer preferences, staying informed about industry-specific topics helps you easily adapt your marketing strategies and offerings. This proactive approach ensures that your brand remains relevant and responsive to evolving market dynamics.
Moreover, tracking industry-specific terms and keywords enables you to identify content opportunities. For instance, you can create blog content around trending hashtags and keywords in your niche.
Thanks to technology advancements like generative AI, you don’t have to waste too much time creating valuable content. The same tools have also made it extremely easy to do content marketing at scale.
For instance, you can use an online article summarizer to summarize your blog content’s key highlights and use it for your social media posts and email campaigns.
3. Inbound Links to Your Website
Inbound links are hyperlinks from external websites that direct traffic to your website. These links serve as votes of confidence and authority, indicating to search engines that your website is credible, relevant, and trustworthy.
These links can help boost your backlink profile, boosting your website’s performance on search engines. Therefore, monitoring them regularly helps you gauge the effectiveness of your link-building efforts and SEO strategy and make any adjustments for better results.
You can analyze your backlink profile using a tool like Ahrefs backlink checker.
Additionally, tracking inbound links provides valuable insights into referral traffic patterns and user behavior. By analyzing the sources of inbound traffic and the pages that receive the most referral traffic, you can identify high-performing content, optimize conversion paths, and enhance the overall user experience.
Besides that, monitoring inbound links can help you identify and address any negative SEO tactics or spammy backlinks that could harm your website’s reputation. This proactive approach to link management ensures that your website maintains a clean backlink profile that boosts its visibility.
4. Industry Insiders and Lingo
Industry insiders are influential people or organizations with deep knowledge and expertise in your industry. They may include industry experts, thought leaders, influencers, key stakeholders, and professional associations. Industry lingo includes a set of jargon, acronyms, and technical terms that are commonly used by professionals in a certain field.
Actively monitoring industry insiders and engaging with them allows you to tap into their expertise, knowledge, and networks. This then helps you stay ahead of the curve, especially in terms of innovation and growth opportunities. You can connect with them by attending industry conferences, participating in online forums, or following industry blogs and publications.
Moreover, monitoring industry lingo helps you effectively communicate with both the industry insiders and your target audience. Consequently, you can easily understand and contribute meaningfully to industry discussions.
5. Competitors’ Activities
Regularly monitoring your competitors’ activities allows you to benchmark your performance against theirs and identify areas for improvement or differentiation.
By analyzing their marketing campaigns, product launches, and customer interactions, you can gain insights into their tactics, messaging, and positioning strategies. This enables you to adapt your own strategies accordingly, identify gaps in the market, and capitalize on opportunities to differentiate your brand and offerings.
In addition, tracking your competitors’ customer reviews and valuable feedback provides valuable insights into customer perceptions, preferences, and pain points. By analyzing these insights, you can identify common customer issues or concerns with their product that yours can resolve to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Uncovering Link-Building Opportunities Through Media Monitoring
Media monitoring is the process of tracking mentions, discussions, and coverage of a brand across various print, online, and broadcast media. As such, media monitoring provides great link-building opportunities on which you can capitalize.
Here are three key ones:
1. Finding Unlinked Mentions
Unlinked mentions show instances where your brand, products, or content are mentioned across various online platforms but not accompanied by a link to your website. They are, therefore, a missed opportunity to boost your link profile.
You can use a media monitoring tool like Brand24 to identify unlinked brand mentions.
Once you’ve identified these unlinked mentions, reach out to the content creators or publishers and request that they add a backlink to your website. When reaching out, emphasize the value your website or content can provide to their audience. You can even highlight relevant resources, articles, or information that would enhance their content and provide additional value to their readers.
If you don’t receive a response to your initial outreach, follow up with a polite reminder or additional information. Your persistence might just earn you an extra backlink.
2. Monitoring Competitors
Monitoring your competitors’ existing link profiles can also help you identify potential partners and opportunities to acquire backlinks. Begin by identifying your main competitors within your industry or niche.
Then use backlink analysis tools to track your competitors’ backlink profiles and identify sources that have linked to their websites. Ensure you focus your efforts on high-value sources when seeking link-building opportunities. You can then pitch relevant content or collaboration opportunities that offer value to their audience.
You can also identify instances where your competitors are mentioned but not linked to or the links are broken–which you can use a tool like Ahrefs broken link checker to find.
These present an even better link-building opportunity since you can offer your brand as an alternative.
3. Building Relationships With Influencers and Publishers
Building relationships with influencers, bloggers, journalists, and publishers within your industry can also lead to link-building opportunities.
Engage with these individuals on social media channels, comment on their articles, and share their content to establish rapport and credibility. Once you’ve built a relationship, pitch them relevant content ideas or collaborations that align with their audience and interests.
Another great way to build quality relationships and networks is through events. You can attend industry workshops, conferences, and seminars. These present an exceptional opportunity to network with other industry experts and beyond.
While at these events, use a digital business card to share your contact information. Use a platform like Uniqode to make your digital business cards. The cool part about using these digital cards is that you can track the people opening and engaging with your card. That means that beyond sharing your contacts with potential partners, you might also identify prospects through real-time analytics, like how many times someone opens your card.
To Wrap This Up
What is brand monitoring really? Brand monitoring is not just about keeping tabs on your online presence—it’s about leveraging valuable insights to drive meaningful action and growth for your business.
By embracing brand monitoring, you can proactively manage your reputation, stay ahead of industry trends, and capitalize on opportunities to engage with your audience and stakeholders.
As we’ve discussed above, key elements to closely monitor include brand mentions, industry-specific terms and keywords, inbound links, competitors’ activities, and industry insiders and lingo.
Go ahead and make brand monitoring an integral part of your business strategy, and watch it propel your brand to new heights. Don’t forget to leverage media monitoring to build your backlink profile!
