If you are not monitoring the internet for mentions about your brand, business, or products, you might not be able to learn what your customers think or feel about your company. Even if you are, depending on the methods you are employing, you might only be scraping the surface of a large amount of useful data.
The purpose of effective brand monitoring is to gather data about what your customers think about your brand, product, industry, or your competition. These details can provide your business with opportunities for conversions, customer engagement, customer satisfaction, brand development, and promotion. But before you delve further into brand monitoring you must understand the essential steps to make it efficient.
How to Get the Data?
If you have any experience of brand reputation monitoring, you would know that to get the desired results you would need a list of keywords that must get included in your search parameters. These keywords usually include:
- The name of your brand.
- The names of your products or services.
- The name of your company.
- Any variations of the above.
- Hashtags related to them.
- Industry terms.
- List of competitors.
However, you might end up with a large amount of monitoring data due to the inclusion of some commonly used keywords. That is why it is essential to add filters to get rid of unwanted or unimportant data. Some of the sources might not be required, so you must block them. A few runs will help you in refining the list of keywords that you must include in your search.
Who Are Your Stakeholders?
If you thought that you only need to monitor inputs from your customers, you are mistaken. You also need to observe people who would be able to influence your reputation online other than your clients, such as your vendor, competitors, influencers, journalists, and many others.
Influencers and bloggers usually have a large audience, so their inputs are the most important after the mentions by your direct customers. Influencers who are advocates or critiques of your competitors should also be a part of the top of the list because they will keep you updated on what your competitors are up to and what the market thinks about them.
What Are Your Objectives?
Apart from generalized brand monitoring services, you can also utilize the tools for specific purposes, such as during an event or running a campaign. Brand social media monitoring during the launch of a product can help you understand the market’s reaction towards it, and help you gather feedback if you need to tune it further.
If your brand’s reputation is under attack, brand motoring can help you isolate further mentions on the internet to help you draw or adjust your strategy.
Brand monitoring tools for social media can get utilized for customer service since it allows you to address any displeasures or complaints about your products or services. It also comes handy to thank customers who are happy with your brand, build customer loyalty, and run referral programs.
You can also use the tools to identify and connect with influencers who have used your products and are advocating them. Building a rapport with them can help you to expand the reach of your brand.
What Brand Monitoring Tools Will You Use?
You will need to choose a system to carry out the process. Most businesses employ one of these three kinds of methods.
- A manual system where you or your team can scan the social media pages for mentions about your brand, and reply accordingly. You can also try to cover forums and blogs through search engines, but that is a very cumbersome process that might require a lot of time, effort, and money.
- Free tools can give you a shallow scan of the internet for mentions of your brand. It works for beginners and small businesses.
- Paid tools provide an in-depth analysis of brand mentions on the internet. They draw up reports based on the activities of your audience as well as your competitors. The returns of paid tools often outweigh the cost.
What Are the Steps to Monitor?
Once you have decided which process you want to follow, these are the steps that you need to follow to monitor your brand on the internet.
Step #1. Set up the Project
Once you’ve finalized your tool, you will need to set up the project to monitor your brand online. Irrespective of the type of service you use, you must have a team of personnel who would be carrying out the task.
If you are using paid services, the process will be much simpler, and all you would need to do is input your keywords and pick the preferred language. The only technical part is choosing the perfect keywords for your business, which we explained before.
Step #2. Analyze the Sentiment
After you’ve got a list of posts that talk about or mention your brand, you will need to analyze the sentiment of the mention. Your brand and its products and services can get presented in a positive, negative, or neutral manner.
You will also need to understand the intensity of the opinion, especially if it is negative. The strength of the sentiment will determine the influence of the post on your brand’s image. It will also regulate your reaction and response.
Step #3. React and Respond to the Mentions
Once you have the list of customers or other sources that have mentioned your brand on the internet, you will need to have a plan on how to deal with them. How will you address a complaint and face the criticisms? You must get prepared to answer every mention, especially the negative ones because people do not like it when a brand ignores their complaint.
Think of social mentions as a part of customer care and approach it that way. You must also remember that just like every customer care call, each mention of your brand is an opportunity to make a sale, gain the loyalty of a consumer, improve brand awareness or convert a customer from your competition.
Conclusion
Brand monitoring is a powerful tool that must be used wisely. Therefore it is necessary to plan the steps carefully so that you can get the desired results.