BRAND MONITORING: Secret to Growing your brand

Your brand is a network of associations that represent your company. It’s the story that resonates with your target audience and builds top-of-mind awareness. The most loyal com;munities online stem from a strong, unified brand.

Building your brand identity begins with a foundation. Your goals. Your target audience. Your role in the marketplace. How you’re actually perceived. These are the starting points to build a stronger, more unified brand identity.

Brand monitoring helps you build the blueprint.

5 benefits of monitoring your brand

• Build brand awareness and valuable relationships
• Strengthen your brand’s reputation
• Make customers happy by paying attention
• Understand your role in your customers’ lives
• Solve problems customers have

But first, what is your brand?

1?Start With a Vision

DEFINE YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION

Every company provides a product or service for some purpose. As a marketer, it’s your job to fine-tune that value offer to distinguish your brand from the rest of the crowd.?

You may have the lowest price or widest selection. Perhaps you offer the best customer service. Your value offer may change as time goes by, and the way your customers use your product may not be what you envisioned

WHAT TO DO:

• ?Keep tabs on mentions of your product.
• Talk to as many of your customers as possible to find your product’s unique value

2. RESEARCH YOUR COMPETITORS’ BRANDING

No company exists in a silo. To make sure your offer is unique, know what your competitors are doing and how they’re positioned in your market.

You may have a product targeted for B2B marketers in IT, while your competitor is targeting B2C marketers in IT. Knowing that will help you position your brand and be one step ahead.

?WHAT TO DO:

• Track what your competitors are doing. ?Keep tabs on what customers and influencers think about competitors
• Every company provides a product or service for some purpose. As a marketer, it’s your job to fine-tune that value offer to distinguish your brand from the rest of the crowd.?

You may have the lowest price or widest selection. Perhaps you offer the best customer service. Your value offer may change as time goes by, and the way your customers use your product may not be what you envisioned

2 Strengthening Brand Perception

After you’ve laid out your brand vision, you need to see if your audience agrees. Even more important than what customers say to you, is what customers say about you. It’s nearly impossible to keep tabs on everything customers say about you, especially online. That’s where monitoring comes in handy.

Listen to conversations about you:

• Only 9.16% of tweets mentioning companies start with their handle. Brands who don’t look beyond direct mentions miss out on over 90% of messages related to their companies.
• Mentions are even harder to track outside social media. Without monitoring, your brand will miss out on important conversations around your brand on blogs, forums, and news websites.

WHAT TO DO:

• Monitor your brand, product, or service - including variations

?Learn from the experts. At Hootsuite, Alyssa Kritsch, their social media campaign coordinator, monitors “hotsuite” and “hootsweet” to make sure all mentions directed to them are collected

See keywords associated with your brand:??

• Discover how your brand is perceived by finding out what people associate with it. Most monitoring will have word clouds that let you see words frequently used with your monitored keywords.
• Most of the time, we have pretty low self-awareness. Your perception of the company that you work 40 hours a week for might be very different from that of a customer.
• Knowing how people think of your brand will give you a reality check and help you position it better in your marketing campaigns.

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

- Jeff Bezos, CEO & founder of Amazon

Defend yourself

• Brian Swichkow, founder of Ghost Influence, was featured in an article about Reddit marketing.
• ?It was quickly picked up by the Reddit community, the majority of which did not appreciate Brian’s marketing tactics.

?The day after it was published, Brian received alerts about a heated discussion people started on Reddit about it and him

As soon as he saw the mentions, he joined the conversation and explained what he really does:

The negative comments took a turn into passionate discussions about good and bad advertising, and how they think Reddit should be used and respected. And Brian managed to find some common ground with the Redditors.

?Instead of just being discussed, Brian joined in. That earned him brownie points.

WHAT TO DO:

• Jump into conversations you find while monitoring if there’s an opportunity to change public opinion.

Know how your competitors are perceived

Competitive analysis.

It’s a simple, strategic tool to build a stronger, more unified brand identity. What can you do with inside information on how your target audience perceives your competitors?

Well, a lot.

?Here are some of the benefits:

• Discover their brand tone and messaging
• Find product weaknesses from customers’ feedback ??
• Develop unique ideas to stand out

3 Boosting Brand Engagement

Now that you’ve got brand perception down, you’re ready to boost brand engagement.

Help quickly?????

Don’t leave customers hanging - monitor mentions asking for help. Reacting swiftly helps eliminate customer frustration.

?what to do: create filters and searches to find and respond to support inquiries quickly.

?Find brand advocates??????

You can’t build an empire without some loyal fans. Brand advocates are your best magic elves for building your brand.

?Prioritize influential brand advocates, as their potential reach is much higher. Rank advocates by influence.

Engage in conversations????????????????

It takes more than great customer support to be a great brand. Listen to all the conversations surrounding your brand, join in, and let people know you’re a living, breathing person. Present your company as a brand that cares

4 Increasing Brand Reach

Even more than your brand’s perception and engagement, brand reach is an important factor of how big your brand can grow. Here are a few ways you can increase brand reach.

?Influencer outreach???????

?Influencers are brand advocates on steroids. Influencers have high reach - that can be used to amplify your messages. Reaching out and talking to them can lead to campaign collaborations that help grow your brand

PR is an essential part of branding. Basically, you want to know when you’re mentioned in the news Who’s mentioning your brand

How to find more people to talk about you

With a monitoring tool, you can find out the moment an article about you is published. Reach out, share the article, and build relationships with the media outlets to pitch in the future.

Paid marketing????????????????????????????

?Advertising is a great way to increase brand exposure. AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram - there are tons of options. Choose according to where your audience are.

With monitoring, you can find out:

• Platforms to promote your brand on
• Top keywords associated with your brand???
• Your target audience

5. Execution

Now we’ve laid out all the principles. “You make it sound so easy!” You say. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you have everything you need to make it happen. Here are a few things you need to kickstart your brand monitoring process.

?Before you start?????????

?If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Here are seven ways to monitor more effectively:

??01???DEFINE YOUR GOALS

?You’ll monitor differently based on your goals. Do you want to improve customer support? Find new leads? Identify the problem you’re trying to solve.

??02???SET CLEAR KPIS

?Data is useless if you don’t know what to look for. If you’re growing your Twitter presence, your KPI might be “followers gained by the end of Q2.” If it’s better community management, it’d be “number of mentions responded to/ total number of mentions.” Map out your KPIs to assign context to your data.

?03???CHOOSE THE RIGHT TOOL

?Tools do many things, but what features do you need? You should know after defining your goals and KPIs. Do you need to monitor social networks, or both social and websites? Can you measure the ROI of investing in this tool?

??04???GET THE WHOLE TEAM ON BOARD

Do you have the necessary manpower to handle the alerts? Do you have a process in place to communicate with the whole team? There should also be a person in charge to track KPIs and make sure goals are met.

??05???SET PROCESSES

?If you have a team, setting a clear plan is key to efficiency. Decide how you’ll handle each type of mention, and who’ll be responsible for them. Pro- duct related, customer support, or PR and marketing - all mentions must be quickly assigned and dealt with.

06???SET A TRIAL PERIOD

With any new project, it’ll take some time to get it right. Keywords, KPIs, resources, even the tool itself, should be evaluated. Start with a hypothe- sis, review, and A/B test after some time. Re-assess your plan, if necessary.

07???LEARN FROM THE DATA

With any new project, it’ll take some time to get it right. Keywords, KPIs, resources, even the tool itself, should be evaluated. Start with a hypothesis, review, and A/B test after some time. Re-assess your plan, if necessary.

Use a response formula????

When starting out, you may find the number of mentions overwhelming. You can’t respond to everyone. Who do you choose?

Prioritize influencers: Focus on people who have potential reach. Their engagement is going to make bigger ripples. You can identify them by looking at influencer tools.

Not all mentions require a response: Some messages won’t elicit a response - just read and learn from them.

Use the situations below as reference:

• ??Positive + true = respond & share
• ??Positive + wrong information = respond ???
• Negative + true = respond
• ??Negative + wrong information = respond ???
• Negative + troll/hater = listen
• ??Negative + joke = listen

Tools that help you monitor your brand?????????????????

You can’t manually search for and find every mention related to your brand. That’s why tools exist to help you monitor your brand, products, competitors, and keywords in the industry.

?Google Alerts

Google Alerts lets you monitor names, phrases, and keywords and covers websites that Goo- glebot can access, as it crawls them. You just need a Google account and a Gmail address to use it.

By default, you’ll get updates once a day. You can also set up the alerts to go to your inbox in real time.

?It has its limitations as a free tool - since you can only get alerts for information that the Goo- glebot can access, mentions on social networks, for example, are not captured.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool. You can track different social media mentions of your name, and manage your social profiles - scheduling updates, collecting analytics, etc.

?With Hootsuite, you can combine all your social marketing into one platform. It’s great for fin- ding the people you want to interact with on social media and forming relationships with them. Track those who respond and continue interacting with them to build a relationship.

Conclusion

Growing and managing a brand online is no walk in the park. Between growing your social media presence and finding influencers for your next campaign, you have to find time to handle PR crises and track what your competitor is doing.

Monitoring makes it all easier. By now you should have a good understanding on how to use it to achieve your brand goals. It’s your turn to try it out.