Brand monitoring is the process conducted by businesses of trailing all mentions about your brand, service, or product and monitoring their growth and standing in the industry. It deals with the tracking different channels to identify where your brand is mentioned. The channels monitored may include social media, search engine results, links from other websites etc.

Coming to the most common questions you may have on this, what should be monitored?

• Keywords- The initial thing to start your brand monitoring is to look up brand keywords. This may include the name itself, but also extends to other variations and iterations it may have; like acronyms and tag lines. Even misspelled names of your brand can be used as a keyword to be looked up.
• Influencers- The world of online and social media influencers are on the rise day by day. They can be very essential to individual brand strategies as they both symbolize as well as influence the habits of a representative member segment of the audience.
• Topics and industry trends- This can give insights around the phrases your prospective customers use to talk about key topics in your industry.

What is the brand monitoring tools to be used? There are a lot of brand monitoring tools available that work with social media research, trend tracking and image analysis. The most common of them are listed below:

• Google Alerts- You can use this platform to track anything from your company brand name to currencies, making it versatile. However, it is pretty basic though, provides only the mentions with no further analytics or long-term outlines.
• Ahrefs- Unlike google alerts, this gives a deeper insight into monitoring your brand as you can see all of the links coming to your site. This comes in very handy for tracking interested customers online with ease.
• LexisNexis- The LexisNexis’s News desk tool involves monitoring your brand mentions in print media. It helps you track mentions in a variety of publications and analyse the results therein.

Now is the most awaited question of all. Why does brand monitoring matter and how does it benefit your business?

• Standing and crisis management- This is one of the primary uses of Brand monitoring. It helps PR, marketing and communication, and public affairs teams to keep a foresighted eye on the associated conversations or news stories around your products, services, industries. Further, it aids the management to be prompt to react to any situation, either positive or negative that may affect your standing in the Industry.
• Sentiment Analysis- With the use of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP), platforms are able to analyse online conversations from social media and news sites to provide insights into the feelings of the selected audience segment or conversation around the topic. This helps you to identify how your brand is being perceived and spoken of by people of interest and further analyse any negative sentiment if any, surrounding your brand.
• Communication and feedback- Responding on a public platform to the reviews or comments on your product/ service shows your audience that you are actively listening to them. Being available for their queries and addressing their concerns will help you gain further understanding on the preferences of customers and thus helping you modify and market your outcomes accordingly.

It can be emphasized that in today’s world of competition surrounding anything and everything, brand monitoring will help you keep ahead of your competitors. Additionally, it can help you identify how and what the users expect about your brand and how they actually feel about the same.