Ray L. Perry Consulting

7 Ways Brand Monitoring Software can Help Your Organization

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Though marketing campaigns can be more effective with beautiful graphics and clever copywriting, people are the real driving force behind any industry.

Changes in culture can strongly influence what a brand’s target market does. The conversations happening in the world can be used to gain valuable insights. All you have to do is listen!

Social media monitoring has become increasingly important in recent years for keeping tabs on trends, analyzing them, and making predictions. It helps businesses stay ahead of the curve on emerging trends and mitigate negative attention before it turns into a disaster.It allows businesses to identify potential risks early and take steps to avoid them.

What we’re talking about

There are numerous brand monitoring options. Brand monitoring is built into some social media analytics tools, or can be added as an option. Some popular dedicated brand monitoring options are Mention, Brand Watch, and Trackur.
There are also free brand monitoring tools out there, the most popular of which are Social Mention for doing research, and Google Alerts which will generate notifications when it discovers a mention of the keywords you define. We’ve tried the free tools, as well as a number of the paid tools and have found the paid tools to be easier to configure, better at assigning sentiment and collect more mentions from more sources.
Most brand monitoring software will find mentions in a number of places on the Internet ranging from social networks, to blogs, to news sites, to other sources. If you’re evaluating social monitoring software you should review the sources they monitor and choose a solution the monitors the places where your customers (or prospective customers) hang out. Most brand monitoring software has the following features:
Many brand tracking services offer other features such as integration with other analytics tools, or task assignment for responding to mentions, enhanced options for response, download of mentions, reporting, and even mobile apps. Almost all of them have pricing tiers based on the number of alerts (keyword groups) you wish to monitor, and or the number of mentions you receive each month. The more alerts you want to configure, and the more mentions you need to track, the higher the price. Pricing starts at about $30 per month (Mentions lowest tier for 3 alerts and 500 monthly mentions), and many more options become available at the $100 price range.
Now that you know what brand monitoring software is let’s how it can help your brand.

1. Monitor your brand (and get alerts)

It’s no surprise that this is the biggest benefit – as stated earlier, brand monitoring software helps you find what people are saying about your brand, its products, and services. But let’s drill into this for a minute. You may have social media publishing or analytics tools, such as Hootsuite, that give you information or show notifications when people interact with your posts or content. Brand monitoring software shows you what people are saying

outside of your social media pages and content. If someone writes and article about your brand on their blog, brand monitoring software will tell you about it.

2. Measure Sentiment

Measuring sentiment is an important part of social listening. Tracking the trends in overall sentiment is one way to measure the effectiveness in the following areas:

3. Perform social media audits

Every few months you should audit your social media activities to get the big picture of how well you’re managing, growing, and utilizing your social media presence for marketing, sales, and service. Brand monitoring tools aren’t essential to that, but they sure make it easier. In addition to seeing sentiment, you can break out mentions about your content types (such as images, videos, long form posts, and so forth), content topics, campaigns, products, services, and the brand overall. You can see what’s working, potentially find ways to duplicate successes in other areas, and adjust marketing and content strategies to produce more of the content your audience likes and interacts with.

5. Find influencers

I’ve written before about identifying and connecting with influencers you find using social media analytics software to monitor your own social media pages and content. But there’s a subtle, yet important, difference between the influencers you find when monitoring your own pages and content and those you find with brand monitoring tools. At least some of the influencers you find through brand monitoring may not be on your social media channels. They will be on their own other social media channels. Their blog, their website, their Facebook page, their LinkedIn group or other online location. By identifying them and engaging with them you’re essentially developing a new social channel that extends your reach to new communities.

6. Find product and service positioning

Social listening with brand monitoring software can provide insights about what people think of your brand and how your products and services compare to competitors. Let’s face it, people are going to have an opinions – you may, or may not, like those opinions, but knowing what those opinions are gives you a chance to respond. You can build on the value and positioning sentiment you hear or use content to address misconceptions head on, and try to change people’s minds. Either way, using brand monitoring software to discover what people think about your products and services gives you the opportunity to move those conversations in the direction you want.

7. Research products, services industries, verticals, keywords, and hashtags

If you’re getting ready to launch a campaign, or target a specific market segment with content, brand monitoring can help you create better marketing and content plans. It can help you validate keywords, discover industry terms, and popular topics. That can guide your content planning by telling you the types of content that work well for the market segment, as well as social networks, blogs, and websites that are popular. You can monitor competitors, or any organization with a strong presence in the sector, and see how they engage.
You can use all of this information to create a better marketing plan. One that takes advantage of social networks, websites, and media outlets popular to the target audience, using content that audience likes to consume, speaking a language they understand.

Tips for effective social media monitoring

Now that we have seen the importance of monitoring social media, here are some suggestions for making sure your efforts are as successful as possible.

Don’t cast to a wide net

However, this isn’t always the case Many people believe that by monitoring multiple social media channels and data sources, they will gain a better understanding of trends and conversations that are most relevant to their marketing goals. However, this isn’t always the case. This often happens when people try to focus on too many things at once and they end up with a low-quality, confusing view of their target market’s behavior.

The social media world is too big to explore all the platform and space opportunities for marketing. The number of social media users worldwide has reached 3.484 billion, rising nearly 10% year-on-year, as leading paid social agency KAU Media Group says.

In addition, recent events have shown that social monitoring tools may not be effective enough to justify the privacy concerns they raise. You need to make sure that you are using your resources as effectively as possible to achieve your business goals.

Know your Competitors

Although it is not advisable to copy your competitors’ strategy, paying attention to them and to the conversations about them taking place online can give you important insights into the conversations and trends that are typical for your industry.

Keep tabs on your competitors’ social media platforms and look for ways to improve on the things their customers love while avoiding the negative interactions.

When companies mess up in public, it can look like it would have been easy to avoid if you knew what would happen ahead of time. But you can’t afford to take chances like that. Keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to can help you stay ahead of the game on social media.

Spread the Word

Social media monitoring is something that your whole company should be doing, not just your marketing department. Social media monitoring can teach you a lot about your customers that can help improve their experience with your business. Make sure to share what you learn with the rest of your team.

So, if your competitors’ mobile app has a user-friendly UI, you might want to give this feedback to your company’s designers and developers to help with future updates.

Don’t hoard information gained from social media monitoring; share it with other departments that could benefit from the data.

Word of mouth marketing

Answering mentions and requests on social media helps to build trust with customers, encourages prospects to reach out to your brand, and increases engagement rates on social media platforms.

User-generated content can be found through social media monitoring. This is beneficial for online consumers. You will get a genuine testimonial with very little effort.

Hubspot believes that the majority of consumers make decisions based on the past opinions and reviews of other customers.

You can collect positive reviews and identify issues customers have with your product or service by monitoring social media.

Keep an eye on the social media marketing ROI

It can be difficult to get a complete overview of your social performance with so many social media channels and thousands of mentions every day.

If you want your social media strategy to be effective, it needs to be based on more than just guesses and vague data. A comprehensive dashboard is the only thing you need in order to keep track of changes on different platforms in real-time.

Marketing ETL systems can automatically gather paid and organic performance data from social platforms to help automate your marketing reporting.

Indispensable tool

Brand monitoring is a must. You can use free tools like Google Alerts and Social Mention, or invest in paid tools to save time, and get more features. Either way, you should be practicing social listening to with brand monitoring software to take advantage of these seven benefits. Active social media monitoring can be beneficial if you have the right tools and resources. It can be a challenge to find useful patterns in all the noise, but with a little experience it can be very rewarding.

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