Digital technologies have infiltrated companies’ day-to-day processes on all levels and intertwine intrinsically with how PR and marketing campaigns are led.
You’re not accurately planning your next PR move without taking into account what’s being said about your brand online. Marketers and PR specialists take into account brand monitoring to reach that next level of accuracy and effectiveness needed for the current digital landscape.
What Is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the comprehensive surveillance of your brand’s standing online. It’s a steady, continuous process of tracking company-specific keywords relating to brand, service, products, and noteworthy staff members. On the basis of this tracking, brands create strategies to further control public discourse and create a positive brand image.
No PR strategy should get greenlit without relevant data analysis. Brand monitoring effectively serves as a social barometer and identifies the sentiments associated with your brand. Social media, forums, news sites, blogs, and review sites should all be incorporated into your monitoring efforts.
Why Is Brand Monitoring Important?
Because a lot has changed in the power dynamic between brands and consumers – you can thank the advent of social media for this drastic change. No longer are brands isolated from the public in their ivory towers, where communication was solely a one-way channel through traditional media mediums. Brands beamed their messages onto TV, radio and print media. Consumers consumed.
This hierarchy has since become a relic of the past as consumers have become much more active and informed. We’re in the era of ethical consumerism and customers are much more discerning as to where their products come from. The very least consumers want the brands they support to align with their personal values and they’re not afraid to call out brands that are behind the times in supporting social justice.
Brands are much more accountable today and that’s a significant obstacle in front of PR marketers.
How to Choose a Proper Brand Monitoring Tool?
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The market overflows with tools at different price points to accommodate small and mid-size brands, and there are a lot of different capabilities and features to explore as well. What we advise is to seek out tools with limited free trials such as Social Sprout and Hootsuite.
How to Use Brand Monitoring to Evaluate Your PR Efforts?
Brand monitoring breaks down the performance of PR campaigns and messaging blow by blow so that you see what works and what doesn’t work in your particular case. It takes time before you’ve collected sufficient data to use as a blueprint against future endeavors, but the results are worth the wait.
Look at the Right Set of Metrics
Data is powerful only in the hands of those who know what they’re looking for in the first place. As such, analyze different data sets for different purposes, otherwise, you run the risk of getting swallowed in a sea of numbers.
Are you trying to measure engagement? Then you should look at how many mentions, comments, shares, and likes your social media posts generate.
Are you trying to gauge brand awareness? Zoom out of your own social media channels and track the overall number of brand and product mentions online, including those that do not tag you.
Analyze Their Meaning to Your Public Relations and Overall Business Strategy
Strategies should be a living, breathing thing. Do not set your vision in stone and adopt a flexible mindset that you might change course at the drop of a hat if the numbers support such a change.
Brand monitoring keeps brands in touch with consumer interests, needs, and values. It’s worthwhile to keep an ear to the ground to track your performance, identify pockets of opportunity, and spot beneficial trends early.
How to Boost Your PR With Brand Monitoring?
Do what public relations has been created to do – talk to the public. Brand monitoring enables PR professionals to alter the conversation and amplify positive sentiments.
Connect With You Influencers and Partners
Brand monitoring sheds light on loyal customers who champion your brand and influencers that are highly respected by customers in your market. These are the people you should contact, support and partner with in the future. It’s the golden age of collaboration.
The beauty industry has known this for some time as we see in the countless partnerships between makeup brands and famous influencers on YouTube – relationships initially fostered through free samples and makeup tutorials.
YouTubers have new content to post and makeup brands receive massive PR that’s practically cost-free compared to the millions upon millions of views on YouTube. That’s press, attention, and authority no traditional media campaign can deliver.
Grow Your Network
You might have started this journey with one buyer persona in mind as your goal, but the truth is that there’s no one singular type of customer. Brand monitoring reveals another or even several more customer types, who also buy your products, but might otherwise be alienated by your campaigns or not effectively reached by your messaging.
The data you extract from monitoring helps you identify these new prospective customers, their online habits, and their needs. That’s a built-in audience ready to be serviced and you have the tools to do so without expensive, lengthy market research.
Discover New Channels
In addition to new target demographics, brand monitoring also widens the scope of your presence online. Perhaps you’ve discovered that your audience spends most of its time on Instagram while you only have a Facebook page. Yes, Facebook is still important, but you want to ensure the widest possible reach for your content.
Social media should be only one front of the attack. PR and
Businessman holding binoculars on cityscape background -DepositPhotos
