A Beginner's Guide To Mastering Brand Monitoring

You don’t have to be an AI scientist, a genius in Silicon Valley, or even a gene splicer to unleash innovation and create value. Sometimes, listening to your customers is enough – after all, they are the kings and queens!

Let’s look at one of the most successful business stories, demonstrating how listening to consumers helped a sinking company become the second-largest pizza chain in the world. In 2010, Patrick Doyle joined as CEO of Domino’s Pizza in troubled years. The brand was known for “the worst pizza ever”. Not long after he assumed leadership, the company began a bold advertising campaign that went viral, featuring focus group participants' opinions of the product, such as "worst pizza I ever had," "the sauce tastes like ketchup," and "the crust tastes like cardboard."

Doyle took the harsh criticism in stride, appeared in advertisements and pledged to "workdays, nights, and weekends" to improve. Doyle stuck to his word and worked tirelessly to up the taste, logo, packaging and even worked with crowd-sourced auto designers to create a Domino’s delivery car, (some called it a “cheese lover’s Batmobile”)!

The result? In Q1 2010, the company saw a 14.3% increase in revenue over the previous quarter. From December 2009 to December 2010, Domino’s stock shot up 130%! Their revenue has doubled since the rebrand from $1.4 billion in 2009 to $2.79 billion in 2017.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of listening! Brand Monitoring is quintessential today to track what audiences have to say about your brand and navigate your strategy accordingly. Today, at TechDogs, we uncover what Brand Monitoring is and how to leverage it. Read on!
 

What Is Brand Monitoring?

Brand Monitoring tracks and analyzes a brand’s online presence, reputation and customer sentiment across various digital channels. It’s like having covert spies hearing and reporting everything about you, so you can steer the course of your business strategy!

This involves monitoring social media platforms and reviewing websites, blogs, news articles and other online sources to gain insights into how the brand is perceived by its target audience.  Businesses can proactively manage their brand’s image, promptly address negative feedback, and capitalize on positive sentiment.


This real-time vigilance allows businesses to make data-driven decisions, cultivate customer loyalty and stay ahead of competitors in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Brand Monitoring is way more common today and plays an important tool in brand feedback. How important you ask?
 

How Important Is Brand Monitoring For Your Business?

Brand Monitoring is key in building brand recognition, creating brand awareness, assessing brand sentiment and ensuring brand loyalty. It allows brand analysis, market research and trend identification in your industry by automating the collection and analysis of data into coherent insights and actionable information.

That’s a lot for one tool, isn’t it?

Brands can measure the success of their campaigns, products and collaborations in real-time, a giant leap from the old-age era where marketing was a one-way street. By measuring the results of your hashtags, engagement and other marketing metrics, you can determine the success of your efforts and realign as needed

Not just your content, Brand Monitoring helps track your competitors to know what’s going on in the industry. There’s a lot you can deduce from these insights, helping you understand what consumers appreciate about rival brands and what’s not working for them.

You can take your customer experience to the next level by spotting and reacting to negative comments early on by analyzing the sentiment around certain products, campaigns or services. This helps to know your audience better by listening to what they say about your brand. After all, the customer is the lifeblood of any business!

So, here are the types of Brand Monitoring solutions you need to be aware of!
 

Different Types Of Brand Monitoring

If Domino’s had listened to their hungry consumer sooner, they wouldn’t need an elaborate re-do! So, to stay on the safer side, here are the different methods to track your brand’s presence you should use:
 

• Social Media Monitoring: Tracking across different social media platforms is vital as consumers openly use these channels to express their thoughts. You can check out Hootsuite and Mentionlytics for monitoring social media channels.

• Review Monitoring: Analyzing review sites such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, G2, Amazon, etc., can help you gather a lot of information about your company’s products and customer service. Such tools can help identify customers that are happy with your brand, for collaborative product demos in the future.

• News Monitoring: This involves tracking media outlets, both traditional and digital, to identify mentions of your brand, product or related topics. Try tools like Sprout Social, Brandwatch and Meltwater for customized news mentions!

• Influencer Marketing: Influencer partnerships can help elevate your brand’s mentions to a new audience. However, you still need to track your brand’s mentions to understand the effectiveness of the influencer marketing campaign.

• Competitor Monitoring: To stay up to date with industry developments and what makes your competitors stand out, use tools such as Semrush, SpyFu, and SE Ranking to capitalize on competitive intelligence.

You can also capitalize on these tools to monitor user-generated content (UGC) such as reviews and testimonials to enhance your brand reputation. Most brands, however, implement a combination of these types to create the best blend for their Brand Monitoring requirements. Here’s a handy checklist!
 

What Elements Should You Be Tracking?

If you haven’t started monitoring already, this cat and we share the same horror.


Whilst data is the pumping blood of business, avoid collecting unnecessary data that can slow down or complicate monitoring processes. Select only the elements relevant to your brand and the area you need to track. Here’s how to get started quickly!
 

• Brand And Product Mentions: You can track specific products to understand how consumers are reacting to them and the areas of improvement.

• Competitor Analysis: Understand how much and what consumers say about your brand as compared to your competitors to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses in the industry.

• Website Backlinks: This explains how the consumer reached your site through backlink verification, helping you optimize your SEO strategy and steer web traffic data and customer sales funnels.

• Brand Sentiment: Determine consumer reactions to understand their sentiments towards your brand after major events such as product launches or earnings reports.

By keeping in mind these four key metrics, you will be able to track your brand effortlessly through the digital multiverse, no matter where the consumer mentions your brand name. Nifty, right?
 

Monitoring Our Final Thoughts!

By monitoring your brand, you can protect your reputation and increase audiences’ trust by listening and responding to online feedback to handle customer issues promptly. Brand Monitoring works round the clock for you and offers various types of monitoring tools to ensure complete coverage. So, start monitoring conversations online and enhance your brand’s reputation as a social media-savvy, helpful and quick-responding business!