Brand Mention Tracking: Why It Matters and How to Master It
Have you ever been at a party or a family gathering when suddenly you hear your name mentioned from across the room? Even if it’s not directed at you, doesn’t a part of your brain just automatically perk up and start listening more intently?.So what exactly is brand mention tracking? Why should you care about it? And how can you get started? Let’s dive in!
That’s kind of what brand mention tracking is like for businesses and brands on the internet. Amongst the endless feeds, posts, comments and digital conversations happening online, brand mention tracking allows you to tune your ear to pick up anytime your company’s name gets dropped.
What is Brand Mention Tracking?
At its core, brand mention tracking is exactly what it sounds like – monitoring and keeping tabs on every single time your brand name, product name, company name, or any other keywords related to your business get mentioned across the internet.
This could be a customer leaving a review on a shopping site, an influencer name-dropping you in a YouTube video, or someone commenting about a recent news article involving your brand. Basically any instance of your name being spoken in the vast online arena.
But brand mention tracking goes way beyond just vanity metrics and seeing how many times your brand gets namedropped. It’s about gathering valuable insights, both good and bad, about how people perceive your company or product.
Why is Brand Mention Monitoring Important?
If someone is talking about your brand somewhere on the internet, don’t you want to know about it? Here are a few key reasons why brand mention tracking matters:
1. Measure Brand Awareness and Sentiment
Are conversations around your brand overwhelmingly positive and growing? Or is there a lot of negative criticism you need to address? Brand mentions give you a direct pulse on your overall brand awareness and reputation.
2. Identify Issues and Prevent Crises
If there’s a major flaw, glitch, or problem brewing related to one of your products, you’ll likely start seeing rumblings about it through online mentions first. Catching these early can prevent them from spiraling into a much bigger issue.
3. Find Sales Opportunities and Leads
Someone might be posting on social media about looking for recommendations for a product or service just like yours. If you’re tracking mentions, you can jump into those conversations and get your brand in front of keen prospects.
4. Connect With Influencers and Advocates
Online influencers can make or break brands with their content and endorsements. Brand monitoring lets you identify the influencers already talking about you positively so you can pursue partnerships with them. You can also find your true advocates and brand loyalists who go out of their way to praise you online.
5. Stay One Step Ahead of Competitors
You may not be able to track everything your competitors are doing in real life. But by monitoring online brand mentions and chatter around your whole industry, you can stay firmly aware of how you measure up in the public eye.
How Does Brand Mention Tracking Work?
Trying to manually comb through every single social media site, news outlet, blog, and forum to find mentions of your brand would be virtually impossible. That’s where brand monitoring tools come to the rescue!
These monitoring tools work by letting you input keywords, phrases, hashtags, URLs – basically any terms related to your brand that you want to track online. Their web crawling technology and search bots then scour the vast online world 24/7 to find any new mentions or conversations that include those keywords.
When a match gets found, it automatically flows into your monitoring dashboard or gets compiled in a weekly email digest. You can then filter, sort, and dive into all of those mentions.
Pretty cool, right? Instead of being blind to online conversations, you have a centralized stream of every single time your brand gets talked about on the internet.
From there, many tools also include analytics capabilities to measure things like:
– Overall sentiment analysis around mentions (positive, negative, neutral)
– Which specific topics, products or keywords are mentioned most
– Where mentions are originating from (social, news, blogs, etc.)
– Geographic breakdown of mentions by country or city
– Share of voice and trend analysis compared to competitors
You can even get alerts anytime a specific high-profile influencer or media outlet mentions your brand name.
Setting Up Brand Mention Tracking
Clearly, there’s a ton of value in monitoring your online brand mentions and conversations. But how can you get started? Here are some tips:
1. Set Up Monitoring for Branded Keyword Phrases
At the most basic level, you’ll want to monitor for any verbatim mentions of your company name, product names, branded hashtags, and so on. But don’t stop there…
2. Add Branded Campaigns and Marketing Messaging
If you have any major marketing campaigns, branded taglines, or common lingo in your ads, be sure to track mentions of those too. For example, if you run a lot of ads that say “The Best Darn Hat Company”, you’ll want to add that phrase.
3. Cover Abbreviations and Common Misspellings
People don’t always spell or abbreviate your brand name correctly, so try to cover common misspellings and initials. If your company name is “Tiny Home Builders” you may get mentioned as “THB”, so track both!
4. Monitor Competitors and Industry Keywords
It’s not just about tracking your own brand – you’ll also want to monitor mentions of your competitors too. And track general keywords related to your products or industry as a whole to gauge awareness.
5. Assign Owners and Response Protocols
Divide up your monitoring responsibilities by product line, marketing channel, geography or other criteria and assign owners. Establish an escalation workflow so everyone knows when and how to respond to brand mentions.
6. Integrate With Other Marketing Tools
Top brand monitoring tools integrate with other marketing and customer service platforms so you can seamlessly sync up mentions and transfer conversations if needed.
Best Practices for Monitoring Success
Now that you have the basics down, here are some tips and best practices to truly master brand mention monitoring:
– Check in Frequently: Set reminders to review your monitoring feeds frequently. You’ll want to stay on top of conversations happening in real-time.
– Establish Alert Thresholds: You can set many tools to only notify you when spikes in mentions occur beyond your normal volume. This prevents you from getting overwhelmed with notifications.
– Measure What Matters: Don’t just report on vanity metrics – identify which brand monitoring KPIs actually reveal meaningful business impact like increased sales or brand affinity.
– Add Contextual Insights: Tag and categorize each mention with added context about the source, intent behind the post, and any required follow-up actions.
– Join the Conversation: Don’t just observe – engage! Reply to people’s questions, thank advocates, and steer relevant conversations in a positive direction.
– Analyze and Optimize: Review trends and patterns in your monitoring data and use those insights to constantly optimize your marketing and brand positioning strategies.
Start Tuning Your Brand’s Radar Today
There’s an old saying that “perception is reality.” And in our hyper-connected digital age, the online perception of your brand really can become its make-or-break reality.
Don’t let that path be determined by conjecture or assumptions! By consistently monitoring and responding to your online brand mentions, you can put yourself squarely in the driver’s seat of shaping your brand’s digital narrative – conversation by conversation.