Is your brand monitoring software outdated? As technology evolves, the software you use should, too. Whether this is your first introduction to brand monitoring, or you’ve been happily using the same tool for years, make sure you’re up to date with the latest developments and tools on offer to keep your business competitive.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the process of tracking your brand’s online presence and reputation. This can include everything from social media mentions to online reviews, blog posts, and news articles.
Most businesses use some form of brand monitoring, whether that’s manually checking social media channels or using a tool to do it for them. Depending on the scale of your business, brand monitoring can be a time-consuming task, which is why many businesses invest in brand monitoring software.
What are the Benefits of Brand Monitoring?
There are many benefits to brand monitoring, including:
- Improving customer satisfaction: By tracking what people are saying about your brand online, you can quickly address any negative sentiment and turn unhappy customers into brand advocates.
- Boosting brand awareness: Brand monitoring can help you track your brand’s reach and identify new opportunities for promotion.
- Managing online reputation: In the event of a crisis, brand monitoring can help you quickly assess the situation and take steps to protect your business’ reputation.
- Increasing sales: By tracking social media mentions and online reviews, you can identify brand advocates and target them with marketing messages.
Brand Monitoring Tech Trends of 2022
Now we’ve covered the essentials of brand monitoring, let’s look at the top tech trends changing the landscape of brand monitoring software:
Advanced natural language processing
One of the most exciting advancements in brand monitoring is the development of advanced natural language processing (NLP). Natural language processing is a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand human language.
This is a significant development for brand monitoring because it can help you automate a lot of the manual tasks involved in tracking your brand’s online presence. For example, NLP can be used to automatically identify and categorise social media mentions, track sentiment, and generate reports.
NLP is powered by machine learning, which means it’s constantly evolving and getting more accurate. Sentiment analysis technology has long struggled to interpret nuances, misspellings and slang, but the most cutting-edge NLP on offer now is much more accurate at understanding the context of online conversations.
The advancement of NLP underlies many of the other tech trends mentioned in this list.
Psychographics
Another exciting trend in brand monitoring is the use of psychographics. Psychographics is the study of personality traits, deep values, attitudes and interests.
It’s often used in marketing to segment audiences and target them with more personalised messaging, but it can also be used in brand monitoring.
Find out what kind of people are following your brand. Are you reaching your desired audience? How does your audience compare with your main competitors? You can find the answers to these questions using psychographic technology.
Brand monitoring tools are now starting to offer this kind of data, which can give you a much deeper understanding of your brand’s online presence. Symanto offers two different research-based psychographic models using the most highly regarded personality taxonomies: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), based on Carl Jung’s personality theory and The Big Five (OCEAN) model.
Combined with Symanto’s advanced sentiment analysis, these models can also give you insights into the proportion of customers that demonstrate an emotional connection to your brand and are most likely to remain loyal, as well as “at-risk” customers that are most likely to churn.
Alerts
Brand monitoring tools are used by PR teams to help them track media coverage, and act quickly before bad sentiment escalates into a PR disaster.
One popular feature in brand monitoring software is alerts. Alerts allow you to get real-time notifications whenever your brand, or a topic relating to your brand is mentioned online. This feature is particularly useful for small to medium sized businesses operating within a niche market, but larger businesses can be overwhelmed by the noise. In these instances, you need more specific alerts, for example, you can set up alerts to notify you of just negative brand mentions.
You can also choose to receive alerts for competitor brand mentions, or for industry-related news. Some brand monitoring tools will also allow you to track specific keywords relating to your brand.
Enhanced security
Any time you introduce new technology to your business, especially if it handles customer data, digital security is of utmost importance.
When it comes to brand monitoring, security is two-fold: you need to protect your brand’s online presence from malicious attacks, and you need to ensure that the data collected by brand monitoring tools is secure.
Some of the newer brand monitoring tools on the market offer enhanced security features, such as two-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption.
When it comes to data security, GDPR compliance is now a must for any brand monitoring tool that handles EU citizens’ data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in the EU in the area of data protection that was put into effect in 2018. It puts special limits on how you can use and store personally identifying data. Make sure any tech you introduce is GDPR compliant and is committed to using the most advanced digital security technology for secure data handling.
Get Started With Symanto
At Symanto, we are world leaders in natural language processing research and technology. We personalise solutions using a combination of our tools and technologies to ensure our products are genuinely useful and relevant to your aims.
For more information on using Symanto technologies for brand monitoring, get in touch, or book your free personalised demonstration.
