A quick guide to brand tracking

Your brand is one of the most valuable, intangible assets you have. Tracking your brand online will provide you with a set of data you can use to improve your brand awareness, build a robust online presence, or, ultimately, increase your business bottom line.

In the digital world, almost all the information about your brand can be found online. Tracking your brand’s online presence will give you enough data sources to make well-informed, strategic decisions.

If you want to sustainably grow your brand and increase your market share, continuous brand tracking is a must. Brand building campaigns usually take some time before you can see the results. But, over time, you can be sure that brand perception will change.

Take a look at our comprehensive guide to brand tracking!

In this brand tracking study, you’ll learn what brand tracking is, why it is important, and how the data collection process should look like.

Here’s what’s ahead of us today:

• What is brand tracking?
• Brand tracking attributes
• How to track your brand?
• Brand tracking metrics
• The benefits of brand tracking
• The disadvantages of brand tracking
• Is brand tracking worth the effort?

What is brand tracking?

Brand tracking is the process of collecting, analysing, and reacting to all publicly available online mentions concerning your brand.

Brand tracking is a form of brand investment as it helps you increase your brand recall, improves your brand perception, helps you get in touch with consumers, and track your brand health over time. The business impact of brand tracking is an increase in brand equity.

Brand tracking will help you assess your brand’s health in a given moment. The analysis will indicate what aspects of your brand’s online presence you should improve right now and see results almost immediately. The process should indicate brand strengths and weaknesses. SWOT analysis will show you the key metrics for determining your product-market fit.

But collecting data about your brand can be beneficial for the future development. The insights from brand tracking studies can indicate the changes needed in your strategy and will allow you to build a strong brand. Measuring your brand performance is one of the key elements of sustainable business growth.

Remember that your brand strategy is not a document set in stone. You should amend it anytime you analyse a set of data and come across important actionable insights.

To get to the actionable insights, you need to track your brand over a long period. Only that way can you identify the important changes in your target audiences and distinguish them from seasonal fluctuations. Your brand success depends on the ongoing research you conduct.

Brand tracking attributes

We will discuss four aspects of brand tracking in greater detail:

• Awareness and brand recall
• Associations
• Sentiment
• Consideration

Analysing every brand tracker, and you will get a thorough analysis of your brand health.

Awareness

Let’s start with brand awareness.

Awareness is the measure of brand recognition among your target audience. Brand awareness answers the question — how familiar is your audience with your brand?

There are several ways to measure brand awareness, I recommend using a media monitoring tool.

There are several advantages to implementing a dedicated tool into your brand tracking and market research.

First of all, a media monitoring tool will collect all available results containing your brand name in real-time. You will not risk losing any important brand mentions.

That means the lack of data won’t skew the analysis.

Secondly, brand monitoring tools have strong analytical components. You will not have to sit and manually search for the most important insights. The tool will do brand tracking research for you.

I wholeheartedly recommend Brand24 as your media monitoring tool of choice.

There are several reasons why Brand24 is a good choice.

1. You will gather mentions from various online sources including major social media platforms, for example, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, or Tiktok.
2. The AI-based algorithms will analyse the mentions and extract the most important metrics, such as estimated social media reach, influencer score, the share of voice.
3. The tool will categorise the mentions. You will be able to see only the most essential mentions of your brand. Filtering the relevant content from the Internet noise will save you a ton of time.

Track your brand! Start your 14-day free trial (no credit card required).

Associations

Associations are the concepts your clients have in mind while thinking about your brand. This aspect of brand tracking takes the whole brand experience into account.

Take a look at the context of the discussion in the Analysis tab. You will find all terms used while searching for your predefined keyword.

Confront the results with your brand strategy. Is the context of the discussion in line with your brand positioning? What is the brand warmth?

If the associations are not in line with what you want to communicate, it is time for some changes in external communication.

Sentiment

Analysing the sentiment around your brand is one of the most important aspects of your brand health.

Sentiment analysis around your brand will indicate whether your reputation is positive or negative.

Potential customers will opt for a brand that has a prevailing positive sentiment. And existing client base will refer their friends and family to a brand they trust.

Analyse the sentiment around your brand! Start your free trial here.

Which brings us to our last point.

Consideration

Brand consideration can also be called brand loyalty. You can survey your existing customers and ask them for feedback.

If they prefer your brand over your competitors and are willing to repeat the purchase, the brand consideration index should be high.

This metric is vital since it’s much cheaper to up-sell your product to existing customers than to target a brand new audience.

How to track your brand?

The most optimal way to track your brand online is to use a media monitoring tool. Of course, you can do it manually, but it is much more effective to use a dedicated tool.

Media monitoring is not an expensive process. Brand24 starts at $49 per month, and the limits of the plan will suit a small or medium business perfectly.

Let me show you the use cases of a brand monitoring tool.

What is important to mention, is that most media monitoring tools don’t collect historical data. That’s why it’s essential to monitor your brand over an extended period.

The first step in brand tracking program is setting up a project. Since you want to focus on your brand, track the keywords related to your company, for example:

• the name of your company
• the name of your product or service
• your branded hashtag
• your campaign hashtag
• the name of CEO or other well-known employees

This comprehensive approach will give you a good understanding of what consumers say about your brand.

Start brand tracking! Set up your first project here!

For robust analytics, take a look at the Analysis tab. You will find some key analytics metrics, such as:

• the most popular mentions
• mentions from the most popular public profiles
• the number of social media mentions
• the total number of social media likes, comments, and shares
• estimated social media reach
• the number of positive and negative mentions
• top public profiles talking about your company
• the context of the discussion
• the share of voice
• list of trending hashtags

You should choose the metrics that will bring you the most insights into your brand health, depending on your current situation.

For example, if you focus at the moment on the influencer marketing campaign you should take into account:

• the total number of mentions
• the share of voice
• top public profiles talking about your business niche
• the sentiment of the mentions

A thorough analysis of these metrics will guide you through the whole process, starting with analysing the current situation and choosing the right person to work with, and ending with assessing the results of the campaign.

Start brand tracking! Set up your first project here!

Brand tracking metrics

Brand tracking studies requires you to track different key metrics that will determine your success. Of course, the metrics will depend on your ultimate goal — if you want to monitor employee experiences you will set a different brand trackers than for market research.

Which metrics should you track during your brand tracking studies? Let’s take a look at the brand trackers!

The volume of mentions

The volume of mentions will indicate how many conversations are there online about your brands. The more people talk about your brand, the more popular it is.

You should track the volume of mentions closely is the aim of your campaigns is brand growth.

Sentiment

Sentiment gives you the context you need to correctly assess the data you collected. Sentiment analysis will answer the question — how do people feel about your brand?

If you want to assess your brand health, you need to track brand sentiment closely.

Start brand tracking! Set up your first project here!

Sentiment will indicate the areas your product or service needs improvement. This metric will tell whether your customers experiences are positive, negative, or neutral. You will be able to pinpoint any issues your clients have, answers their questions, and gain breakthrough insights.

Reach

This metric will tell you how far your messages have travelled across different social media platforms. This brand tracker is especially useful for marketers and PR professionals.

You can measure reach on different social platforms and other web sources. Reach can indicate whether your marketing efforts are bringing the desired results.

Brands should know where their target audience is present. This brand tracker will show you where you should run your marketing campaigns and how successful they are.

Start brand tracking! Set up your first project here!

The benefits of brand tracking

Now that you know what to measure, you probably wonder why to go through all the trouble.

The answer is simple — brand tracking will help you assess your brand’s health.

Tracking all the metrics listed above is the backbone of your strategy. Brand tracking tackles the root problem your company can experience. The process focuses hugely on your consumers’ needs and expectations.

If you want to build products or services that stand out in the crowd, help your customers succeed, and increase brand loyalty, you need to track your brand.

With brand tracking you can assess the results of brand campaigns. You can identify the issues your non-customers have and turn them into your consumers.

Your audience needs will change. The sooner you see the trends, the better product you will be able to offer. That’s how you beat your competitors, grow your brand, and become an industry leader.

The disadvantages of brand tracking

There are, however, some drawbacks when it comes to tracking your brand.

First of all, take a closer look at the quality of your data. There are tons of online articles, photos, social media posts, mentions, and so on. Some of them are not relevant and will not help you protect your brand reputation or build brand awareness.

Secondly, manual brand tracking is a time-consuming process. Considering the amount of online content produced every day, it will take you hours to search through all the online sources and analyse the relevant ones.

Is brand tracking worth the effort?

Many industry experts will answer this question shortly — yes, it is! Tracking the data about your company, products, or services will answer many different questions and help you position your brand as an industry expert.

Real-time brand tracking can have many different use cases across various departments of your organisation. The process will help you develop the right branding strategy, increase customer loyalty and customer lifetime value, implement dedicated customer service solutions, track marketing activities, or even choose the business software that suits marketers needs.

Tracking brand gives you the level of expertise you need to grow. Brands that implement this strategy can offer services that fulfil their consumers needs.

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