Brand monitoring and brand tracking tools build and protect the reputation of your company and services. The same tools are also used for competitor analysis. PR agencies, public relations professionals and brand tracking companies deploy sophisticated AI-driven tools to identify critical brand mentions on social media and in news coverage.
But does brand monitoring really work?
My experience as a veteran news analyst and PR professional working in Latin America is that many of our customers have doubts about whether brand monitoring tools deliver the strategic insights corporate communications and marketing managers really need.
Ask yourself, is your brand monitoring giving your executive team the information and guidance needed to maintain and improve your organization’s competitive positioning?
Five keys to better brand monitoring
Here are 5 things needed to make your brand tracking and brand monitoring effective and worth the money invested in it:
1) Identify the important. The best brand monitoring tells you which brand mentions are more important than others. Brand monitoring tools should help you influence your market. Rating mentions as positive or negative isn’t enough. Figuring out which brand tracking results merit your attention requires analysis and a deep understanding of market context and how your product strategy and positioning fit into current events.
2) Focus on key influencers. Brand monitoring should tell you which media outlets and social media platforms are the most influential in your market. This can be difficult if you’re operating in a foreign country or in a foreign language. Using brand monitoring provided by local experts on the ground is an essential tools for figuring out which mentions of your brand have the most impact on your local audience.
3) Name the context. Online reputation software can be great for tracking every time your brand is mentioned in the media, but it doesn’t give you the context. To know how to weight different brand mentions you need to have accurate analysis of the context. It guarantees you get actionable insights from your results. But you need to know which press mentions are the ones to pass on to your senior executive team based upon its key management and competitive concerns.
4) Don’t be fooled by data quantity. It doesn’t equal quality of analysis. A typical AI-driven online reputation software will deliver a tidal wave of numbers, graphs and information with more data than anyone could possibly absorb in a day. Excellent brand tracking, however, is driven by PR intelligence that focuses your team on the most important results. At Latin Media Monitor we provide PR intelligence driven by highly qualified news analyst who can identify the most important brand mentions produced by media monitoring.
5) Choose the right brand monitoring tools. There are hundreds of reputation management companies doing business today. Choosing the right tools for your needs is critical and analysis by humans familiar with your local markets is key—especially in foreign markets. You need human analysts with a deep understanding of your company’s competitive position to help you focus on the most important brand mentions and media monitoring results.
Latin Media Monitor headquartered in Mexico
At Latin Media Monitor, headquartered in Mexico, we work with local media monitoring and brand tracking companies to ensure our customers get the most knowledgeable service. Our understanding of the region means we can provide our clients with analysis of brand monitoring results based on the most local influences. The result is brand tracking driven by ground-based PR intelligence that produces actionable insights for competitive positioning.
Receive a free demo of our work by sending a WhatsApp to our CEO Mark A. Browne at +52 55 1341 3631.
