Are you looking for the best brand monitoring tools available in the market for you to use for monitoring your brand? Then you are on the right page as we would be discussing the top 10 brand monitoring tools in the article below.
The Internet has made it easier for customers and your competitors to air their views about your business and brand. This is a good thing and also a bad thing depending on how you respond to mentions. It is a good thing because you can tell what the public perception of your brand is and you can quickly respond to it.
However, without monitoring what other Internet users feel about your brand — such makes mentions of your brand a bad thing as the wrong message can be widely distributed without you knowing making it a bad idea. This means that you cannot afford not to monitor your brand on the Internet.
When it comes to brand monitoring, the act is done automatedly as it is impractical for you to manually monitor what is being said about your brand on the Internet because of the billions of pages on the Internet. In this article, we would be discussing some of the top 10 brand monitoring tools that have been introduced into the market that you can use to monitor your brand on the Internet.
Before describing these tools, we would be taking a look at what brand monitoring is and its importance.
What is Brand Monitoring?
Brand monitoring in the case of the Internet is the process of tracking different channels and websites to discover what is being said or perceived about your brand. It involved tracking the web for mentions of your brand to identify who is saying what about your brand. With brand monitoring, you are able to collect valuable feedback not just from your audience but those you never knew were your audience.
It helps you to keep an eye on your brand and respond to issues before they degenerate into crises that would hurt your brand. It is important you know that there is a difference between brand monitoring and social monitoring.
In the case of social monitoring, the only channels being monitored is social media networks which even though effective, can be limiting, making you miss out on information from other sites. For brand monitoring, aside from social media channels, you also monitor other channels which include online discussion forums, news websites, review sites, and even print media. The more channels you cover, the more effective the exercise becomes.
Usually, businesses do not just monitor their brand name, they also monitor the variations of their brand names and products which people identify with their brand. They also track mentions of their CEOs and public figures as well as industry buzzwords and competitors.
Why Brand Monitoring is Important
A survey was carried out with 250 business executives as respondents and 72 percent of them are actively engaged in brand monitoring. This tells you that it is an important process. But why is it so important for 72 percent of business executives to engage in it? Well, the single most important reason why businesses engage in brand monitoring is a sentimental analysis which helps them to identify public perception about their brand and products/services.
However, this is not only the reason. Another important reason businesses engage in it is because of reputation and crisis management by identifying issues from mentions and taking those into account for improvement.
Top 10 Brand Monitoring Tools in the Market
There are many brand monitoring tools in the market that claim to help you keep a tab on mentions of your business and how those change over time. In reality, some of them do not provide you the service the way they are advertised.
We have carried out research and know the top brand monitoring tools in the market. We would be discussing some of the top 10 of these tools below.
1. BrandMentions
BrandMentions is one of the popular brand monitoring tools you can use to keep a tab on your brand across the Internet. BrandMentions dig every corner of the Internet to find relevant mentions of your brand. The service has support for web and social listening, which aid in sentimental analysis. It is also useful as a competitor spying tool.
BrandMentions has support for real-time notification which means that you get notified as soon as new mentions are discovered. The tool is quite popular even among big companies. The likes of etoro, iProspect, and techhub make use of it to monitor their brand mentions. The tool is a paid tool but new users are offered a free trial.
2. Brand24
Brand24 is quite popular among businesses of different sizes. Taking a look at the customer list of this service, you will see the likes of Intel, Stanford University, and Uber are some of the big brands making use of it. Brand24 is a brand tracking tool that makes it easy to keep a tab on your brand and that of your competitors easily. With this, you can get instant access to your brand mentions on blogs, news sites, forums, podcasts, and reviews, among others.
One feature you will come to like is its support for an automated sentimental analysis detection which segments mention into the positive, negative, and neutral classes. Brand24 when used correctly can improve customer satisfaction and help you in meaning your marketing efforts.
3. Google Alerts
The good old and ever-improving Google is worthy of mention in this list. Google owns a tool known as Google Alerts which you can use as a brand monitoring tool. All it does is provide you notification of your mentions as they are discovered. You will agree with me that Google owns one of the world’s databases of web pages with new ones being crawled daily. For this reason, it is one of the best tools you can use to monitor mentions of your brand.
Interestingly, Google Alert does not come with a fee — it is completely free to use. Another thing you will come to like about Google Alerts is it is very simple to use. However, it does come with its own downsides which include not being able to monitor mentions on social media. It also does not come with the advance features specialized brand monitors come with.
Sproutsocial is an all-in-one social media management platform that would help you to unlock the full potential of social in your business. It has a good number of tools out of which the Listening tool is the product of interest in this article. The Sproutsocial Listening tool will help you uncover critical insights via social listening. This tool will not only monitor social media for mentions, but it also monitors other channels such as blogs and online discussion forums.
This tool will help you with valuable intelligence that would get you to evolve with your audience and by doing this, stay ahead of your competitors. Sproutsocial does not only listen to mention, it also analyses the mentions and also provides you reports.
5. Mention
Mention is another brand monitoring tool you can use for monitoring your brand online. It is specialized in social media monitoring where it helps you monitor your brand mention on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Aside from social media, there are over a billion other sources that Mention can help you monitor in other to notify you when your chosen keywords are mentioned.
With this tool, you can get insight into your brand and competitors at your fingerprint. Use Mention to uncover discussion, filter, and analyze them automatedly to make data-driven marketing decisions. It also doubles as a post-scheduling tool for social media platforms.
6. Brandwatch
If you want to understand what the public thinks about your brand and that of your competitor, then the Brandwatch tool should be one of the tools you consider. It is one of the top brand monitoring tools in the market that would help you find meaning in conversations happening online about you, your competitors, and your industry of choice. The tool has been named a leader in the 2020 Forester Wave for Social Listening Platforms.
Some of the use cases of Brandwatch include crisis management, brand management, marketing research, trend analysis, and competitors analysis, among others. If you intend to use this tool, you are in a good company as popular businesses such as Nestle, Unilever, Sky, and Delta trust them.
7. Hootsuite
The Hootsuite service is one of the popular social media management tools in the market today. Interestingly, it has got support for social media listening by keeping an eye on the latest social conversations, trends, and brand mentions. Hootsuite brand monitoring support is just one of the many features you will enjoy using Hootsuite.
The tool is an all-encompassing tool that has support for scheduling your posts on social media, discover what works by analyzing your top-performing posts, and even making it possible to collaborate with other members of your team. One thing you will come to like about Hootsuite is that it allows you to use it for free for 30 days as a new user.
8. Falcon
Falcon is another platform that has been developed for social media marketers to make their tasks easier for them. It has got support for a good number of tools including a social listening tool which is of interest to us in this article. The listening support is provided by Brandwatch, one of the tools described above. One good thing about this is that it does more than just brand monitoring as it also takes care of other social media managing tasks.
With Listen, you get a social listening tool that would help you understand your audience better by understanding what they are saying about your brand. With this tool, you can quickly get notifications of posts that would damage your brand reputation and quickly respond to them.
9. TalkWalker
TalkWalker is also one of the services that have been developed to make Internet marketing easier for marketers. It comes with many products with the social intelligence tool being one of the key products it offers. With this tool, you can monitor the web in real-time for mentions and you can even tap into their historical data for over 5 years.
With TalkWalker social intelligence tool, you get one of the most relevant and impactful insights using advanced AI-powered sentiment analysis. One thing I didn’t like about this tool is that its pricing is not publicly displayed. You will need to contact them to get a quote.
Social Media Networks and Analytics
For many small marketers, they might not even need all the complex tools out there to monitor their small brand. All they need is a simple tool to notify them when they are mentioned on specific social media networks.
For these marketers, spending money on a brand monitoring tool is overkill. Instead, all they need to do is set up notifications for their chosen social media network so they get notified anytime they get mentioned. Many social media platforms do have support for that.
For some, all they do is check hashtags related to them to see what their audience and critics think about them. However, you need to know that except your business is small and only has an audience on specific social media platforms, it might not be easy for you to keep up.
1. How Does Brand Monitoring Works?
The working mechanism of brand monitoring is simple and nothing but web scraping with a mix of notification and analytics. Brand monitoring tools crawl the web pages on the Internet and as it does that, it keeps a tab of URLs that have keywords of interest. When it sees one, it saves the URL and notifies the user that has an interest in the keyword which could either be a brand name, public features of a brand, or their product, among others.
2. Is Brand Monitoring Illegal?
Brand monitoring is not illegal. It might interest you to know that you are not the only one interested in it. Big businesses are actively engaging in it not only to monitor their own brand but also monitor that of their competitor to know how they stand.
From the above, you can see that there are a good number of tools available to you if you want to keep a tab on your brand mentions on the web. If you take a look at the tools described, you will see that most of these tools are quite similar in the features they offer. Only a few of them have features that distinguish them from the others.
