Brand Monitoring: what it is and why it is important for SEO too
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it, says a well-known aphorism by Warren Buffett, the American entrepreneur considered the largest value investor in the world. The reason is quickly understood: a single mismanaged brand crisis can quickly damage that reputation that took years to fortify. Being aware of this, he continues, you will do things differently to try and protect a valuable resource such as reputation. Even in the world of digital marketing and SEO what others think of us has a weight and there is a specific activity to improve the brand reputation and defend the image of the brand.
What is brand monitoring
We can define brand monitoring as a process of business analysis of various Web and media channels to keep tabs on the information around the company, its products, the brand, and anything explicitly related to the business.
More simply, it is an activity focused on monitoring the reputation and reception of the brand by the general public and targeted consumers. It also involves not only monitoring direct mentions, but also understanding the context in which these references occur, to also check the predominant sentiment in people.
Thus, it is the management of how the brand is perceived and discussed in the digital world, and therefore doing brand monitoring consists of carefully monitoring various online channels to keep track of brand mentions and related conversations that occur in spaces such as social media, blogs, forums, review websites, news, and any other digital places where there might be references to our brand.
Not just monitoring: what online reputation management is for
The theoretical basis of brand monitoring refers to the broader “reputation management,” which argues that the public’s perception of a brand can have a significant impact on a company’s success. Therefore, by monitoring and responding to brand mentions, companies can positively influence their reputation.
This activity has its roots in the pre-digital era, when companies monitored traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts to keep track of their brand mentions. However, with the advent of the Internet and social media, brand monitoring has taken on a new dimension: today we are all online, and companies have easier access to sophisticated and automated brand monitoring tools through which they can track brand mentions in real time across a wide range of online channels.
Today, then, the purpose of brand monitoring is to periodically and strategically survey the landscape of online media and resources to uncover different perceived sentiments about our brand or that of our competitors and respond with specific strategies to improve people’s grip.
It therefore means monitoring brand reputation and reacting proactively to concerns and criticisms from press or customers in order to foster trust and brand awareness.
Why reputation monitoring is important
It should already be clear from what has been written that brand monitoring is critical for many reasons.
First of all, it can help companies understand how they are perceived by the public so that they gain valuable information that can guide marketing and product strategies.
In addition, it can help companies identify and respond quickly to potential brand crises-for example, if customers are sharing negative experiences with our product or service online, monitoring can help us identify these conversations and respond appropriately.
Finally, brand monitoring can help improve SEO, as we will see more analytically: when the brand is mentioned online, especially on high-quality websites, Goo