Plenty of work goes into developing a brand’s image, from logo design and taglines to reputation for quality and customer satisfaction. But sometimes, despite our best efforts, the public view of a brand gets damaged. In fact, publicly-traded companies whose brands are targeted by data breaches take an average stock price hit of 7.5%.
The worst part is cybercrime can destroy your brand before you know it’s coming. If you fail to fix the issue quickly, your business could suffer millions in lost revenue and more in customer trust. That’s why brand monitoring is the lifeblood of public perception. Let’s take a look at some crowd-favorite brand-monitoring tools, benefits, and best practices below.
What is brand protection and monitoring?
Brand protection is the enforcement of protecting intellectual property related to a company’s identity. This can include logos, trademarks, or slogans, among other things. Protecting a company’s brand is critical to maintaining its image, reputation, and value to its customers.
Brand monitoring is tracking mentions of your brand across different channels to see how it’s perceived, talked about, and used. Monitoring your brand lets you collect important feedback and guide marketing, PR, and sales efforts. It also stops cybercriminals and counterfeiters from hijacking your brand to launch phishing and other online attacks.
Benefits of brand protection and monitoring
Brand protection starts with monitoring. If you don’t monitor your company’s brand, it’s in a black box—and the box is locked. But brand monitoring tools have benefits beyond just providing insight into consumer sentiment.
- Listen to customer concerns
- Stop costly fraud attempts before they can do irreparable damage
- Adjust messaging and marketing
- Understand customer needs
- Choose the right marketing channels
- Manage perception issues as they arise
- Adapt your products to consumer desires
- Track marketing impact
- Find your influencers
Brand protection and monitoring best practices
Successful monitoring doesn’t happen by accident, and the right brand monitoring tools can help. Companies that win at monitoring use tools that track social media and web mentions. They also monitor the web for fake websites that use their brands for criminal activity. Finally, brand monitoring champions have a game plan for what to do when brand use goes awry.
Protection kicks in once a malevolent use of a company’s brand is discovered. The key to effective protection is the speed at which the brand violation is taken down from the Internet. This is often a manual process that can take from days to months, but AI-powered platforms that leverage automation can reduce this time to minutes.
What do you need to monitor?
Track channels where consumers, employees, and other stakeholders congregate. Unfortunately, that means the entirety of the internet (4.5 billion pages!) and all of social media. Many companies track mentions on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the internet in general, print media, and the broadcast media. Because of the scale of the problem, effective brand monitoring cannot be done by humans and requires AI and automation.
Best brand monitoring tools
Since there’s too much content for mere mortals to keep tabs on, brand monitoring tools are an essential ally.
Here are a few of our monitoring favorites and why we love them:
- Google Alerts: Use the power of Google to set up alerts that monitor your brand.
- Bolster: Lean on Bolster’s AI tools to spot and take down fraud sites in an instant.
- Sprout Social: To see the scuttlebutt about your brand on social media, use Sprout Social’s amazing tool.
- Brandwatch: Spot consumer trends and chats on Twitter, Reddit, blogs, and video sites.
- Hootsuite Insights: Simplify consumer research with Hootsuite’s top-level brand visualizations.
Protect and monitor your brand for growth and success
While brand protection and monitoring can feel like putting out fires, the right tools can tame the blaze. By monitoring your brand consistently, you’ll be able to create a conversation with your customers, shape public opinion on your brand, and highlight positive customer experiences. Best of all, your brand, your audience, and your employees will stay safe from harm and fraud.
Want to know more about how Bolster can help you and your company?
Learn more about our Brand Protection Solutions.
Contact us today.
Read our whitepaper on Best Practices for Modern Brand Protection
