When people talk about metrics, we often don’t think of ‘brand’ as part of the group. But your brand is quite possibly the most important data point – how it’s perceived, its online traction, and performance against competitors all tell you how, and if, your brand (AKA business) is growing.
“Brand” as a metric can feel abstract. But that doesn’t mean you can’t track it anyway.
Here are some tools to help you accurately track your brand and strengthen your marketing strategy.
Benefits of Brand Tracking Software
Brand tracking means staying atop of critical insights that reflect how your brand is seen by people. It brings lots of benefits, including:
- Monitoring the level of your brand awareness, brand sentiment, and customer loyalty.
- Identifying trends in your brand’s online reputation, and responding to changes faster and more efficiently (meaning that your brand stays relevant for longer).
- Staying competitive in your market. For example, you can benchmark your brand’s performance against your competitors, and uncover opportunities where you’re not meeting customer expectations.
- Boosting your relationship with existing customers by regularly reviewing their feedback and making their needs a priority for your brand.
- Maintaining closer ties with users and their activity, which only improves customer loyalty and customer lifetime value – translating to higher ROI.
Top Features to Look For
When looking for a brand tracking software solution, here’s what you may want to keep in mind:
- Real-time insights: Brand tracking software should be able to uncover up-to-the-minute data, so you are able to gain insights to make decisions swiftly and successfully. Historical data would also help you see how things have evolved over time.
- Competitor analysis: No brand exists in isolation - and so your brand performance needs to be given in context to other market players. This will give you a better idea of how the public views the other brands in your space.
- Brand sentiment: Tools have to have a scale for customer emotions and opinions about your brand - on a micro and macro level (e.g. on a particular social post, or over a period of time in a region or country). These can be based on social and mass media monitoring, customer reviews, and surveys.
- Listening and feedback integration: Software that gathers input from social platforms and direct input from customers can provide more accurate, representative and impactful data.
- Audience segmentation: A breakdown of your market by demographic, location, and behavior can sharpen your focus when you’re looking at new target markets and deciding on your positioning.
- Customizable dashboards and reporting: Brand tracking software should be tailored to your business KPIs and preferences, so that insights are digestible and actionable.
1. Brand Monitoring
The Brand Monitoring app (made by Prowly) tracks all your brand mentions, competitors, social media posts, keywords, backlinks, and more. With the app you can also find relevant articles and authors to target for SEO and PR purposes, helping boost your brand across the web.
What’s more, you can filter your mentions by language, country, article category, and domain category.
Plus, you can set up recurring digests and custom alerts in the Brand Monitoring app, so you get notifications about new mentions automatically.
What We Like:
Brand Monitoring includes a way to assess the value of each mention your brand receives. It has specific metrics like sentiment, domain authority, estimated reach, and backlinks that give you a more granular idea of where your brand is being mentioned and why. Essentially, it tells you the quality, not just quantity of your brand perception.
Who It’s For:
Growing brands who want to integrate a successful PR strategy in their brand tracking.
Pricing:
Free seven-day trial available with a Semrush account
Paid plan costs $59 per month
2. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a comprehensive tool for social listening. The platform uses data from over 100 million online sources to create insights about how people view your brand. Brandwatch includes social media analytics and sentiment analysis, allowing you to stay on top of your reports, mentions, and hashtags for specific campaigns.
What We Like:
The ‘Compare’ section of Brandwatch gives you a breakdown of your competitors’ social posts, fans, fans growth, and total engagement.
With this data you can determine what resonates with your shared audiences. Brandwatch also has AI-powered summaries of the latest comments on your and your competitors’ latest social posts, so you can quickly understand the public’s response.
Who It’s For:
Any SME to large enterprise focusing on social media and consumer intelligence can leverage Brandwatch.
Pricing:
Free demo available
Paid plan pricing varies and requires speaking to a team member
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a marketing tool with functionality to sense check your brand’s traction across social media and optimize your customer service.
With the tool you can track what people are saying about your brand online, plus you can monitor and respond to social media engagement (comments, DMs, and mentions).
You can even track historical interactions with your brand from individuals, so you can personalize replies and manage repeating sentiments more effectively.
What We Like:
With Hootsuite you can bridge the gap between brand monitoring, social media engagement and customer service.
You have a detailed overview of how, when, and who is communicating with your brand, and because everything is stored in one place, you’re less likely to miss important messages and risk a PR crisis.
Who It’s For:
Growing businesses with a social media manager are best suited to Hootsuite and its capabilities.
Pricing:
Free demo available upon request
Paid plans start from $99 per month
4. Google Alerts
Keywords and brand tracking go hand-in-hand. Google Alerts informs you when your selected keywords are used in new content online. For example, you could track your brand name as a keyword, and stay updated when you’re mentioned in the news or when your products are discussed online.
What We Like:
Google Alerts is easy to navigate, making it a great tool for smaller brands that are getting up to speed with savvy marketing. It also makes media monitoring easier, as you can enter keywords that are relevant to your competitors, and keep a closer eye on their digital activity.
Who It’s For:
Small businesses who need a jumping-off point for their brand tracking. Google Alerts doesn’t provide real-time data, so it’s best only as a guiding tool.
Pricing:
Free
5. Media Monitoring
If you’re trying to grow your SEO along with your brand, you need to do more than count the number of times your brand is mentioned. You’ll want to find ways to turn those mentions into valuable backlinks.
With Media Monitoring (available in the Semrush App Center), you do just that.
This tool connects you with people who are talking about your brand and curate a list of sources who can be backlink partners. The result expands your network plus gives your SEO a huge boost.
Additionally, you can collect customer feedback across dozens of platforms, analyze positive and negative sentiment of your mentions, and track mentions of your competitors. You can even prioritize mentions of your brand and then discover people who have the right tone and reach for talking about your brand, and contact them as possible brand ambassadors.
What We Like
The Media Monitoring app gives you opportunities to build links and work with influencers. It’s more than a dashboard with data, it helps you grow your marketing strategy by listing the most influential websites that mention your brand, and highlighting the websites that mention your brand most. It serves you up brand tracking next steps on a platter!
Who It’s For
Predominantly companies working in crisis management, customer service or PR and branding. The app’s monitoring services allow you to measure and evaluate just how well your work is paying off.
Pricing
Free seven-day trial with a Semrush account
Paid plan costs $39 per month
6. Keyhole
Keyhole collects and analyzes social media engagement metrics, as well as keywords, links, and hashtags. Not to mention, it has a sentiment analysis showing whether people feel positive, neutral or negative toward your content, and where they’re based in the world.
You can therefore effortlessly gauge what people think of your brand without having to sift through data manually.
What We Like:
Keyhole is great for brands hoping to partner with influencers, too. The platform can help you find the right influencers to work with, and monitors influencer campaigns once you’re set up with them. This functionality means you take care to only collaborate with influencers that are proven to bolster your brand.
Who It’s For:
Mid-sized businesses and agencies can get the most value from Keyhole. Companies in media and entertainment are well-suited to Keyhole because the platform allows them to find industry trends and consumer conversations, and manage their reputation online. Reports from Keyhole enable media and entertainment companies to show their social media impact to advertisers and sponsors too.
Pricing:
Demo available upon request
Campaign-based paid plans start from $100 per month
Custom pricing for other paid plans
7. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence platform where you can follow trending topics and customer sentiment around your brand.
Not only can you track keywords with the tool, you can detect visual mentions of your brand in images and videos.
On top of that, you can gather real-time customer feedback from all your social channels. This granular data means you really know where your brand is appearing and how the exposure can affect people’s opinion of and connection to your brand.
What We Like:
Talkwalker makes big tasks simple. The instant summarization feature consolidates the sentiment across thousands of your customer feedback tickets, reviews, and surveys. Meanwhile, the communities analysis examines feedback from online groups, so you access collective and independent sentiments toward your brand.
Who It’s For:
Enterprises, agencies, and larger companies with a substantial customer base. The platform can even integrate with call centers, to analyze transcripts and highlight areas for customer service improvement.
Pricing:
Demo available upon request
Custom pricing for paid plans
Staying on the right track(ing software)
Brand tracking is a core part of a successful marketing strategy. It’s the equivalent of leaning in to the conversations that are happening about your brand, from the people that matter most – the public.
Experiment with the tools listed above to see which aligns well with your brand and processes. Remember that you shouldn’t be trying to confirm assumptions about your brand. Instead, the data should be telling you the path that your brand is on, and how many people want to join you on the journey.