Brand Monitoring (+7 Tips for Achieving Top Visibility)

The internet is an endless virtual space that hosts thousands of platforms in which your brand can make itself known and reach a wider audience.

It can be easy to get lost among the many brands mentioned online. However, there are some tricks that you can do to gain better visibility. Find out what they are here. 

Before you can start increasing visibility and brand awareness, you need to know where your brand currently stands. That’s where brand monitoring comes in. 

Brand monitoring keeps you up-to-date on how current customers perceive your brand and opens prospects for gaining new ones. Likewise, you can watch your competitors and see how they’re doing.

It boils down to this: The more specific information you have, the better-informed marketing decisions you can make.  

What you should be monitoring for visibility

Think of brand monitoring as a form of reputation management. Within this reputation management, there are many things you can monitor, including if people are aware of your brand and how they think and feel about it. Read comments, reviews, and feedback.

Track conversations to see what they like, what they don’t like, how they perceive your brand, and what they think of your competitors. On top of reading, watching, and/or listening to what’s being said, engage with your audience.

Brand monitoring isn’t just about watching your brand explicitly. It also involves observing your competitors. How can you be more visible to your target audience if another brand is keeping you in their shade?

Gathering insights about your industry in general and focusing on competitors can help you improve your own marketing strategies, as you’ll know what has and has not worked before. Knowing your competitors also means being able to determine what you can do to stand out.

It’s important to make clear that brand monitoring is not just about tracking only your brand. It involves more technical research like watching keywords and inbound links.

Beyond your brand, industry trends, influencers, and conversations about members of your team should be considered when monitoring your brand. You never know when there will be good coverage or if there’s something that needs to be fixed.

How to monitor your brand

There is a whole host of places where you can monitor brand visibility, including: 

Print media, like magazines, newspapers, weeklies, billboards, and posters

Broadcast media, like radio and television

Online publications, including whitepapers, digital magazines, newsletters, and reports

Websites that feature blogs, forums, or reviewing platforms

Social media platforms, both for fun and for networking (e.g. LinkedIn)

Don’t be overwhelmed by the large amount of areas you need to monitor; there are tools for brand monitoring.

Use Google Alerts to monitor new content on your selected keywords. Use different social media monitoring tools like Tweet Deck, which allows you to view multiple timelines from Twitter in one place, Buzzsumo for content research and analyzes how your Facebook pages are doing, or Postfity to help with scheduling and analyzing your social efforts. 

If you really want to get ahead of the game and be able to make better marketing decisions that will increase visibility, use MRP-based brand tracking.

MRP is an advanced statistical technique first introduced by Latana that provides reliable and precise data searching through thousands of audiences and breaking the information from audiences’ characteristics into highly targeted results.

Being innovative about your research gives you an extra edge and helps you to see things your competitors might not. 

7 ways to make your brand more visible

The data and information you get from brand monitoring can help make your brand more visible and increase brand awareness.

Here are seven ways to make your brand more visible.

1. Make sure your website and online presence is mobile-friendly

Having a mobile-friendly website makes your brand look more credible, and for those thinking about SEO, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites.

This will help your website rank higher on search engines and make your brand more visible, as it will be one of the first search results your audience will see. 

Additionally, with how often we use our phones on an hourly basis, everything should be optimized for that small screen.

You might offer a great product or service, but if a customer isn’t having a seamless user experience (UX), there’s a chance they won’t be willing to recommend the website to others. 

Related: Check out this rundown of the top mobile marketing statistics to see just how important optimizing your website for mobile is to boost your brand visibility. Then, discover the best mobile marketing software solutions on the market to help you optimize your site.

2. Social media marketing

Increase brand visibility and awareness with social media marketing. With the sheer amount of platforms that your brand can advertise and engage with an audience on, social media is a great tool to introduce your brand and maintain loyal customers.

Use multiple social media platforms to extend your brand’s audience reach and interact with your audience where they want.

Social media lets you connect with customers directly and maintain your brand’s reputation. It’s where customers can see your brand’s personality and build a more personal connection to it.

Customers who have a more personal relationship with your brand will be more willing to share it. Put simply, you want to build connections first, understand what type of content engages with your audience the most, and go for it.

There are a few rules to adhere to, but according to SproutSocial, once you understand which social channels work for you, and the best hashtags, posting time, and circulating content for your brand, there’s no question that you’ll put some bugs in customers’ ears, and, ultimately, convert them.

3. Keywords, keywords, keywords

Not enough emphasis can be placed on researching and using the right keywords to increase brand visibility.

Having the right search terms that people actually look for can make or break your brand. If you’re unsure where to start, having some branded keywords is a good starting point.

You want to check your competitors, which sites point the most traffic to them, and how they are seen. You can also use Ahrefs’ link intersect tool to understand link correlations between websites, and then try and implement these strategies to work for you the same way.

Keep in mind that search volume and keyword density can be hard to get, and you may want to focus on other keywords – something easier to acquire, especially if you’re in a highly competitive niche. 

So, are you to completely forget about high volume keywords? No, but work your way up slowly, and once you have gained some trust and credibility, focus on a few and stay consistent, adding real value to your brand’s visibility. Growing slowly, but steadily is the end game and better than rising fast and falling flat down.

4. Paid ads

For faster and more measurable results, consider utilizing paid ads. They drive more traffic to your website by being placed in prominent and frequent positions on a person’s internet feed, making your brand more visible.

The more a person sees your ad, the more they will recognize your brand. The most important thing with paid ads is that you want to understand the customer’s journey first, and then put your ads in places that drive that specific traffic.

5. Guest blogging

Contributing valuable content elsewhere is still one of the best ways to showcase your authority. By being featured on someone else’s website or blog, you’ll able to expand your audience reach with exposure to the primary blog owner’s readers. This is how you grow your audience, but also build connections with the decision-makers and experts in the field.

What type of content is your audience looking for? What are the biggest challenges in your niche? What insights can you provide that will intrigue your customers to check you out?

Share your insights and ideas on topics with high search volume by researching and writing an expert guide and guest blogging. 

TIP: The article you’re reading right now is a guest blog post. If you want your voice featured on a site with over 1.5 million monthly readers, make sure you sign up to become a guest post writer on G2’s site today.

Don’t just stop there! Engage, share, and engage some more. You can always repurpose your older content and use it for remarketing. 

6. Get a better target audience from your data

Based on the data you have on your current audience, find potential pools of connected audiences that your brand can reach out to and build visibility.

Use data from brand tracking tools to find a better target audience. See what groups of people related to your current audience might be interested in your product, and create content geared toward them to improve brand awareness.

7. Offline marketing

Don’t forget about offline marketing. As tempting as it is to stick to the online world and take advantage of the tools available there to increase brand awareness, there are still some audiences that only have exposure to, or prefer, offline mediums. 

Don’t limit your branding to the internet; create visibility outside of it. As connected as the world is, sometimes a poster in the right place or a pen with your logo will make your brand that much more recognizable.

Brand monitoring for brand visibility and awareness

Use the data you get from brand monitoring to build awareness and brand visibility. There’s only so much you can do with limited information, and the more data you have, the more opportunities you can find to strengthen your brand’s visibility and awareness.

Make your brand more visible by having a mobile-friendly website, using social media marketing, taking advantage of paid ads, and investing time to research your keywords.

Find new audiences with guest blogging, brand tracking tools, and offline marketing. By turning these tips into actions, you will have more brand visibility and stand out from the competition.

Want more information about brand marketing strategies you should be implementing to bring the maximum visibility to your site and content? Check out G2’s extensive brand-building resource hub with over 30 useful pieces of content to boost you to the next level.