There are two key points to understand the importance of monitoring. The first relates to the visibility and permanence of information posted on websites, blogs, and social media in general. Posted content can easily be found and tends to remain available indefinitely. The second key point, especially in the case of social media, is how naturally and comfortably people talk about their daily lives, including the products and brands they interact with. As such, brand monitoring services can be much more effective than most traditional market research methods, which often put respondents in an abnormal and sometimes awkward situation.
However, when I hear about monitoring, the conversation almost always revolves around “responding” or allowing for “quick responses.” I believe monitoring goes far beyond that, so I made a list describing six key benefits of using it.
1) Respond
Responding—and doing so quickly—is the most well-known aspect of monitoring. Did someone mention your brand on social media? You can respond immediately if the monitoring service is integrated with relationship management and digital content production. For companies with significant operational issues, like telecom companies that often face heavy criticism, this would be very beneficial if used effectively. Unfortunately, in most cases, companies still use social media profiles merely for broadcasting. Just look at the Twitter profiles of Claro or TIM—no replies, zero interaction.
2) Learn
Learning about your target audience is incredibly valuable. Let’s say you represent a café in a neighborhood in São Paulo. Besides mentions of the café's brand, its symbols, and its products, is it possible to monitor current and potential customers who have never directly mentioned the brand? Yes! For example, if your café is on Rua Boa Vista, why not monitor discussions about the neighborhood? After all, everyone who lives, works, or passes through there is a potential customer.
By monitoring terms related to that street, you can learn about people’s behavior in the area. Maybe a resident complains about the lack of good breakfast spots. Another says the nearest subway station is the worst in the city. There you go—those are business opportunities and threats.
3) Innovate
Using monitoring is already an innovative step for some mindsets. But good monitoring can fuel many types of innovation. The most tangible is product and service innovation. When users point out flaws in your offerings, praise competitors, or even dream about something that doesn’t exist yet, it opens the door for innovation.
Developing and presenting a new product, service, or brand positioning becomes more effective and safer when you know exactly what consumers want. You know that phrase every brand wants to hear (“That brand did this thinking of me!”)? It becomes increasingly true.
4) Identify
Identifying so-called “brand advocates” (a term I’m not fond of, but it’s widely used), hubs, and opinion influencers is much easier through monitoring. In today’s (and tomorrow’s) internet landscape, every individual has a unique communication and content creation potential that can, in some cases, surpass that of large companies. Monitoring allows you to find people who could “work for the brand” in exchange for something—reputation, status, popularity, money, or simply the pleasure of engaging with something meaningful in their lives. From there, the company's communication teams or ad agencies can determine the best strategy to maintain, improve, or change what these individuals are saying about the brand.
5) Optimize
The fifth reason is that it allows for cost and return optimization in campaigns. Monitoring conversations between people lets you understand where they go online, who they talk to, who they read, what they listen to, how they speak, and so on. When combined with web analytics data, this allows for more precise and optimized media spending. Whether for digital or traditional media, monitoring also means understanding the styles, discourse, and references your target audience wants to consume. As such, analytical reports based on monitoring can even provide creative strategy insights for TV copywriters, for example.
6) Evaluate
Digital campaigns can be evaluated based on increases or decreases in audience engagement. If a company has a continuous monitoring policy, each new campaign, piece of content, or product launch can be reassessed for flow, values, and sentiment. This way, every step the company or agency takes (which should already be grounded in monitoring data) can also be better evaluated.
Tags : brand monitoring services
