The Best Brand Monitoring Tools For Your Business

Keeping track of what people are saying about your brand and what they are talking about in your industry is an essential part of running a business and an essential part of your marketing strategy.

Whether you sell products or services, brand monitoring is an essential tool for your business.

Nowadays, people use so many channels to talk about different things (including your brand) that keeping on top of them is vital for your success. Understanding how people feel about your brand across digital channels can help your business grow and provide valuable insights.

What are Brand Monitoring Tools?

Brand monitoring tools are software systems designed to systematically track and analyze the visibility and conversations around a brand across various online platforms. They scour the internet for any mentions of your brand—be it through words, images, or even videos—so that you can glean insights and react to the public sentiment in a timely manner and make business decisions that work for your brand.

Brand Monitoring vs. Social Monitoring

People often mistake brand monitoring and social monitoring for the same thing. While there is overlap, they are slightly different.

Brand monitoring is broader than social monitoring. Simply put, it’s the process of tracking all of your mentions, and it is not limited to social media channels. You can find out when someone mentions your brand on multiple sources, including social profiles, media, news sites, and blogs. It can help you to keep on top of industry trends.

Brand social monitoring is the same, but you exclusively monitor social media networks and nothing else.

Benefits of Brand Monitoring and Social Monitoring

As a brand, there are several benefits to brand monitoring. We’ll take a look at the most common reasons that brands choose to use brand monitoring tools.

Finding Influencers and Other Partners to Work With

Brand monitoring is an excellent tool for finding influencers and other partners, including affiliates for your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Why? Because these influencers have brand affinity – they are connected to your brand and are already mentioning you in their feeds. These partnerships can be incredibly beneficial because they can help you drive revenue to your business, create targeted ads that resonate with your target audience, and create brand awareness.

Top tip: You can also track your campaign impact before and after an influencer campaign by monitoring your brand mentions.

Crisis Management

In the realm of crisis management, the prompt detection of negative sentiment and potential PR issues is where brand monitoring tools prove indispensable. 

They act as an early warning system, flagging up real-time alerts on critical spikes in brand mentions or emerging negative trends. This allows businesses to swiftly assess and size up the situation, grasping the sentiment and context behind the mentions. 

Tools with advanced sentiment analysis capabilities are key; they help distinguish between noise and a genuine crisis, guiding the urgency and tone of the response. By evaluating the scope and impact across various channels, companies can gauge the extent of a crisis and craft strategic, data-informed communication plans.

Creating More Marketing Impact

The more information you have about your customers, the more impactful your marketing can be. Brand monitoring can help you glean the information you need – for example – you can see what people like about your brand and what they don’t like, discover overall brand sentiment, and get demographic data. You can monitor your direct mentions as well to see what is coming up for your customers.

Listening to your customers means you can make improvements, market something differently, and make your customers feel seen and heard.

Customer-Focused and Customer-Centric Products and Services

By brand monitoring, you can hear feedback from customers about your products and services in your social mentions. This enables you to make changes and improvements where needed and boost what your customers like.

For example, if you are an ecommerce brand and hear lots of complaints about a specific product, you can look into it and decide whether you should discontinue it or make improvements.

Customer Sentiment Analysis

Understanding how customers feel about your brand is crucial. Brand monitoring tools have advanced sentiment analysis across multiple channels to provide a clear picture of public perception, enabling businesses to adjust strategies accordingly.

Tracking Marketing Campaign Performance

Tracking marketing campaign performance is a complex endeavor that brand monitoring tools can simplify. By analyzing the reach, engagement, and interaction that campaigns receive across various channels, these tools provide a clear, real-time picture of effectiveness. 

They track a campaign’s resonance with the target audience by monitoring metrics such as shares, likes, mentions, and the overall volume of conversation. This data is invaluable as it allows businesses to quickly understand which aspects of their campaigns are hitting the mark and which are not. 

As a result, marketing teams can make data-driven decisions, optimizing campaigns in-flight rather than waiting for post-campaign analysis.

Reputation Management

A brand’s reputation is its most valuable asset, and reputation management is a critical, ongoing concern for businesses. Continuous monitoring is a keystone in this process, as brand monitoring tools scan the internet for mentions, comments, reviews, and content related to the brand across various platforms and channels. 

The ability to respond quickly to criticism or rectify misinformation can reinforce a brand’s commitment to its values and consumer satisfaction, maintaining a strong and trustworthy online presence.

Market Research

Market research is something every business goes through, and it’s made more accessible with brand monitoring. You can look for feedback on your competitor’s products or services to see if there’s an appetite for something.

You can also use it to see if you’re missing something and what the levels of conversation are around this to get an idea of whether or not your customers want something.

Better Customer Support and Retention

If you see that your customers have negative sentiments about one of your products, you can respond to that. Answering in the right way can help with customer retention, especially if something is going wrong and you provide exceptional customer support. This way, you create loyal customers who love your brand.

Monitor Overall Brand Performance

By harnessing the power of brand monitoring tools, businesses can see a comprehensive overview of their brand’s online footprint, and how it’s perceived, discussed, and engaged with across a myriad of digital platforms. This is crucial for evaluating the brand’s health and vitality. 

Businesses are equipped with the data needed to make informed, proactive decisions. 

Key Features of Brand Monitoring Tools:

Real-Time Alerts: Instant notifications about brand mentions allow for swift action and engagement.

Sentiment Analysis: Automated insight into whether brand mentions carry a positive, negative, or neutral tone.

Competitor Analysis: Tools to compare brand presence and sentiment against competitors.

Social Media Tracking: Measurement of a brand’s influence and interaction on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Keyword and Hashtag Monitoring: Tracking specific keywords and hashtags to gauge campaign performance and brand relevance.

Influencer Engagement: Identification of key influencers and tracking of their impact on brand promotion.

Analytics and Reporting: Comprehensive data and insights on brand performance, presented in actionable reports.

These core features empower brands to stay informed and strategically engage with their audience and market.

What to Monitor to Find Influencers and Affiliates For Your Brand

To find influencers and affiliates for your brand, you can monitor a few things to help you find potential new partnerships.

Brand name: Your company name is likely being tagged by influencers and affiliates you are not already working with. If they have brand affinity, they are easier to convince to work with you.

Industry trends and topics: People active in this space talk about industry trends and issues. Your influencers and affiliates will likely be on top of these trends too.

Niche keywords: If there are any niche keywords around the products or services you sell, follow them.

Your competitors: Competitors will likely have potential influencers and affiliates talking about them – this is an opportunity to approach these people and ask if they want to work with you.

When working on your brand strategy and social media strategy, it’s vital to think about which is more important to your business.

Do you want to focus on social media platforms to find new partners with brand affinity, or do you want a wider picture of your brand perception? Is social listening data essential, or do you only care about blogs and forums? You should take these things into account when choosing your tools.

Small businesses will need different things compared to a bigger brand, and for some a social monitoring tool might be better than a brand monitoring tool, and vice versa.

How to Choose the Right Brand Monitoring Tool

Choosing a brand monitoring tool can be difficult – with so many different options available it can feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

What are Your Specific Needs and Goals?

Begin by clearly identifying what you want to achieve with brand monitoring. Are you looking to manage your online reputation, increase brand awareness, track competitor activity, or improve customer engagement? Setting specific objectives will help you narrow down the list of features you need in a tool.

What is the Size of Your Business?

A small business may not require the same level of complexity in a tool as a large enterprise. Similarly, industries like fashion and technology might need more sophisticated sentiment analysis due to the fast-paced nature of trends and consumer preferences in these sectors. Select a tool that aligns with your business’s scale and the peculiarities of your industry.

What Integrations are Available?

The ability to integrate with existing marketing or CRM platforms is a must for a seamless workflow. Check if the brand monitoring tool can connect with other software you are already using, such as Hootsuite for social media management or Salesforce for customer relationship management.

Review Pricing and Scalability:

Analyze the pricing structure to ensure it fits within your budget while meeting your needs. Some tools offer a tiered pricing model that scales with your business, which can be advantageous as your brand grows. It’s also wise to look out for any hidden costs such as setup fees or charges for additional features.

When choosing a brand monitoring tool, it’s important to balance functionality with cost, ease of use, and scalability. Take the time to engage with demos or trial versions of different tools, and don’t hesitate to reach out to vendors with specific questions about how their tool can meet your brand’s unique requirements.

The 7 Best Brand Monitoring Tools

Awario

Founded in 2015, Awario is a brand monitoring and social media monitoring tool that enables you to find brand mentions all over the web and on social networks by crawling 13 million websites every day.

Awario offers you the opportunity to use social selling by finding new prospects and engaging with them, customer care, influencer marketing, and hashtag research to help your business grow all within an intuitive dashboard.

Join discussions in real-time, research your market and engage with customers.

Features include:

• Powerful analytics
• Tracks in any language
• Boolean search
• Sentiment analysis
• Location-based monitoring
• Social listening reports
• Slack integration
• Social listening API
• Web monitoring

Pricing:

• Starter plan: $49 per month or $29 per month billed annually.
• Pro Plan: $149 per month or $89 per month billed annually.
• Enterprise: $399 per month or $249 per month billed annually.

Brand24

Market leader Brand24 has been around since 2011 and includes Uber, Twitch, and Wondery as clients. They monitor social networks and online content (including podcasts, web forums and reviews) for any brand mentions using AI.

Features are regularly updated, and their analytics tools enable you to stay ahead and analyze your data. You are notified of negative mentions immediately so you can get involved.

Features:

• Automated sentiment analysis
• Report automation
• Analytics
• Export your data
• Discussion volume chart and immediate notification of negative comments
• Slack integration

Pricing:

• Individual plan: $99 per month, or $79 per month, billed annually with two months free.
• Team plan: $179 per month, or $149 per month, billed annually with two months free.
• Pro plan: $249 per month, or $199 per month, billed annually with two months free.
• Enterprise plan: $499 per month, or $399 per month billed annually with two months free.

Mention

mention has three key aspects – brand monitoring, audience listening, and social media management. You can use it to find key influencers, complete competitor research, and automated reporting on your social presence.

You will not miss a thing. Mention monitors over 1 billion resources on the web, including news sites, blogs, review sites, and forums and you can set up alerts for mentions. Its intuitive interface is easy to use, and keywords get highlighted in texts.

Plus they offer a free 14-day trial.

Features:

• Boolean search
• Customizable alerts
• Precise reporting
• Filters
• Plan and manage your social networks

Pricing:

• Solo plan: $49 per month, or $41 per month billed annually.
• Pro plan: $99 per month, or $83 per month billed annually.
• ProPlus plan: $179 per month, or $149 per month billed annually.
• Company plan: Price on application.

BrandMentions

BrandMentions has been around since 2017. Its use cases include brand monitoring, reputation management, competitor research, business intelligence, and finding partnerships.

It monitors the whole web, not only your social channels, to find brand mentions so you can quickly grow your business.

Features:

• Industry trends information
• Sentiment analysis
• Immediate alerts via email
• Hashtag tracking

Pricing:

• Growing business plan: $99 per month, or $79 per month with an annual plan
• Company plan: $299 per month, or $249 per month with an annual plan
• Enterprise/Agency plan: $499 per month or $399 per month with an annual plan

Talkwalker

Image source: Talkwalker

Talkwalker calls itself the consumer intelligence acceleration platform, and they have many tools available for brands. The best way to describe them is an intelligence analysis tool. For these tools, there’s no pricing available on the website.

However, the best part is that they offer social media sites and web monitoring for free, without all the bells and whistles. You need to sign up for alerts, and create the search terms you want. It works in the same way as Google Alerts but it has more depth to it than Google Alerts, and results can be more easily customized and filtered.

Features:

• Boolean search
• Covers blogs, websites, forums, and social
• Easy to filter your results
• Customizable

Pricing:

• Unlisted, you need to book a demo to get full pricing information.

BuzzSumo

Image source: BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for generating ideas, monitoring your brand and competitors, finding influencers and other brand partners, and creating high-performing content.

They have an archive of over 8 billion articles and 300 trillion social engagements, and Expedia, HubSpot, and Buzzfeed are their clients. Their pricing packages are based on your needs.

Features:

• Content discovery
• Find influencers and other partners
• Brand monitoring
• Content research
• Slack integration

Pricing:

• Content Creation $199 per month or $159 per month paid annually with a free 30-day trial.
• PR & Comms $299 per month or $239 per month paid annually with a free 30-day trial.
• Suite $499 per month or $399 per month paid annually with a free 30-day trial.
• Enterprise $999 per month paid annually with a free 30-day trial.

Google Alerts

Google alerts are designed for you to enter search terms and get email digests from Google’s search engine, including content with your search term. It’s free, though the functionality is limited (there’s no way of filtering things). You can choose whether to receive a daily digest or a weekly digest with all of your alerts in one email. All you need to do is enter your search terms into the search bar and then choose how often you want to get alerts.

Features:

• Daily digest or weekly digest
• Option to have all search terms in one email, or each topic emailed separately

Pricing:

• Free

5 of the Best Social Media Monitoring Tools

The following tools monitor your social media channels for brand mentions and don’t include general web search in their brand monitoring. If you are only interested in social media, these tools can help you grow your business with social media monitoring.

Keyhole

Image source: Keyhole

Keyhole offers social media account monitoring and analytics and other tools, including influencer analytics, competitor analysis, and social publishing. This tool is another “all-in-one” where you can manage every aspect of your social media management and monitor social media.

Features:

• Hashtag analytics
• Historical social media data
• Social media scheduling and publishing
• Social listening
• Reporting
• Hashtag and keyword tracking
• Social media analytics API

Pricing:

• Individual: $79 per month or $63 per month billed annually
• Team: $149 per month or $119 per month billed annually
• Pro: $249 per month or $199 per month billed annually
• Advanced: $449 per month or $359 per month billed annually
• Enterprise: Starts at $899 per month billed annually

Sendible

Image source: Sendible

Sendible is an all-in-one tool that enables you to manage your social media, including social listening. You can track sentiment and have your alerts integrated into Slack.

Founded in 2009, Sendible includes VisitBritain, HobbyTown, and the Government of Queensland as their clients.

Features:

• Sentiment analysis
• Alerts integrated with slack
• Reporting
• Social Media post engagement tracking
• Social streams all in one dashboard
• More integrations than other tools – includes LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter Instagram.
• Co-branding available

Pricing:

• Creator plan: $29 per month or $25 per month billed annually with a 14-day free trial.
• Traction plan: $89 per month or $76 per month on an annual plan with a 14-day free trial.
• White label plan: $240 per month or $180 per month billed annually with a 14-day free trial
• White label + plan: $750 per month, or $638 per month on an annual plan with a 14-day free trial.

Hootsuite

Image source: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media management tool where you can utilize social listening and scheduling and publishing, and analytics. The social listening aspect enables you to see what people are saying about your brand in real time, and you can search for specific hashtags.

With more than 200,000 clients, clients include Ikea, Bumble, LiveNation, and WWF, to name a few.

Features:

• Custom streams for monitoring social channels and hashtags you choose
• Real-time audience insights
• Integrated with other social listening tools for integration
• Create and schedule posts
• Manage social media channels
• Plan campaigns
• Interact with users on different social media channels in one stream
• Six languages supported

Pricing:

• Professional: $99 per month with a 30-day free trial
• Team $249 per  month with a 30-day free trial
• Enterprise: Custom pricing with a 30-day free trial

Sproutsocial

Image source: sproutsocial

sproutsocial is a one-stop-shop for social media management – from scheduling posts to social listening and conversation management. This is ideal for people who want to manage their social media and keep their social media content strategies on track

Their customers include Evernote, Shopify, and Vice.

Features:

• Analytics across earned and owned media
• Competitor analysis
• Real-time results
• Content publishing and scheduling
• Conversation management
• Social selling
• Employee advocacy

Pricing:

• Standard plan: $249 per month, and a 30-day free trial.
• Professional plan: $399 per month and a 30-day free trial.
• Advanced: $499 per month and a 30-day free trial.
• Enterprise: Contact for pricing

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is another option for complete social media management, including brand monitoring as part of the mix. You can label content to highlight influencers and other partners easily.

Features:

• Trend and competitor tracking
• Unified social inbox
• Content planning, collaboration, and scheduling
• Content labeling
• Recommendations based on user behavior data

Pricing:

• Free plan: Free
• Standard plan: €69 per user per month, or €49 per month on an annual plan.
• Professional plan: €99 per user per month, or €79 per month on an annual plan.
• Advanced plan: €149 per user per month, or €119 per month on an annual plan.
• Enterprise plan: Contact them for pricing

Brand Monitoring for Paid Search Terms

Your brand’s visibility can mean the difference between dominating the market and fading into obscurity. With every click costing precious marketing dollars, it’s essential to ensure that your brand is not only visible but also protected in the digital ecosystem. Brand monitoring for paid search terms emerges as a critical strategy, allowing you to keep a vigilant eye on how your brand is being represented and how competitors might be vying for your valuable digital real estate.

Whether it’s safeguarding the integrity of your brand or dissecting the tactics of your competitors, understanding the intricacies of paid search terms is more than just a marketing tactic—it’s a fundamental component of your brand’s online survival toolkit. 

Here are two tools that can help

Adsec

Image source: Adsec

Adsec specializes in ad verification and brand safety.Their suite of tools ensures that your advertisements appear in appropriate and effective contexts, enhancing campaign performance and preserving brand integrity and online presence. Adsec utilizes technology to combat ad fraud, prevent inappropriate ad placements, and provide real-time analytics to keep your brand secure.

• No pricing available

BrandVerity

Image source: BrandVerity

BrandVerity’s solutions are focused on brand protection and compliance, offering vigilant monitoring of paid search and online content. By ensuring that affiliates and competitors adhere to trademark rules and promotional guidelines, BrandVerity helps preserve the consistency and trustworthiness of a brand’s online presence. Whether it’s preventing trademark bidding in PPC campaigns or safeguarding against counterfeit activity, BrandVerity helps businesses to control how their brand is represented online, ensuring that marketing efforts are both compliant and effective.

• No pricing available

Start Brand Monitoring Today

Now that you’ve discovered all of the benefits of brand monitoring, it’s time to choose a software that works for your brand.

Depending on what you are looking for (customer service, or potential crises management, for example), you can choose between complete brand monitoring or only social media monitoring.

You also need to decide if you want an all-in-one tool where you can manage your social media profiles as well. Either way, it’s essential to ensure that you get real-time notifications and email alerts so that you can stay on top of any negative reviews, product mentions,  and brand sentiment 

This will give you the tools to assess the success of your marketing campaigns to give you valuable insights. We’ve given you the best social listening tools out there. The ball is in your court!