7 Actionable Expert Tips on Brand Reputation Monitoring

Monitoring the chatter online is challenging because many things are out of your control. Buyers’ preferences and behaviors are constantly flip-flopping. They aren’t afraid of talking about you online using feedback, unfiltered criticism, or praise.

That’s why brand reputation monitoring has become more significant for companies than ever before.

Online businesses need to keep track of different channels to protect their reputation.

Customers will never stop talking about you and everything you can do to take control and react the right way. When you get it right, online monitoring can help disclose low-hanging ways to enhance your overall business.

I asked 10 branding experts to share some tips on online reputation monitoring and why it matters for brands. Let’s get started.

What is Brand Reputation Monitoring?

Online reputation monitoring is supervising and analyzing your audience’s feedback to understand how your brand is perceived online.

That can help you determine the sentiment of your customers (positive or negative), identify trends, and gain insights into your digital reputation. By analyzing this information, brands can better manage their digital reputation.

Reputation management is not just about review sites like Trustpilot and Yelp. It involves keeping track of your digital reputation across various channels such as news and earned media, forums (Quora, Reddit, etc.), social discussions, third-party review sites, and review aggregators.

How To Take Your Online Reputation Monitoring

Building a solid online reputation starts with monitoring and taking action. That can provide many benefits, such as ensuring your brand is adequately positioned and messaged and identifying areas for improvement in your content and products.

Let’s look at our expert tips you can apply for comprehensive online reputation monitoring.

Automate Your Workflow

Automating brand reputation management can significantly reduce your workload and drive better outcomes. Online reputation monitoring tools make it easy to access all the necessary information in one place, streamlining your workflow.

That adds efficiency to the organization and improves overall brand reputation.

You can easily track and understand customers’ negative experiences with your product using specific tools. This will help you gain a complete understanding of your brand’s online reputation. You can access brand mentions and essential information you may have missed with just one click.

Zac Johnson, a widely respected leader in blogging, believes that investment in online reputation tools can automate your brand management and speed of response :

“Leverage free tools like Google Alerts to monitor your brand’s online reputation effectively. Set up alerts for your brand name, product names, key executives, and industry keywords to stay informed about any mentions across the web.

Regularly review these alerts to gauge sentiment, identify emerging trends, and address any issues promptly.”

Meghan Galaxy, the Brand Manager at Profi, repeats the same perspective:

“Use social media listening tools like Mention to get ahead of the curve in managing your reputation. Track relevant keywords, engage with positive mentions, and identify brand advocates. By being proactive, you can shape the online conversation, build stronger relationships, and turn potential negativity into positive brand experiences.”

Define What You Want to Monitor

Companies may need to increase their reputation and sales by making their brand more discoverable. To achieve this, they work on establishing brand trust and attracting new customers. One way to do this is to understand clearly what to look out for.

Mariano Rodriguez, the founder of LawRank, agrees with this point of view. He states explicitly:

“Without a clear understanding of what to monitor, it can be difficult to monitor your online reputation effectively.

For most brands, that typically involves analyzing various keywords, terms, and hashtags relevant to your brand, including branded keywords, industry or product-related keywords, and search terms related to your rivals and alternative products.”

Another way to consider this is by tracking unbranded keywords, which are searched for more than branded ones. Unbranded keywords are reliable because they help businesses understand what potential customers are searching for.

Businesses can attract more website visitors and increase online visibility by optimizing their site pages and creating content around these non-branded keywords.

The Digital Marketing Consultant and Speaker Neal Schaffer reports along similar lines:

“While it’s important to monitor mentions of your brand name, products, and competitors, I believe that monitoring mentions of unbranded keywords related to your products will give you a feel for the “talk on the street” to understand holistically what brands and products are being talked about and in what context your brand mentions and products are appearing.

This broad context can give you a tremendous and invaluable overall perspective for the rest of your brand reputation monitoring. It might also uncover competitors that you had yet to hear of before because you didn’t input them as competitors when you set up your monitoring project.”

You can always talk to your customer success and sales teams when you doubt and don’t want to guess which terms to monitor. You will be surprised how many trendy and timely phrases and terms they can reveal that are used by your target audience.

Prioritize the Platforms to Monitor

Monitoring your online reputation is not limited to the channels you own. Many brands are currently paying attention to their social media mentions, direct feedback channels, and review listings.

While they are already prioritizing these channels, they don’t provide a complete picture of your online reputation. It’s important to remember that they aren’t the only ones that matter.

Nicholas Turner from Digivate considers forums and review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google Reviews to be great for seeing customer feedback. But he also highlights the following platform:

“Reddit can be an absolute goldmine. If your brand is big enough, I recommend starting your own subreddit (if it hasn’t already been done) and fostering a community there. Reddit users don’t hold back, so the opinions and discourse you’ll find here will be incredibly enlightening.

If nothing else, you’ll gain critical insights into your brand’s reputation and, more often than not, discover your users’ pain points. As you’ll find, Reddit users are some of the most vocal complainers you’ll encounter online.”

For example, law firms like Zayed Law Offices and B2B businesses emphasized LinkedIn and review sites like Avvo and Justia. They usually include honest discussions that reveal essential insights but often receive little attention.

So, when managing your online reputation, it’s essential to keep an eye on channels where you’re not active, including some of the examples mentioned above.

Enhance Your Customer Support

Customers who interact with your brand online, on social media, or in any other way form perceptions about your company.

However, your customer support team will likely be customers’ only direct contact with your company. Ensuring this team is well-trained and equipped to represent your brand effectively is essential.

“I always recommend that you engage genuinely with your audience. Today, more than a simple, automated response will be needed. Take the time to understand the concerns and praises coming your way,” says Lilach Bullock, Business Success Coach & Consultant.

“Acknowledge feedback, thank those who support you, and address any issues with a personal touch. That not only shows that you’re listening but also that you care deeply about your customers’ experiences.”

Customer support is critical in retaining customers and keeping them from moving to competitors. However, you can control how your customer support is perceived.

Happy customers are more likely to spread the word about your brand, stay with you for extended periods, and give you a competitive edge. Remember that it’s more affordable to retain customers than acquire new ones.

Awais Younas, the Co-Founder of SocialBu, recommends monitoring specific metrics that can help you understand how well your customer support works and detect the areas for improvement. He adds the following:

“To improve customer support, first of all, I analyze the general first response time to ensure customers receive timely solutions to their queries and the customer satisfaction score to see whether they stay happy with the support they received.

To get the complete picture, I also consider Net Promoter Score to evaluate the likelihood of customer recommendations and average resolution time to count the average time your team takes to resolve and close issues.”

Build Your Brand Crisis Plan

To manage your online reputation effectively, it is essential to have a crisis plan at hand. Monitoring data can be challenging because there is often much irrelevant information.

However, by doing so, you can spot trends that point to more significant issues and opportunities, like a sudden surge in negative reviews on social media. A plan can be a game-changer in overcoming a social media crisis.

Many PR managers know about such situations and how difficult it is to manage them. Ben Ajenoui, the Founder of SEO Hero, states :

“When dealing with time-sensitive situations, time is critical. Having a plan in advance helps you instantly react and respond by minimizing the damage.

Prepare your response beforehand to manage the situation more effectively and prevent it from worsening. Your response should be short and direct, using active sentences and mentioning the most important information first.”

You should always stay aware of what’s happening and keep up with the latest news. However, it can be challenging to track everything on the internet manually. Make sure to use online monitoring tools like Mention to prevent any PR crisis that may occur.

Source

Personalize Your Customer Interactions:

A personalized customer experience is essential today, as it helps build customer loyalty and makes them feel special. Personalization requires knowing your audience, including their devices, industry, behaviors, and demographics.

That will help you determine the language and tone to connect with them effectively.

Most customers’ channels to interact with your brand can be customized to fit their preferences. These channels include mobile apps, online ads, emails, chats, and call centers. By tailoring these experiences, you can provide customers with a more personalized and engaging interaction.

However, Andres Mendoza from Elite Legal Marketing notices that it can take some work to get the right balance regarding personalization.

People care about their privacy and don’t like sharing too much private information. It’s best to avoid going overboard with personalization to avoid crossing that line. She also adds a few words:

“It’s not always best to give a lot of things to people when trying to sell them something. Listening to people’s words is better than giving them what they want. That way, you can make sure they have a good experience.”

Set Up Alerts for Negative Sentiments

While positive sentiments can increase sales, customer confidence, and brand loyalty, negative ones can have the opposite effect. But it is okay because positive reviews are as important as negative ones. So, you should instantly react and respond to negative sentiments, too.

According to this survey, 70% of unhappy customers want to connect with a brand again if their complaints are resolved. Additionally, 34% would delete a negative review if they were happy with how the brand responded.

Holger Sindbaek, the Serial Entrepreneur and the Founder of Online Solitaire, agrees with this point of view.

He explicitly states that you should be authentic in your response and ensure they’re satisfied with the resolution. Holger also adds the following:

“In our approach to Brand Reputation Monitoring, we harnessed sentiment analysis within niche forums and social media communities. This wasn’t just about tracking feedback; it was about understanding the pulse of our players.

Analyzing their conversations, we pinpointed exactly what they loved and where we could improve. This direct insight led to targeted updates that boosted player satisfaction and engagement.

It proved that listening closely and acting on niche community feedback is a game-changer for product development and brand loyalty.”

Negative reviews can help your business show the weaknesses of your products and improve your brand based on your customers’ needs and desires. Set up alerts for negative mentions or crises to minimize potential damage.

Moreover, responding to negative opinions presents your brand well, as it shows your human side and lets people know that everyone makes mistakes. After all, apologize and demonstrate that you learned from the feedback, and people will forgive you.

Bottom Line

Taking care of your brand’s reputation is essential. If you want your business to grow, you must pay attention to what people say about you and react instantly if something isn’t right.

If you don’t manage your online reputation, it can have severe consequences and harm your business.

Repairing the damage can take time, resources, and effort. To avoid these negative impacts, being proactive and maintaining a positive brand image is vital. The above tips will help improve your reputation and prevent brand crises.

To improve your online reputation and know who’s talking about your brand, try Mention for 14 days!