Your brand reputation is an asset. What your target audience thinks of your company can have a great impact on your revenue. Both positive and negative.
That's what makes brand monitoring important. But what many companies fail to realise is that not only short term monitoring of reviews and social mentions is important. That's why on this list of top brand monitoring tools, you'll also find ones that help you measure brand sentiment over time. Let's dive in.
Short vs. Long Term Brand Monitoring
First, let's talk about the difference between short and long term brand monitoring. Most available monitoring tools focus on short term tracking of brand mentions, positive and negative comments. This gives you and your team the chance to respond and quickly gather customer feedback on your active marketing campaigns. It's crucial to implement this type of brand monitoring, especially for B2C businesses whose revenue could be directly impacted by the negative mentions.
However, there's more to brand perception than just the company's online activity and monitoring brand mentions. A properly built and managed brand can be a massive asset for the company, bringing in more customers and revenue. But building that is a long term process that includes looking at and analysing demographic and behavioral data as well as competitor analysis over time. By looking at historical data and conducting market research, you and your team will be able to adjust your marketing and branding strategies and improve your overall brand's perception.
Read also: Understand brand equity and how to get traction
Top Brand Monitoring Tools You Should Consider
Now, let's get into our recommendations for the best brand monitoring tools. Most companies use a combination of a few of these to get a better overview of the brand sentiment, depending on their specific target audience and target market. And this is the best approach for brand monitoring, especially if your brand has a strong online presence.
To help you navigate this list, we organised the tools in order of the least complex and comprehensive to the most. So if you're just starting out with brand monitoring - check out the first few tools. However, if you need next-level brand tracking and analytics - go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of the list for the best recommendations.
Google Alerts
If you're looking for free brand monitoring tools - look no further. Google Alerts is a great tool for smaller businesses or those just starting out with brand monitoring. It's very easy to use, due to how simple it is. You just type in a phrase and receive email alerts anytime someone uses it. However, this simplicity is a double-edged sword. First of all, Google Alerts doesn't monitor social media platforms, so you won't have a complete overview of all the mentions. Additionally, the tool doesn't offer sentiment analysis or detailed reports.
We recommend Google Alerts as a starter tool if you're just setting up your brand monitoring efforts. It can also be useful as a competitor's analysis tool.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Free tool
- Easy to use
- Doesn't track brand mentions on social media
- Hootsuite
While Hootsuite is primarily known as a social media management tool, it does offer certain brand monitoring features. If you're using it to manage your social media, you can consider giving those features a try. Besides their standard brand monitoring feature, they also offer Hootsuite Insights which was created in partnership with Brandwatch (a tool that's also on this list). It's a more advanced tool that includes more in-depth analytics and consumer insights as well as social listening.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Easy to use
- Customizable reports
- Primarily a social media management tool
Read also: Brandr og rebrand? Should you change your corporate identity
Brand24
Brand24 is one of the most popular brand monitoring tools and has been around for quite some time. Most of its features revolve around social media listening but they also offer some functionalities for competition research and analysing your brand mentions over time. What's great about this tool is how comprehensive it is when it comes to collecting mentions from different social media channels. Besides basic channels like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, you can also track mentions from newsletters, podcasts, various news sites as well as review sites.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Monitoring mentions from all major social media sites
- Tracking your reach across different platforms
- Sentiment analysis
- User-friendly and easy to set up
Keyhole
Keyhole offers all the "classic" brand monitoring features (tracking mentions, sentiment analysis, traffic insights), but unlike other tools it also offers hashtag analysis which is great for brands that are very active across multiple social media platforms. The tool also has features to help you predict social media trends which is great for companies heavily relying on social media as part of their marketing strategy. You can create alerts to stay ahead of all the major trends giving your brand more visibility online.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Hashtag analysis
- Trend analysis across various social media networks, websites, review sites etc.
- Social listening & sentiment analysis of the mentions
- Brandwatch
Similarly to Brand24, Brandwatch has been around for a long time and acquired a lot of high-profile clients like Nestle or Toyota. When it comes to brand monitoring software, Brandwatch is definitely one of the best choices, but it is also one of the most expensive ones. It offers extensive analytics powered by machine learning and AI as well as historical data so that you can monitor online conversations going as far back as 2010.
When it comes to this brand monitoring tool, it's best suited for large companies and enterprises. If you're a smaller company, chances are this tool might be too complex for your needs and won't provide a great ROI. However, if your brand is reaching very wide audiences across different markets - Brandwatch might be the brand monitoring tool for you.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Live reporting & real-time data
- Extensive social listening analysis
- Access to an AI analyst
- Access to historical social media data
Read also: The secrets to brandbuilding nobody told you
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a brand monitoring tool trusted by big brands like Adidas or Duracell. And there's a reason for that. Besides brand monitoring across 10 different social media accounts and over 150 million websites, blogs etc., the unique feature Talkwalker offers is video and image recognition. This means you can analyze brand exposure like the use of your logo in more types of content, giving you a more complete overview of the conversations happening around your brand online.
Talkwalker is definitely one of the more sophisticated tools with extensive brand monitoring capabilities, but it's also a rather expensive choice. However, when it comes to modern brand monitoring tools, this one stands out thanks to the unique video and image recognition. If your brand is featured in these types of content often - investing in this tool will be a good way to keep track of those mentions.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Video and image recognition features
- Access to historical conversations (up to 2 years back)
- Extensive analytics and customisable reports
- Tracking in multiple languages
brandr Index
Brandr Index is a solution that's very different from others on this list. The focus is on the long term brand strategy and brand reputation. Unlike other brand monitoring tools, brandr is not software that you use yourself. It's a team of branding experts who conduct research in the four crucial areas of branding: differentiation, segmentation, perception and image, social responsibility and sustainability. Based on that they create a comprehensive report with actionable insights that you and your team can implement into your sales and marketing strategy.
What's special about brandr Index is their 360 approach to your brand or product. Besides analysing overall brand sentiment, you also get a thorough analysis of the entire target market and your brand's performance compared to direct competitors. When it comes to long term brand monitoring, brandr is the perfect solution for both B2B and B2C businesses. They recommend conducting their analysis once a year and you can also work with their experts to help you implement changes to your strategy.
Key Features & Benefits:
- A once-a-year, comprehensive evaluation of your brand
- Access to branding experts
- Detailed report of your brand's reputation among the target audience and target market
- Actionable insights that are easy to implement and measure
- A long-term approach to building a good brand reputation
Optional Tools Worth Considering
The tools listed above are specifically meant for brand monitoring and keeping track of your social media platforms. However, if you want to track all the mentions, you might want to consider using an extra tool to track backlinks, which are often not included in your main brand monitoring tool. This is especially useful if your content marketing strategy is an important element of your overall marketing or if competitor analysis is important to you.
Semrush
Semrush is a tool best known among content marketing and SEO professionals. But that doesn't mean it's not a valuable brand monitoring tool. It has useful social media monitoring features so that you can easily track your online activity and the results of various campaigns. But as a SEO tool, Semrush offers something that many other brand monitoring services don't. And that's tracking your indirect brand mentions. By that we mean links to your website, your products or your content that don't mention your brand by name but can affect potential customers and your brand's reputation. Semrush is also great when it comes to competitor monitoring and seeing how well they are doing with their online presence.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Vast SEO functionalities
- Monitoring backlinks
- Competitor monitoring
- Monitoring your social media channels and their performance
Ahrefs
Ahrefs, similarly to Semrush, is a tool mostly used by content marketing and SEO experts. And while its main purpose is to support your organic traffic efforts, it can help you track indirect brand mentions, just like Semrush. When it comes to these two tools, there's rarely a need to use them both, so we recommend choosing the one that suits your team's needs the most - especially when it comes to SEO and organic traffic.
Key Features & Benefits:
- Vast SEO functionalities
- Monitoring backlinks
- Competitor monitoring
Read also: What's the difference between B2B and B2C branding? If there are any...
Which Brand Monitoring Tool Is The Best For Your Business?
When looking at this list, you'll notice that most of the tools are quite similar, however each one has specific features that differentiate it from other tools like more in-depth analytics, the approach to research or image monitoring.
The starting point for this decision should be your brand monitoring goals - why do you want to monitor your brand and what do you hope to achieve? Are you looking to understand why your marketing campaigns are unsuccessful in a certain niche? Do you want to research customers' opinions about your brand in the online channels? Or is this all about crisis management and getting ahead of negative comments that could affect your revenue? Depending on your specific goals, a different web monitoring tool will be best for you.
It's also important to compare pricing models and calculate the possible ROI different brand monitoring tools provide. Some of the tools we've listed above are a bigger investment and it's always crucial that you see actual results and returns on any tool you purchase.
Another point to consider when choosing any tool is how it can be integrated into your marketing team or sales team. Your internal teams need to be able to efficiently use the tool, gather insights and implement changes to the strategy.
Why Improving Brand Perception Should Be Part Of Your Company Strategy?
We're guessing you're already aware of how much impact branding can have on a business's success, since you're here, searching for brand and social media monitoring tools. But while many marketing strategies include branding and focus on improving the brand's image, this should be a part of your overall company strategy. Your branding has a direct impact on every single person inside the company as well as on potential customers, investors and other stakeholders.
To answer this question really simply - great branding is very beneficial for any business, but bad branding or a poor brand reputation can have disastrous effects. Not only when it comes to revenue or growth but also when it comes to hiring new talent which is increasingly getting harder and harder nowadays.
If you'd like to talk to branding experts about your brand - contact us and let's see how we can improve your brand together!
