media update’s Aisling McCarthy looks at the importance of brand tracking and how it can be leveraged.

The Internet and the media are both saturated by vast amounts of data. Navigating through this data, and finding useful information for businesses, can prove tricky.

Brand tracking can help businesses gain a greater understanding of the people and the topics that are important to their brands, and can help to identify where marketing strategies need to be tweaked to make them more effective.

1. Get to know your followers

Brands sometimes have a basic understanding of the people they want to reach and what those consumers like. This understanding is, however, not always backed by data and means they might be missing out on a demographic or aiming their content at the wrong market.

Brand tracking services give businesses the information that can help to ensure you are delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time. It allows you to track the performance of your marketing material and see what content best resonates with your audience.

Brand tracking can also help brands identify where they are getting good ROI, and which platforms are not suited to them. For instance, a brand may spend hours taking that perfect shot for Instagram but, through brand tracking, may discover that it is not generating any leads.

This allows businesses to build more effective marketing strategies and to invest in the channels that work best for them. This can be done by comparing the success of past campaigns, identifying what works for specific audiences, and what does not.

2. Keep tabs on your competitors

Stay up to date with what competitors have to say, what content they are producing, and how they are marketing it. By keeping an eye on businesses with a similar audience, it is easy to identify what content that audience found engaging and which pieces fell flat. This will allow brands with the same target market to know what their audience wants to see more of, and what content should be avoided.

By monitoring specific competitors, brands can stay up to date with the goings-on in their industry, ensuring their content hits all the right spots, learning from what their competitors do right, and avoiding any mistakes they might make.

3. Discover hot topics

Tracking a specific brand can help identify which topics their target market is interested in. Through monitoring specific topic keywords, brands can be notified of any mentions of those keywords within the media.

Specific topics can be tracked on social media to monitor what consumers are saying. For example, if the topic ‘medical aid in South Africa’ was tracked, it would be possible to keep an eye on what people are saying about the topic, and then tailor your marketing material to suit the needs of those consumers.

To identify a topic of importance, keep an eye on three things:
  • What people are frequently mentioning and asking questions about;
  • Topics that pop up in conversations about your brand or competitors; and
  • Unique posts that earned large amounts of engagement.
Brand tracking identifies what people want to hear about, what questions they want answered, and what kinds of content they like best. This inside information can be used to avoid repeating mistakes made in the past and to market a brand in a format that their followers react to.

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Brand tracking and media intelligence go hand in hand. See how media intelligence processes have grown with technology in our article, The evolution of media intelligence – from manual processing to AI-driven tracking.