Brand Monitoring Made Easier: Use These 5 Incredible Keyword Strategies

8 min readJun 21, 2018

Nowadays with the influx of Internet users, markets are becoming more competitive. The consumers are more informed about the products and services they purchase. This poses a serious challenge for brand managers, as well as marketers to communicate their brand to the customers effectively. Effective keyword strategies are important for brand monitoring so that the message reaches the targeted customers.

The World Wide Web has provided businesses with new avenues to reach the customer and engage with them in discussions about the brand. Whether it is through social media marketing or using the correct keywords in your blog posts, marketers are required to create smart brand marketing strategies to target the online consumer. Hence, it is not only the brand’s physical existence on the shelves that is important but also its presence online.

Brand Monitoring

Every business designs a marketing strategy to reach its target audience effectively. Such a strategy or plan by the marketing department involves, as traditionally implied, the education of target customers about the brand. However, there is more to it than this. In addition to creating, brand awareness in the market, smart brand managers must also monitor the customer’s developing interest in the brand. The marketing strategy which is put into place must, therefore, spread awareness about the brand or enable the business in creating a loyal customer base. Moreover, it must also have the capacity to monitor the brand reach on various social media outlets. It is important to use brand monitoring as a business analytics process in assessing the viability of the brand among online customers.

What can be gained through brand monitoring?

In addition to sales, a brand also requires finding out what people are saying about it. Monitoring customers’ responses to your products and services or any social issues you are campaigning for allows you to gauge their preferences. The customers are, hence, the most important component of an effective brand marketing strategy. So, tracking brand mentions online, honest customer feedback, as well as other online discussions about the brand, provides brand managers with the opportunities to direct their business towards the right customers, markets and in the right manner.

Why are keywords important?

Keywords are part and parcel of every Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. According to HubSpot research, around 61% of marketers claimed that a better SEO strategy and growth in their organic presence is their priority (impactbnd). They are words and phrases which define your content, and which searchers look for in search queries. Using the right keywords means getting a better ranking in search engine results. Subsequently, you are able to reach more of your target audience. Around 93 percent of online experiences are initiated from a search engine, with Google being one of the most important ones. It is also interesting to note that in 2016, over 1.2 trillion global searches were conducted each month (searchenginejournal). For a business, specifically, the use of relevant keywords is important for driving targeted web traffic to its website and improving the brand’s online growth. The brands which make use of the right keywords can improve their sales and success online (woodstream).

Which are the right keywords for your brand?

Choosing the right keywords may seem like a simple, easy-to-do step. However, it is a complete process, which involves a better understanding regarding your brand. It further includes knowing your audience and the kind of content they prefer. Hence, to create the right content for your targeted customers and to ensure that it is visible to them through the use of relevant keywords, brands must understand the needs of their visitors. This involves an analysis of which age, income or other demographic categories their online viewers fall into, as well as what language or content they seek. This is where brand monitoring steps in. By allowing brands to track, as well as interact with customers online on social media, discussion forums, and community groups, as well as helping them in proper keyword research, brand monitoring becomes necessary for the success of a brand.

Five keyword strategies

The most important question for a brand doing its keyword research is which keywords should it track? Keywords are pertinent to understanding how the target audience feels about your brand. However, using some keywords could give you a better analysis of your brand’s image than others. Hence, below is a list of five keyword strategies that will help you in the process of choosing the right keywords for effective brand monitoring. Although all these keyword strategy tips and tricks, mentioned below, are useful for all businesses, they may apply to some more than others. Every brand must, therefore, adopt what best suits its interests and marketing goals for the future.

#1 Tracking hashtags

Whether it is to create pre-event hype or discussion around a social cause, hashtags have become increasingly important on all social media outlets. It is a great idea for brands to track their hashtags. They might be mentioned or used more on social media rather than the brand name. These hashtags could consist of your brand’s tagline or slogan. This would be a great strategy to employ if your business is organizing or participating in an event to create awareness about the brand.

Hashtag strategies are a great way to improve your SEO. You can choose between having a brand hashtag or a campaign one, depending on your marketing strategy. However, it is important to remember that hashtags should be both unique and easy to remember. This means that the hashtag you use must not only resonate your brand’s image but also be short enough for people to use easily. In addition to creating your own hashtag, you can even use the already trending ones. This would mean that your message can be seen by a massive audience who has been using or following that specific hashtag. Nonetheless, you must ensure that whichever hashtag you use to promote your brand, it should be relevant to it as well (blog.wishbond). As marketers, you should then monitor these hashtags to check how many people are using it and in what ways. This will give you a good idea of who your brand is targeting.

#2 Avoid keyword clutter

Most people believe that inserting keywords in every other sentence of the content will help them generate more viewership. A lot of businesses come up with an arbitrary keyword density goal without proper keyword research. This leads to redundant phrasing that reduces the content’s quality. Rather, try to improve your keyword research to come up with a narrowed down version.

You can even use Google AdWords Keyword Planners or Google Trends to short-list the ones which generate the greatest search volume. Also, make sure that you carry on this keyword de-cluttering process regularly. Preferably it should be done a few times a year, as keywords always come and go out of style. Moreover, it would perhaps be a good idea to try using variations of the keyword or phrase to naturally fit it in the content you create (Forbes).

#3 Finding your keyword gaps

It is important that you look for keyword gaps in your strategy. You can do this by tracking your website’s gap in comparison with that of your competitors’ paid keywords. There might be several content topics on which your coverage is not adequate. Perhaps your team needs to focus more on them. However, it is also important that you only take account of keyword gaps which are in high popularity and which if used can prove to be critical for your business success online (blog.Alexa).

There are several things you can do to fill in these keyword gaps. The first step is to start with an analysis of the keywords you already use. As brand managers, you must ask the basic question of whether the keywords you use effectively represent your brand. Moreover, it is also important to plan for the future and pick up new keywords that would symbolize future goals. A good idea would be to look for search volume for these related keywords beforehand. This would be particularly useful if you are stepping into a new market segment. The second step would be to assess your competition. This would be from sites similar to yours in terms of both content and audience (blog.Alexa). You can use several keyword analysis tools available online to evaluate your competitors, as well as your own, keywords usage. This will help you identify the relevant gaps in your keyword strategy and help you fill them.

#4 Looking for Long Tail Keywords

As a business, not every customer that you deal with is the same. Each customer might have different preferences and may view your product or service differently than others. It is perhaps more convenient for you to categorize your customers into groups or market segments based on their characteristics. These include data such as age, gender, income and other demographic classifications. Long Tail keywords become important in targeting such more specialized consumer markets segments. You must remember that about 50 percent of search queries are four words or longer. Hence, most of the Internet users are searching for keywords which are more specific or in other words, long-tail keywords (impactbnd). These keywords are more specified and low competition. So, try using Long Tail organic keywords if you are planning to conquer new opportunities and explore innovative content ideas (blog.Alexa).

As a marketer, it is important for you to understand that your target audience does not wish to waste time. They would only want to be directed to websites that are relevant to their search query. Hence, those visitors who reached your website from a general keyword search are more likely to leave it very quickly as compared to those who reached it through a more specific long tail keyword search. Hence, using long tail keyword does not only save the time of your audience, but ends up lowering your bounce rate, improving your conversion rate, increasing average time spent on site, and consequently giving you a competitive edge over others.

#5 Monitor industry keywords

Each industry has its own keywords and jargons. A great way to identify new industry trends and reach your target audience is to find industry-specific keywords. If you use updated industry keywords, you have a better chance of generating traffic for your website. Hence, this makes it important to constantly stay in touch with what is happening in your industry. If there is a new campaign your competitors are taking part in, a new innovation in the production of a product, or something as simple as an industry fair being advertised online, you need to know everything. Using the right hashtag at the right time, or perhaps taking part in a discussion about your industry would make your brand more visible. Moreover, industry keywords must be recognized through not only observing those that your competitors use but by also keeping an open eye for something that is completely new.

To Sum Up

Brand monitoring is important for every business; whether small or large, each must invest in knowing more about its target audience and its customers’ views about the brand. Keywords are particularly important in this respect; especially using the right ones at the right time can do wonders for a brand. They not only allow the brand to reach their customers online through better SEO keyword strategies but also help them in tracking the brand’s reach. However, keyword research and brand monitoring online can be a cumbersome process. There are several tools available online that brands can use for monitoring customer responses on social media and different web pages. However, in order to design an effective brand marketing as well as monitoring strategy, marketers must consider all these aspects of keyword management and resources placed at his or her disposal.

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Originally posted on Mentionlytics:

https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/brand-monitoring-made-easier-5-incredible-keyword-strategies/