Buzz Tracking — Know What Audience Says About Your Brand
Tags: Audience, Tracking, Brand Strategy, Monitoring

As a marketer or a business owner, you might be having a large fan base who could be mentioning, liking, commenting, or tweeting about your brand. But, have you been able to track any of these? If not, then it’s time for you to resort to buzz tracking or buzz monitoring to catch every brand mention in the online space.

Nearly 97% of consumers use online media to research any product or service they want to buy. Upon that, 89% of consumers read online reviews and business responses to understand the way you react. Now, how are these statistics relatable to buzz tracking?

It indicates that customers are talking about your brand online. They want reassurance before they invest in your products or services. For this, they are turning to every possible medium in the online space right from online review sites to social media sites. All they want is to learn about your products and services. They repeatedly visit your website and talk about your brand everywhere that creates buzz, which acts as social proof.

There are numerous ways you can track buzz that we will be discussing in this blog, but before moving forward, let’s see how you can create a buzz.

Here’s how you can create a social buzz

A great way to create social buzz is by launching new products and services and bringing them into the public eye. And, one that’s hot and trending currently is sharing teasers that get the customer excited. However, you have to be clear with the platform you choose to release teasers. Here, Twitter is the appropriate platform that would be useful for your products and build anticipation. Also, email marketing will play a significant role in sharing the details further.

The best example is the Amazon that created a buzz for their gadget “The Echo” or popularly known as Amazon Alexa for which it created three teaser ads. Missy Elliott, Alec Baldwin, and former Miami Dolphins quarterback, Dan Marino were the stars who acted in the commercial. You can have a look at the commercial down below-

Another great way to get the people talking is by building awareness that the non-profit organization- Worldwide Breast Cancer did so well. The organization created a campaign known as #KnowYourLemons. It used a crate of 12 lemons to explain different warning signs, as shown in the image down below.

We can say that it is one of the biggest and most powerful routes to persuade customers into buying your products and services. It is crucial that you accurately track your buzz on various digital avenues. All you need to do is to tap into customer conversations, opinions, and recommendations. Other important things you have to consider are:

Public discussion avenues on the Internet like boards and forums

Consumer ratings

Moblogs

Social networking sites

What Will You Get Out of Buzz Tracking?

When it comes to buzz tracking, the most important benefit it gives is marketing insight into the consumer attitude and perception that it has for your brand. Other than this, there are many more benefits that will compel you to resort to buzz tracking. Here are some of them noted below, let’s have a look:

Sentiment Analysis

When it comes to buzz tracking the very first thing that comes to our mind is sentiment analysis. Buzz tracking aids the identification of important topics that trigger a specific sentiment and shapes public perceptions. Whether positive or negative comments surround your brand, they will help you spot the key factors or trigger points that you might not have otherwise. And, working on those key factors you can attract a large customer base by creating a marketing strategy around their sentiments.

More Market Intelligence

One of the biggest advantages of buzz tracking is the ability to locate your market and get more insights about who is talking about what and when. As soon as you get insights into your niche market, you get to know which product or service of yours people are looking for. This way, you can reach people, help them, and generate a sale. Moreover, you can benefit your brand’s image tremendously.

Apart from this, pinpointing your customers will allow for more effective targeting. You can also identify influencers in your industry who could assist you in spreading brand awareness and gauge customer opinions.

Access to all Relevant Discussions

Buzz tracking gives you access to what and how much people are talking about your brand. Whether you are a small business owner or a fortune 500, you will know what is being talked about you. It is always great to have a positive comment about your brand; however, even if you get a negative comment or negative buzz, it will help you spot the issues. When you solve their problems it gives an impression that you are concerned about them. This way, you can make your unhappy customers happy and get things right.

Also, it shows their side of the story that helps you identify the common issues customers face when they use your products or services.

So, now that you know how buzz tracking can benefit your brand, let’s have a look at the steps you can follow and leverage all the social data at your disposal.

2 Steps to Buzz Tracking and Benchmarking Social Conversations

You will get to know the steps to create a buzz baseline to gauge consumer opinion. So, let’s have a look at the outlined steps at different stages of the campaign:

#1 Before You Start A Campaign

The best way to begin buzz tracking is to chart day-to-day conversations and general sentiment about your brand across various marketing avenues available online. Here’s what you need to do:

Find Your Baseline

When we talk about establishing a baseline, begin tracking social channels and understand what people have to say about your brand today. Also, consider how many times you have been a part of the discussion.

The purpose is to know and understand the conversations your brand already generates usually, without the need to launch a campaign. You will also know what your target customers are currently talking about and what is their concern? Also, you will know the buzzwords they are using. All these insights will help you in developing a marketing strategy. You will exactly know what to include in your message and what to leave.

Find Your Competitors’ Baseline

In the step above you have been setting the baseline for your brand. But in this step, you will set the baseline for your competitors. Here you have to consider their brand mentions, likes, comments, traffic, shares, and other important elements. You can use social media analytics tools to get the insights as manually it takes a lot of time.

Consider what their customers have to say about their brand. You will get to know whether they are happy or complaining, which could be a valuable insight to feed your own marketing strategy.

Find Your Industry Baseline

Now you have to set your industry baseline. The purpose is to know what people have to say about your industry, and how often they like to talk about it. Consider industry mentions and take a look at the conversation around the mentions.

Set Goals

Now that you have set a baseline, it’s time to set the goals that can give you a meaningful comparison. You will know how far you have been successful in persuading people at the end of the campaign. The common goals include traffic, lead generation, thought leadership, brand awareness, crisis management, or leads. As long as you delve into the practice of creating social media campaigns and running them across different avenues, you will realize that your marketing goals and predictions are becoming more accurate.

#2 During the Campaign

Look at the Right Numbers

As discussed in the above point, the marketing goals of buzz tracking could be different, but creating a buzz can help you fulfill many goals. Let’s see how you can tap into the conversation and track them to achieve your marketing objective:

Traffic

When it comes to traffic, track what people are more likely to share. It gives you an idea, what appeals to the audience the most. You can also consider the email traffic you received, the number of time people stayed on your page and the source from where people are coming.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is related to sales activities that take place on your page. So, the factors would be different from others, where social shopping is the main focus; especially, if it is an eCommerce website. Here you can track social listening metrics that include conversations, feedback, suggestions, and product reviews.

Thought Leadership

After lead generations come thought leadership, where you have to track different elements. It includes- mentions of your brand or thought leaders, referral visits to your website, backlinks, comments, shares, and retweets.

Brand Awareness

Brand recall and brand recognition are two parameters that come to mind when we think of awareness. To measure brand awareness and the buzz created around your brand, you need to track the following:

Impressions, reach, brand mentions, the share of voice, likes comments, and shares, and lastly the public sentiment that surrounds your brand. Monitoring these, you will know whether you are heading in the right direction or not.

Look Beyond the Numbers

Many marketers are fooled as they completely focus on numbers. They only consider the volume of posts, mentions, likes, shares, and followers. Based on these, they decide whether their marketing campaign is a hit or a miss. But, when it comes to buzz tracking, a completely different picture emerges in the absence of context and sentiments that surround your brand.

When you consider public sentiments and context, you get a closer look at what type of buzz surrounding your brand. You need to look into public perception by reading the comments and understanding the discussions. Supposedly, you encounter negative reviews and frustration, it’s too early to equate the number of comments and shares with success. So, ignoring the context can prove dangerous.

Make Changes as Needed

Now that you have considered every aspect of buzz tracking the biggest advantage you can have is the margin and opportunity to make changes in the strategy of the campaign.

Real-time buzz tracking will allow you to tweak the tonality of the message you want to spread, or change the concept after discovering the trigger points. However, make sure that you plan for a long-running campaign to have a more accurate picture of the buzz it will generate. Also, you have more time and margin to make changes as campaigns designed for a short duration don’t give a complete picture. We would recommend you to follow a structured plan even if you are making changes so you can use the social data to its full capacity.

Summarize and Record

After considering numerous elements and measuring the results, it’s time to record what you did and the time you made the change. As you aggregate and summarize the results, you can refer to them later on for review and incorporate all that you learned into your next marketing campaign. It provides for a better ground of comparison and understands the intensity of impact it left on your customers.

How Mentionlytics Can Help in Buzz Tracking?

Buzz tracking involves loads of information available online that your consumers or audience share on different marketing avenues. It can be challenging to track this and more time-consuming. Instead, we recommend using social media monitoring tools for buzz tracking. It will give you a complete picture of your customers’ behaviour, preferences, sentiments, and engagement.

One such social media monitoring tool is Mentionlytics. With Mentionlytics, you can enjoy a hassle-free time tracking loads of information in one go. It offers numerous features that are incredibly beneficial for your brand management that include:

You can collect important insights,

Look for trends and strategize your campaign

Access to mention insights,

Find the right influencers for your brand,

Grow your brand’s reputation and sales

Know about your competitors, products, and industry

Discover public opinion about your brand

Complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website.

Apart from this, you can also join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your brand with Mentionlytics.

So, what are you waiting for?

Get started with a free version here!

Original article: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/buzz-tracking-know-what-audience-says-about-your-brand/