Brand monitoring, social media monitoring, social media listening – all indispensable components of a solid marketing strategy regardless of company size and industry.
What all three have in common is keyword monitoring. It’s the building blocks of campaigns, new products, and marketing messaging. You can’t do anything without it, and you can accomplish just about everything with it.
What is keyword monitoring?
The answer is two-fold and depends on what you wish to accomplish. If you’re in the marketing department and prioritize customer sentiment and brand reputation, then keyword monitoring points towards conversations happening online concerning your brand. Ask SEO professionals and they’ll tell you it’s tracking your site’s position against others for particular keywords and phrases.
Why is it important for your business?
Keyword monitoring serves as your digital senses. It’s about hearing and seeing where you exist in online spaces and what’s the attitude towards your brand as a whole. There are several practical applications of keyword monitoring, but we’re going to highlight only three.
Monitor your brand easier
When we talk about brand health, we talk about public perception and reputation. To most this translates to steering clear of major scandals such as what recently happened to Burger King during International Women’s Day. Some keyword research would have told them it’s a bad idea.
But chances you’d get into a major corporate scandal are low. Brand monitoring for most brands encompasses subjects such as general customer satisfaction, user engagement with hashtags, moral and cultural relevance of a product and service. Branded keyword monitoring reveals what’s being said about you and your products, and every opinion is a potential opportunity to reinvent yourself and secure longevity.
Interact with your customers
Now we reach the part of keyword monitoring as it pertains to social listening. Social listening is self-explanatory – you listen to posts and content on social media about your brand whether you’re explicitly tagged or referenced. Customers rarely talk to a brand directly, so it’s your job to seek out both positive and negative interactions and jump right in! Any engagement is better than no engagement. Customers like it when they’re being seen by companies.
Reach the right audience
A useful byproduct of this monitoring and interaction is refining the buyer’s persona of your target audience. Sales pitches only work when they’re precisely targeted. Who is this person and why do they buy your product? How do they spend their time online and what preoccupies them? These are foundations upon which you establish a connection.
Through consistent engagement, you’ve already seen where your ideal customer hangs out online, their habits, their talking points, and their needs. Keyword monitoring supplements your marketing and SEO efforts in achieving better visibility and improving sales performance.
Why do you need a tool for that?
If there’s anything worth your time and money, it’s a keyword monitoring tool. Keywords are the keys that open the gates to better sales and better market shares. Marketers use them to make sense of customer behavior and identify how to make their brand stand out even in the most competitive online spaces. Keywords help you track brand mentions and reactions across social media as well as news publications – going viral seems to be a strong objective these days.
A monitoring tool distills data found across the great expanse of the Internet into actionable results that aid you in your marketing.
Also, this tool can help in monitoring the website’s position in search results. For example, one of such tools is the Keyword rank tracker. This tool will help you constantly monitor website positions, and you can correlate their dynamics with changes on the website.
Online reputation
You know as well as anybody how much weight reputation carries in online spaces. Where you’ve removed all senses, customers have to trust they’ll receive the quality of service and product. Brands perish because of a sinking reputation.
Think of all the restaurants or hotels you’ve avoided having heard ghastly testimonials from those close to you. We always think ‘thank God, I dodged that bullet. Whether that reputation is true or not, there’s no denying what’s written about brand matters. Keyword monitoring helps you stay vigilant about what’s being said about your brand. The earlier you catch bad press the easier time you have to change the conversation.
Better targeting
Understanding customer behavior correlates to sales numbers and this all has to do with how you target and position your brand online. This understanding hinges on monitoring performed on the industry-crucial keywords and phrases that matter most to your customers. In essence, they’re not branded and reveal customer behavior. Customer research and monitoring reveals more about their interests and preferences as well as identifies their specific language.
Brands are pressured to talk to their customers and striking the right conversational tone is more of an art form than anything else. One you learn by keeping a close eye on your customer base.
More effective campaigns
Every marketer worth their salt compares campaign performance and digs deep into the numbers. Social engagement on posts and branded hashtags are the bread and butter here to determine how well a campaign has performed online. Keyword monitoring is basically the digital breadcrumbs you follow to greater insights into your brand health. Comparing sales numbers pre and during the campaign is a given, but they don’t answer the question of what worked and what didn’t.
Keyword monitoring forms the basis of an analytics-heavy performance that establishes benchmarks. What worked, what didn’t, what are the goals for the next campaign, and how future campaigns stack up against previous successes.
Better overall results
To exist on the Internet and generate revenue requires mastery over your most vital keywords. Those lucky enough to operate in a localized niche have a much easier time fine-tuning their SEO to rank first on any given keyword or phrase. However, it’s not as easy most of the time as there’s stiff competition for the coveted first page of Google search results. Even harder to land yourself in the first three at the very top of the page.
At best, brands can hope to snag attention through well-placed Google ads. Even then brands have to know their keywords.
Also Read: How to Boost Your Business With The Help of SEO?
