Closing the Gap Between Customer Expectations and Brand Experience

There are tons of social networks, review sites, forums, blogs, news sources, and other online spots where your customers are talking about your brand.

If you don't pay attention to all that, you might miss out on business chances, or even, sometimes, put your company in a tricky spot.

That's exactly where brand monitoring becomes really helpful. It lets you take all this valuable information and turn it into useful ideas for your business.

What is brand monitoring?

Brand monitoring involves the continuous tracking of all conversations related to a particular brand across different digital platforms.

By doing this, businesses can be assured of understanding people better with regard to their opinions and feelings towards a certain brand.

In layman's terms, brand monitoring enables a business to utilize information generated by people via various online channels to help them in making the right decisions regarding marketing, branding, customer experience, and product improvements, among others.

Here is an example that illustrates how brand monitoring is done.

Assume that your business has recently released some new products and is now interested in knowing how well they are being received by your target customers.

By implementing brand monitoring techniques, you will not only know how many people are aware of these products but also learn the general opinion about them, including the pros and cons.

Where do brands monitor their presence?

Many people assume customers only talk about brands on social media.

But actually, there are lots of other online places where customers discuss brands daily, such as:

Social Media Platforms

Social media is one of the top places brands look for what people are saying. Most of what's said about a brand usually comes from social media. Think of sites like Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for this.

Forums and Online Communities

Online forums and communities like Reddit or Quora offer really honest and useful information.

This makes them valuable sources of voice of the customer insights and great channels for monitoring. Brands check these platforms to identify potential issues, understand customer sentiment, and join conversations you won't find anywhere else.

Blogs and News Websites

Older forms of media, like blogs and news sites, still really shape how people see and recognize brands. Keeping an eye on news sites is super important, especially when a brand launches a new product, works with another company, or is involved in other big events.

Customer Support Platforms

Customers often share their thoughts on social media and other public sites. But brands also look at what customers say through their own internal communication tools. This includes customer support chats, phone calls, emails, and even text messages – all are checked for mentions of the brand. These give really helpful insights into customer experiences, which help brands make things better.

Steps for creating a brand monitoring strategy

There is no universal brand monitoring strategy.

Depending on the brand and its goals, it can be rather easy or quite a challenging task. That being said, I've created a step-by-step guide on brand monitoring strategies that should work fine for most businesses.

Step 1: Identify Your Objectives

No marketing solution can be implemented without prior goal definition.

When it comes to brand monitoring, possible objectives include:

• Analyzing the sentiments and opinions of customers

• Improving brand reputation

• Monitoring brand reputation

• Competitor analysis

• Customer experience analysis

• Brand influencers identification

• Campaign performance analysis

Step 2: Create SMART Goals

It's time to create goals according to your objectives.

Remember that they should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

For instance:

"Increase positive brand mentions on social media by 20% within six months thanks to influencer collaboration and improved customer experience."

Step 3: Monitor All Possible Channels

Brand monitoring will be incomplete without tracking all the channels related to your brand.

Besides social media platforms, forums, and reviews, you should also monitor the following channels:

• Product discussions on blogs and news sites

• Competitors and industry thought leaders

• News regarding your company

• Backlinks to your brand's website

• Customer service discussions

Step 4: Use Automation and AI Solutions

Monitoring requires effort, especially in its early stages.

Fortunately, there is a range of monitoring tools capable of automating the process.

Here is how:

• Categorize mentions automatically

• Auto-detect sentiments

• Notify you about critical mentions

• Prioritize the mentions requiring prompt actions

• Generate automated reports

• Analyze trends quicker

• Leverage machine learning algorithms

In addition, some brands track mentions of AI assistants and other language models due to their increasing popularity.

Step 5: Participate in Conversations

Monitoring alone won't provide any value unless followed by actions.

Here is what needs to be done next:

• Respond to negative criticism quickly

• Thank the customers for mentioning the brand positively

• Address any misinformation right away

• Alert relevant departments about discovered problems

• Share collected insights between departments

• Follow up on any incidents or problems

Step 6: Analyze KPIs and Optimize Your Strategy

Monitoring has to adjust to your business changes as you evolve.

For this purpose, consider measuring the following KPIs:

• Sentiments trend

• Level of customer satisfaction

• Share of voice

• Levels of engagement

• Resolution time

• Progress of brand awareness

After that, optimize monitoring based on the results.

Final thoughts

In the current world of advanced technology and fierce competition, people expect a lot from corporations. They desire connectedness and personalization, and they value ethical artificial intelligence and safety measures concerning their personal information from any business organization.

However, when businesses fail to provide this kind of experience, this creates the problem referred to as the "customer experience gap".

In order to address this problem, one must engage in customer research regularly, encourage effective communication across all departments of the corporation, come up with innovative ways to educate customers, have management leaders with an empathic attitude toward consumers, and constantly work towards innovation.

Businesses that succeed in meeting this criterion are those that pay attention to the needs of customers, are quick at adopting changes, and create experiences based on integrity and empathy.