Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Let me ask you something. If a customer complained about your business on TikTok today. Would you even know about it? Here's the truth.
Most businesses are flying completely blind when it comes to what's being said about them online, and that is risky. There was some research conducted by Esteban Kolsky that shows that 96% of unhappy customers complain directly to the company. They'll tell friends, or they'll post it online on social media where hundreds or even thousands of people can see it. So monitoring isn't just about, you know, customer service. It's about protecting your online reputation and learning what your audience actually wants and even finding opportunities that you may have missed and your competitors are taking advantage of.
So in this episode, I'm going to be breaking it all down. Why monitoring matters, what exactly you should be looking for, the free and the paid tools you can use, and how to make monitoring part of your weekly routine. Because without it, it's really holding you back.
So stick with me, because by the end, you'll have a clear plan that will help you keep track of your brand across all platforms.
Let's first of all dig into the why. The first and most obvious reason is reputation management. Imagine this, okay? A customer posts on Facebook that their food delivery was late and the order was, well, wrong. You don't reply that.
Their friends pile in agreeing they've also had a terrible service as well. And suddenly one mistake has turned into an enormous thread of complaints. That's the kind of snowball effect that you can prevent by monitoring.
Second, let's look at the customer insights side of things. So monitoring isn't just about being defensive. It's about being proactive. If you keep seeing the same questions like do you deliver on Sundays? Or is this gluten free?
That's free market research for you. It tells you what content to post, what FAQs to answer, and even what products or services people want from you. Thirdly, there is competitor awareness. Have you ever checked the comments on a competitor's ad? I have.
Sometimes people actually complain about them. Exactly on the ad. And this is a golden opportunity for you to position yourself differently by monitoring your competitors. It helps you see what's working for them and also where they're falling short.
And finally, monitoring shows you industry trends. So, for example, trying to think during the pandemic cafes that were monitoring hashtags like #workfromhome noticed an opportunity to promote takeaway coffees and they set up subscriptions. They saw the trend really early because they were paying close attention to their monitoring. Now let's talk about what to actually monitor. So what should we be watching out for?
Well, I think you should start with brand mentions. So you got the tagged and the untagged because not everybody remembers to use the sign and they'll just say they've bought some shoes from your business. Not impressed. And if you're not monitoring, you will never see it. Then there's keywords and hashtags.
So please try to track industry terms, local searches and trends. So let's say you are a wedding photographer. You may want might want to monitor hashtags like hashtag, hashtag, wedding planning or keywords like wedding photographer, Dublin. Then start monitoring competitors names and see how they're perceived as well. Are customers happy?
Frustrated? What are they raving about or not? Then look at reviews. And I don't mean just Google Business Profile, my favourite one, but Tripadvisor, Yelp, Trustpilot, and even platforms like booking.com for hotels. Or there's another one called OpenTable for restaurants.
You can also monitor sentiment, but this is more for paid tools and it tells you whether the mentions about your brand are positive, negative or neutral. For example, some people might be mentioning your brand a lot but, but if half of them are complaints, then that's a, that's a problem that you need to solve. You also need to monitor industry conversations like Reddit threads, Facebook groups, WhatsApp, community chats. You, you can't always monitor everything. I know, I'm completely aware of that.
But being fully aware of these conversations gives you a step up.
Let me give you some real world examples that I've come across. A restaurant in London once went viral on TikTok because a food blogger posit posted a negative review. The video got millions of views. The restaurant only found out because a completely loyal and regular customer tagged them. Now if they'd have been monitoring TikTok keywords around their particular brand and their name, they would have caught it earlier and hopefully they would have responded faster.
On the positive side though, monitoring can also uncover praise that you didn't know existed. As you know, I work with small businesses where customers were raving about them in Facebook, particularly in Facebook groups and the business wasn't in the groups so they didn't know about this wonderful reference about them. So once they started monitoring, they were able to thank those customers and turn them into brand ambassadors.
Another example, a clothing brand, noticed their customers were constantly complaining about competitors extremely slow shipping. So to that end they made fast shipping part of their marketing and it became a huge key selling point. Now they only spotted that gap by monitoring competitor mentions. So do you.
Let's now talk about the tools because you can't manually search. Well, I'm sure you can, but who would? So you can't manually search everywhere all the time. So let's talk about the free tools. First, Google Alerts, you'll get an email when your brand or your keyword is mentioned.
Then you've got Twitter or X using search and lists which still have a good place in your marketing. Then you've got LinkedIn with their competitor analytics so you can see how you compare with similar companies. Then you've got TikTok keyword insights to spot emerging content trends. Then you've got the paid for tools like Mention, Brand24. Agorapulse. You've got Hootsuite and sprout social where they've got all in one dashboards where you can schedule posts and and monitor Mentions as well.
There's just so many different areas, so many different brands that you could look at that could monitor not just mentions but sentiment analysis as well. But they do tend to get more expensive. You have to pick the tool that matches your budget and your needs. So start small and scale up.
Right, before we finish, let me share a quick tip on how to make monitoring part of your weekly routine. So daily, please check your notifications on your main platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, you know, whichever ones. Then please go over on a weekly basis to review your Google alerts and your keyword searches. Then on a monthly basis, look at your competitor mentions and your industry reports. This way monitoring doesn't feel overwhelming.
You build a better habit that keeps you connected to what people are saying.
So to recap, monitoring protects your reputation. It gives you customer insights that fuel your marketing. It helps you understand your competitors and your industry trends. And if you only do one thing after this podcast today, please set up Google Alerts for your brand and of course your top competitor. That way you can see the conversations happening about you and about them.
I'd love to hear from you about what you found to be the most surprising and possibly interesting thing that you've discovered by monitoring things online. So please do drop it in the comments or of course send me a message. And thank you so much for listening in and tuning in today. And remember, what you don't know online can hurt you. But with monitoring you can stay ahead of the curve.
And that's all for now. We'll be back again for another episode next Monday. Have a great week.
