In marketing, you always want to know what the customer is saying about you.

Some companies fail because they have a radically different concept of their self-image versus what the customer is actually perceiving. That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on the channels they use to see where your company is mentioned, both for your knowledge in the future and to act in the present if needed. Here’s what you need to know about brand mentions online.

What Is a Brand Mention in Digital Marketing? 

Basically, a brand mention is any time someone talks about your product or service online. Obviously, not all mentions are created equal. A mention on someone’s personal blog won’t get as much attention as a major publication’s article, but both are technically mentions. Social media posts about your product are also mentions.

Why Do Unlinked Brand Mentions Matter? 

Mentions of your brand that don’t have a branded link are a sign to Google’s algorithm that you are organically growing as a more important name. In turn, this will boost your entire SEO profile, both for your own content and for other mentions you receive. 

How To Find Brand Mentions

Simply Googling your brand name isn’t going to be enough to get the job done. You won’t see more recent results or different posts on social media, which can be key. Also, depending on your audience, there may be too many mentions to seek out manually. The good news is there are resources out there that can help.

Social Searcher 

Social Searcher is a tool that allows you to enter in branded hashtags, terms, or your brand name, and see mentions on social media in real-time. You can also apply this to trending topics or individual users to see topics tangentially related to your brand. There are also sentiment analysis tools to see exactly how customers are reacting to your brand.

Google Alerts 

For those looking for free options, Google Alerts is probably the easiest way for you to track brand mentions. Create an alert based on your brand or product name, and you’ll have a message sent to you every time it pops up in an article or other piece of digital content.

Mention 

Mention specialises in brand mention monitoring, keeping track of any discussions or content across social media and the internet in general. In order to make things easy on your marketing team, you can also get automated reports about where your mentions are and what context they are in.

Brandwatch 

The Brandwatch family is a greater suite of products ranging from crisis management to CX to influencer marketing to brand management. Its brand mention tools give you real-time alerts about when your brand is mentioned so you can shift plans on the fly.

Awario

Rather than a third-party data provider, Awario crawls 13 billion web pages to mine for mentions of your brand. You can also use it to reply to mentions from customers to improve the overall experience.

How To Get More Mentions For Your Brand 

So, what are some things you can do to get more mentions?

• Reach out to publications. Even if you can’t get a guest post or backlink, simply having your brand name mentioned by a major publication will help your presence.
• Improve your social media presence. Social media is a goldmine for mentions.
• Improve your customer service. Nothing gets people talking like a great experience, so be sure to focus on it.
• Interact on forums. Again, this is about going where your audience is.

Brand mentions for SEO are one of many methods that help improve your ranking but don’t expect it to make the difference alone in a vacuum. You need to combine basic SEO fundamentals along with this additional work when it comes to making the most out of your digital brand presence. So, while getting brand mention services are useful, you also want to combine this with a full website SEO audit for your existing digital content. Seek out a digital marketing agency in Melbourne to handle all of these tasks at once.