Brand managers guard over the brand's identity and reputation and strive to improve sales and grow market share. Nowadays a brand's reputation depends in a large part on the online activity and conversations around it. Social media have become an important medium for marketing and customer service. If customers react in a negative way to a certain service or marketing campaign, the influence on the brand's reputation can be enormous. Brand managers should be aware of this (obviously) and they should also be in the know whenever something is happening.
Social media management tools
Social media management tools are frequently used by Marketing and Customer Service. The latter uses it to manage their social channels and respond to clients' questions and remarks. Marketing mainly uses these tools to report on marketing campaigns. Most tools also offer notification features and this is the interesting element for Brand Managers. They can receive email notifications whenever something is going on online about their brand. Similar to Marketing, they can also use a social media management tool to create reports, in this case about their reputation and identity in general. There's absolutely no need to buy any extra tools if your company is already working with the tool Brand Managers need. Very often tools have many features users don't even know about, let alone use.
1. Email alerts
Brand Managers need to be in the know when something is going on that might affect the way their brand is perceived. If a major crisis threatens to ruin their brand's reputation they need to decide on which steps to take and how Customer Service can deal with the crisis. This means they have to receive an email notification whenever needed. Whenever needed, that is: when there are much more mentions than usual, when certain topics are discussed, when certain topics are discussed much more than usual, etc. Based on strong filters (keywords, location, sentiment, volume, etc.) you can trigger email notifications. A false alarm is always possible but better safe than sorry!
2. Reporting
Second important element for Brand Managers is reporting. How is their brand perceived on the different social channels? Are marketing campaigns generating the the results they had in mind? Is their reputation improving or not? Frequent reports guide Brand Managers in their quest to guard their brand's identity and reputation. In social media management tools you can typically export all available charts, tables and figures. In Engagor you can create custom dashboards with only the analytics you are interested in and then export everything at once. Or even better: you can receive automatic reports on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis!
Little effort, many benefits
Brand Managers won't need to log in to the social media management tool regularly. They receive notifications when needed and create reports from time to time. In the beginning this requires a one-time effort to set up the notifications. They probably won't have to bother about setting up topics to monitor their brand because Marketing and/or Customer Service will already have this covered. After that all Brand Managers have to do is log in every few months to report on the evolution of their reputation. The key is in configuring the social media management tool in the right way and make it work for you.