If you’re not monitoring your brand (and competitors’ brands) visually… then are you even monitoring?! Franco De Bonis, Marketing Director at VISUA, discusses the importance of visual listening.
If I say “brand monitoring” what comes to mind for you? For some it’s a PR exercise, for others it’s purely about monitoring social media sentiment. Many will associate it with the tracking of reach, and engagement of marketing campaigns, while a few will know it’s useful for competitive analysis. And just a few, really shrewd marketers, will use it to gather insights on consumer or seasonal trends, and use that data to plan future campaigns.
Which ever way you think of brand monitoring, consider these stats:
- 86 per cent of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like and support (Stackla, 2019).
- 81 per cent of consumers said that they need to be able to trust the brand in order to buy from them (Edelman, 2019).
- 66 per cent of consumers think transparency is one of the most attractive qualities in a brand (Accenture Strategy, 2018).
- 64 per cent of consumers said that they would buy from a brand or boycott it solely because of its position on a social or political issue (Edelman, 2019)
- 73 per cent of consumers cite customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions (PWC, 2018).
And finally, this is the crucial one…
- 79 percent of people say that user-generated content highly impacts their purchasing decisions (Stackla, 2019).
The bottom line is that consumers (and buyers in B2B transactions):
- Want to buy from authentic, caring, and transparent brands.
- They also want to buy from socially responsible and ethical brands – especially those that hold the same values as they do.
- They want to know that the brand will be there for them if they have an issue (whether directly or indirectly).
- They are very happy, and able, to share their experiences with brands among their friends, and the world at large.
So, if people love your products and brand, or a campaign you’re running, they’ll post about it. If people are offended about something your company has said, or a stance on an issue, they will definitely post about it, including pictures and videos, and perhaps create memes too.
All of this means that companies MUST monitor the health of their brand online, and consumer sentiment towards it. But there is a sad secret in the brand monitoring industry that results in you only seeing a small percentage of all the activity and sentiment around your brand!
Two ways to monitor your brand
Many brand and social media monitoring platforms would have you believe that there’s just one way to monitor a brand. They call it tracking “mentions” of your brand, and by that they mean text mentions. This includes @Your-Brand, #Your-Brand, or just including Your-Brand in the text of the post. They have really sophisticated technology to pick up those mentions and analyse the sentiment of the post and the reactions and comments to it by others.
But this is where the problem lies!
We recently ran a study that determined that 88 per cent of all brand mentions are visual-only. That means that your brand is included in the image of the post, but there is no corresponding text-based mention. This shows that there is a second and vital approach for monitoring brand mentions – it’s known by proponents in the brand monitoring sector as “visual listening” and involves using advanced AI (known as visual-AI) to detect logos and key brand marks in images online.
So if the platform you use can’t track visual-mentions, or you choose not to use that feature, you are missing out on 88 per cent of valuable insights on your brand! That’s why I say, are you even monitoring your brand if you’re only seeing 22 per cent of all your brand mentions???
However, we discovered that if you combine the tracking of visual brand mentions with text mentions, not only do you get 100 per cent of the data, you also get more meaningful data that can tell you things that text-based listening alone just can’t. This opens up incredible opportunities at every stage of a campaign, from planning, to executing and monitoring, and adjusting.
So here are five ways that visual brand monitoring can help you
1. Understanding consumer sentiment
This is the biggest bucket of users when it comes to those of you who monitor your brand. It’s obvious, you want to know the good and the bad. But look at these two examples. The EA example is a meme that was reposted with some text in the post. No mention of EA in that text. Yes, EA is mentioned within the meme, but that text is embedded in the image, so unless the brand monitoring platform also has OCR technology, it won’t see that. But there, right in the image, crudely added in, is the EA logo.
Meanwhile, on the right, Snoop Dogg posts a picture containing items from what seems to be a loved brand. Again, the text just says “Boss”.
If your brand monitoring data is showing that consumers love your brand, maybe a few celebrities post images or videos of them with it, that’s something you can leverage in ongoing activities and messaging. Similarly, if you see a high volume of negativity around a particular aspect of your product or brand messaging, being able to react quickly is vital.
Visual-AI uses logo detection and text detection to deliver the insights in these cases. Showing you all posts with images containing your brand and converting any embedded text into machine-readable text.
2. Understanding consumer engagement and moments of consumption
There is nothing as valuable to a brand as understanding consumer brand and product engagement. It helps power your understanding of buyers. Look at the example below of the Stella Artois post. Imagine that you saw that 53 per cent of Stella Artois logo detections in a home setting feature bottles, as opposed to cans or glasses, and have a pizza and a TV showing a football match in the frame. This may conflict with the existing target audience persona developed for the brand, presenting you with an opportunity to refine it.
Visual-AI powers these insights using logo detection combined with object and scene detection to tell you the context of the image and the other objects in the frame with your brand.
3. Manage brand safety
People have a way to use brands to make a point. This isn’t negative sentiment, like the EA Tweet, where EA was the subject of the post, but rather the brand is simply the medium by which the point is made. It can often be innocuous enough, but other times it could be quite damaging.
Again, visual-AI powers these insights using logo detection combined with text detection and, where required, objects and scene detection.
4. Plan future campaigns
We’re going back to a Stella Artois example here. During your visual listening activities you see a large number of images like the one below. You see pictures featuring glasses with the logo commonly appearing in an outdoor setting with snow present. This presents you with an opportunity to plan a cross-channel campaign, which positions your lager as an apres-ski beer of choice. You can be confident that many consumers will accept this positioning as it is backed up by data delivered by visual-AI.
This is where visual-AI’s object and scene detection really shines, providing incredible depth of data linked to your detected brand.
5. Discover partner and collaboration opportunities
In this final example, I’m using another drinks brand (I assure you I don’t have a problem, but lockdown was tough!) Imagine you work for Budweiser. You track all visual mentions of your brand and discover that, in a high percentage of instances where the logo appears in a home setting, a specific food snack is also present in the image. Let’s say it’s nachos, because people are posting about a sports match they’re watching. This data can be used to open conversations with a complimentary brand, such as Doritos, about a brand partnership that could encompass anything from cross-promotion to discounts on joint purchases. In it’s simplest form, you might just include these types of products in your advertising in future.
Again, it’s the pairing of logo detection with object and scene detection that makes this possible.
Start visual listening today
Marketers have a single defining and overriding goal – make every penny count! But we also want to do game-changing and disruptive marketing. The key to achieving this goal is monitoring visual brand mentions and the associated visual data. For that you need a platform that understands and delivers visual brand intelligence and not just text mentions.
If your current brand monitoring provider doesn’t do that, go find one that does – you won’t regret it!