DOWNLOAD FREE CRISIS MANAGEMENT TEMPLATES
To help you deal with a brand protection crisis, download two free crisis management templates. The roadmap you follow if a crisis strikes, and a checklist in case of emergency. These templates, along with my suggested brand protection tools, will help you navigate your way through a reputation disaster.
When you consider brand protection, it’s easiest to think of it as a shield against any damage of your brand’s reputation, revenue, and customer trust; if another source, whether an individual or a malevolent company, attempts to exploit your brand for personal gain. Consider how easy it is for a competitor to set up an eCommerce site, download product images, and compete directly with you, or how someone could purchase your branded search terms and compete with your web traffic.
If you'd more information on how to protect your brand, I'd suggest you read our Brand Protection Guide. It's a comprehensive guide explaining how to create a brand protection strategy to fit your business. Covering social media, employee advocacy, domain names, IP protection, and trademark infringement.
It’s important to ask yourself this question: What kind of effect do you expect that to have on your brand’s revenue and reputation? The financial impact that online brand abuse has on companies is substantial, and if you’re not properly equipped to deal with it, your brand could suffer.
According to Mark Monitor, brands lost over $35 billion to online brand abuse in 2017 – is that a risk you want to take? If your brand isn’t protected and you want to shield your company from losing precious reputation and revenue, it’s important to consider brand protection tools. We’ve included a few of the most efficient and productive tools to assist you on your brand protection journey.
Talkwalker | Social listening tool
Your reputation is everything and Talkwalker will help you protect it. Talkwalker is your extra set of eyes and ears: it monitors what's happening on all social channels and online media in real-time, in 187 languages. Talkwalker helps you to find out what customers think about your campaigns, products, events, earnings calls and brands. Talkwalker is also great to track your brand awareness and message impact globally.
Talkwalker also allows you to search a database of over 30,000 brands meaning you have access to virtually any company information you could possibly need. Beyond the sheer volume of imagery it can recognize, it also uses its adaptable proprietary technology to analyze both text and images, even in conjunction. Get a free demo now!
Copyscape | Plagiarism tool
This is one of the best products out there for helping your brand detect stolen content and content that seems just a bit too similar to the content you’ve created for your brand’s pages.
Consider how easy it is for someone to copy your website content and then pawn it off as if it’s their own. Copyscape helps put a stop this with a search facility dedicated solely to finding plagiarized copy and works to put an end to instances of identified theft. While it’s a free service, there are payment plans available for professional Copyscape services if your brand has more advanced needs.
Global Brand Database | Trademark search tool
Consider your brand for a moment. Think about all the things that make it unique. Those are the important parts of your brand, those trademarked features that help you separate yourself from the rest of the companies that are trying to be like you.
Wouldn’t it be devastating if someone was – for lack of a better phrase – ripping off your brand trademark?
It’s an easy thing to do, and just by having your brand or your brand features trademarked won’t automatically protect you from someone copying your signature. You’ll also need to be proactive about checking in on your brand, your trademarks, and other signatures that are legally yours. To do this, consider checking out the global brand database. This database allows you to perform a trademark search by text or by image in brand data. It explores multiple national and international sources, and includes things like trademarks, appellations of origin, and official emblems.
Google | Claim your Business profile
Not only is claiming and optimizing your Google business profile essential for local SEO, it’s vital for protecting your company’s brand, your reputation, and preventing the loss of your revenue. When you claim your business’ profile on Google, you’re able to optimize, add information, control edits, and answer questions on your business’ Google page when people search for your company, or for companies like you.
It’s free to set up, it’s essential for local SEO, and it will help you control your brand while providing a platform to discuss open and honestly with your customers.
Chatmeter | Brand management platform
If you’ve never heard of Chatmeter, it’s a whole new world. Chatmeter is a brand management software that’s best used for local brands who are looking to analyze, monitor, and perfect their social listening techniques. Chatmeter is designed to help enterprise retail brands and agencies manage their multiple locations, increase revenue, and monitor their online and in-store presence.
Chatmeter is set up to help retailers identify several areas in their online presence that help to drive customers to their stores and help determine why they’re chosen over their competitors. This means that Chatmeter helps to keep an eye on your competition, as well as on your brand, to ensure that you’re the only company using your specific tactics, logos, and marketing.
What Chatmeter does best is help you to monitor and protect your brand. If people are talking about your business, you’ll know it. By using Chatmeter to protect your brand name, you’ll build an online reputation management and social media monitoring tool that can help you evaluate good press and bad pres.
MX ToolBox | SEO, email, domain health tool
MX ToolBox is another great tool for helping you protect your brand and your company, but it functions a little bit differently than some of the other tools previously discussed. Not only can MX ToolBox help to analyze the headers on your site to ensure it’s SEO friendly (as well as seek out copycat content), but it can also monitor your domain health as well as provide diagnostics.
One of the most helpful facets of the MX ToolBox is the email protection tool. Phishing and fraudulent email that your company receives can dramatically damage your business or brand, whether you’re a local shop or a large corporation. If your brand’s email account is hacked and sends out a less-than-professional-and-possibly-inappropriate-email to your client list, the damage could be astronomical! Imagine your client’s opening up an inappropriate email from you – how will they react? Will they ever view your company the same way again?
MX ToolBox provides you with a specialized fraud center to help you identify email-based attacks, prevent malicious hackers from contacting your customers, secure your online identity, increase email delivery rates, and improve the ROI of your email campaigns.
DomainTools | Domain name reputation tool
This is one of the best tools available to you and your brand for turning threat data into threat intelligence. Using this program allows you to check your domain name reputation and augment malware intel with domain data, investigate cyber crimes and online fraud by connecting cyber fingerprints, and proactively hunt for threats using domain and DNS profile info.
What does all this mean? This software does a lot of the hard work for you, seamlessly, too. By protecting your online brand from infringement activity automatically, you’ll be better able to bring down fraudulent sites that might be using your custom information against you. Every day, malware programs, cyber attackers, and phishers use brands’ information to create fraudulent sites and bring down their reputation, but with DomainTools, you’ll be able to spot these sites faster, and have them taken down quickly.
Hootsuite | Social media managament tool
Chances are, if you have a large online presence that you’re consistently trying to improve, you’re likely working with Hootsuite to help manage, strategize, plan, and optimize your multiple online profiles. But did you know that Hootsuite is a great tool for brand protection and social management?
In fact, Hootsuite has a special Brand Protection Toolkit that’s available for installation. Not only does it give you an extensive guide on how to protect your brand (including an in-depth look on the six most common social media risks and mistakes), you’ll also find out how to avoid social media fails, learn how to use Hootsuite to your advantage, and get the skinny on how to monitor competing brands.
Twitter Search | Brand management and protection
You might be thinking that using Twitter in order to monitor your reputation, analyze, or participate in social listening might be overwhelming, but the Twitter search function is very intuitive and helpful when it comes to orchestrating a proper session of brand management and protection.
Because Twitter is a microblogging site, people use it to discuss products they bought, services they’ve used, and companies they like or dislike. Twitter, more so than many other online tool, has provided a personalized outlet for customer feedback on products and performances, allowing people to directly tag brands they want to discuss, either directly or with that brand’s related hashtag.
Using the Twitter Search function to look up what people are saying about your brand is a form of social monitoring as well as brand protection and management. It just takes dedicated time, quick response, and fast action.
PeakFeed | Social media management tool
Running a successful brand means ensuring that your digital marketing, as well as your social presence, is always top notch. This often means keeping up with the latest social media platforms. In an effort to stay on trend and relevant at all times, this can add up to a lot of different platforms to manage, which, can be a pain to monitor. But monitor you must! Social listening and a quick reply are some of the most important facets in productive brand protection – you have to know what people are saying about your brand at all times in order to protect your reputation.
PeakFeed makes managing all of those platforms a snap. This software will help you manage all of your profiles with one, simple dashboard. You can create a custom dashboard that helps you monitor all of your company’s social media profiles so that you’re easily able to keep tabs on your social media growth, your performance, your competition, and most importantly, your brand’s reputation. This makes signing into one account a snap as it acts as a social media conglomerate, giving you the data you need at a glance. Another great feature? PeakFeed sends you a fully responsive weekly report of your progress to your inbox.
Brand protection - why it matters
Giving you the skinny on the top eleven tools to help you manage your brand and protect you company’s reputation can only go so far – you’re also going to need to understand why your brand protection matters in the first place. In the past year, online threats to brands has grown significantly, damaging both revenue and reputation.
According to Mark Monitor, over 14 percent of branded paid traffic in the search engines is hijacked, there are over 53 billion visits to rogue sites in the last 12 months, and there’s been about a 28 percent increase in domain squatting since 2010.
What does all this mean? As brand threats evolve, brand protection strategies have to as well. If you invest time, money, and resources into some of these valuable tools above, you’ll have better odds fighting again fraudulent activities and damage to your reputation.
