Why Brand Monitoring Is Important for Ecommerce Tech Sales

When you have an amazing product, it’s tempting to feel like that’s all the branding you need. Your tech product with its best-in-class features, rave reviews, and unparalleled performance speaks for itself. Right?

Wrong.

The reality is, in the world of ecommerce, it doesn’t matter how good your product is. If you aren’t monitoring your brand, it’s going to hurt your sales.

Here’s why.

Your brand doesn’t just live on your website

It’s not enough to just keep the branding on your own website up-to-date. Everywhere your product appears, you want your brand to look and feel consistent. Inconsistent images, videos, and even copy can break down a consumer’s trust in your brand—even if the product itself is amazing.

And what if you’ve created high-quality assets to demonstrate your product or highlight key features, but your retail partners don’t all display them on your product page? It’s not just in your best interest to make sure your product pages convert—retailers want to make sales too! Monitoring your brand to make sure it’s being presented in the best possible light is advantageous to both of you.

Outdated branding can cost you sales

When you update your product images, names, and descriptions, or release a new version of your product, it’s extremely important that those branding updates ripple across the web to everywhere your product appears.

Outdated branding leads consumers to question: am I getting the current version of this product? Is this legit, or a fake? Some customers will look past those questions and buy anyways. But that moment of hesitation at the point-of-sale is bound to cost you conversions.

Unauthorized sellers may take advantage of you

I hate to say it, but counterfeit sellers exist. If you aren’t paying attention to your brand, watching where and how it appears online, then you won’t even notice when someone creates a fake version of your product or pretends to sell your product in order to damage your brand.

The only way to catch unauthorized sellers is to vigilantly monitor your brand.

Pricing violations happen all the time

Even your best retail partners will violate your pricing policy from time to time. Maybe a page didn’t get updated fast enough after a sale. It happens. But a single pricing violation often sets off a chain reaction—it’s like dominoes, toppling your price from one retailer to the next until all of a sudden you’re the only one selling your product at regular price.

You can’t possibly follow up on every violation—especially if you have a prolific product catalogue—but savvy brand managers today are using advanced tools to identify who violated their pricing policy first. This allows you to focus your energy on the retailers that are causing the most damage and leading others astray. By sorting things out with these provocateurs, you can have a huge impact on the overall number of violations.

But that can’t happen if you aren’t monitoring your brand.

You need to know when people are talking about you

There are more than a billion websites on the internet, and more than three billion people have access to them. People could be talking about you or your products on product pages, review sites, forums, social media platforms, or blogs.

That might make brand monitoring sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. The internet is ripe with opportunities for you to enter conversations about your brand, turn customers into advocates, showcase your expertise, and beat out your competitors—simply by listening to what people are saying, and thoughtfully responding.

Brand monitoring needs to be part of your strategy

Whether your brand has been around for 5 minutes or 50 years, you can’t afford to ignore what’s happening to it online. Brand monitoring is about protecting and preserving the brand you’ve worked hard to establish, and it can have a direct impact on sales, revenue, your product’s longevity, and even the effectiveness of your marketing—you wouldn’t want someone going from your ad, to your website, to a retailer’s outdated product page, right?

If you want to thrive in the world of ecommerce today, you need to ensure your customers have a consistent experience with your brand, wherever they find you.