The Ultimate Case Study: Brandwatch Inception

Steady yourselves ladies and gentlemen, for this article is about use of tools by the tool makers themselves. It’s like the Inception of blog posts, only with lower production standards and only one layer of inception. It’s just as good as being right there in the cinema.

Like Twitter’s own Twitter account or Facebook’s strangely poorly-managed fan page, most online platform providers utilise their own solution for themselves.

It’s exactly what we do at Brandwatch, and lots of other tools do something similar. We’ve noticed HubSpot using their own tool for marketing automation programmes and observed Spredfast using their SMM app for social profile management.

We thought it might be valuable to provide you with a very real case study on some of the ways we use Brandwatch to boost our own business.

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Lead generation

The community team at Brandwatch have a number of queries set up on the lookout for potential prospects.  The tool lets us write queries that specifically target people looking for – or evaluating or assessing or trialling or … you get the idea – a monitoring tool. We’re alerted by email each time a matching mention is published online.

We can then home in on those individuals and organisations to offer them advice and guide them to our product. We firmly believe our tool is the best around, so don’t like to revert to sales tactics, meaning we usually offer links to independent reviews or tailor advice based on their needs; and regularly point to another tool that would suit them better instead, when appropriate.

Through this technique we find dozens of prospects a month that end up demoing Brandwatch who may have otherwise not known about our offering. You can find out more about using monitoring for lead generation in our free eBook. 

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Thought leadership

Using a similar approach as outlined above, we also have queries in Brandwatch that listen for conversation surrounding key issues in our industry.

This can be general discussion of social media monitoring, or more specific issues such as identifying influencers or measuring social ROI. Our community team again visit these sites where the conversation is taking place, such as comments on blogs, forum posts or networks like Quora and LinkedIn, and embed themselves into the community, offering valuable contributions to the conversation.

There’s another free eBook all about this, which you can download here.

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Competitor tracking

To understand your market you must understand your competition. Accordingly, we ensure we know what our competitors are up to, and where their successes and failures lie.

It helps us ascertain where we sit in the complicated field of monitoring tools, at least in terms of visibility, coverage and other measures of popularity (we’re comfortably second in the world in terms of monthly mentions, if you’re wondering, behind the Salesforce-supported Radian6).

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Social CRM

Finding, filtering and prioritising mentions of Brandwatch is bread and butter for us. We can easily identify high value mentions in a heartbeat, and also isolate problems our customers are having right at the source.

This can range from helping a client with their query creation on Twitter to assisting with a blog owner who does not wish their site to be crawled by Brandwatch.

Sometimes we find unsuspecting users discussing our tool that end up informing product development, or go on to help us in other aspects.

With Brandwatch’s engagement facilities, our community team can respond to relevant Twitter and Facebook mentions from inside the app.

The workflow, tagging and assignment features also allow us to split mentions into categories, to be then distributed to different team members.

Need another eBook ? Here’s one on customer service and monitoring tools.

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Influencers

When distributing our content and seeking guest authors for our blog, as well as for a whole host of other marketing and sales activities, we use Brandwatch to identify and contact influencers across different industries and niches.

Using the in-app metrics from Twitter, Kred, MozRank, Authors, Peer Index and now our own custom influence metrics, we’re easily able to isolate the most important individuals and sites for the relevant area we’re targeting.

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Campaign Tracking

Whether it’s tracking the reach of a press release, monitoring the coverage of an update or post, or listening to the activities at an event we’re attending or interested in, we’re always making sure we harness the power of Brandwatch to measure our ROI.

Getting measurable feedback on the efficacy of where we spend our resources is the best way to plan how we spend our time and money going forward.

Last one: our eBook on social media ROI.

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One-off projects

Our diverse blog and regular stream of data-visualisations and infographics mean that we often use Brandwatch to provide interesting commentary and social insights into everything from the US elections to Hallowe’en costumes.

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The actual extent to which we use Brandwatch is huge, spanning report writing to bundles of stuff for our clients. However, we hope that this small glance at some of the ways we’re using it to enhance our own business inspires you to leverage Brandwatch for benefits of your own.