Protect Online Consumer Experience: Audit and Control Your Brand’s Digital Footprint

Brand Protection stretches beyond removing fake listings on marketplaces, impersonating posts on social media, and illegitimate website domains. You also need to pay attention to how your brand is presented legitimately across your key digital channels.

Dormant or unmanaged assets on social media or domains often clog up online search results, causing consumers confusing& diverting potential customers seeking to engage; if you neglect these assets you are effectively competing against yourself. Add online bad actors and your actual competitors to the mix and suddenly, retaining a strong brand identity and ensuring reliable online consumer experience becomes increasingly difficult.

This is why monitoring your digital footprint is key to your brand’s success online. In this piece, we walk you through the use cases, the outcomes you can deliver, and the methods for getting control of your digital footprint.  

What is your digital footprint?

Your digital footprint is your brand’s full online presence – ranging from social media accounts and individual pages on your company’s e-commerce website, to the product & wider brand imagery you deploy online.

There is limited digital real estate – you are vying for a finite number of spots on the first page of search results. Without effective monitoring of your digital footprint, you run the risk that consumers are directed to outdated brand assets or exposed to defunct messaging that doesn’t align with current marketing campaigns.

What are the use cases for monitoring your digital footprint?

The larger your business, the more agencies you engage, and the more territories that you operate in, the more brand assets, social accounts, and general ‘bloat’ associated with your brand is going to be visible online.

Here are two key use cases for monitoring digital footprint:

1. Rebranding – changing brand messaging, imagery & other assets

With more ways than ever to promote products and services across the digital ecosystem and an increasing list of markets targeted, the volume of assets hosted across e-commerce websites, social channels, and by third-party sellers is always expanding.

Brand messaging will often change in response to evolving consumer behaviors or in order reach new consumers and markets. When engaging in a rebranding exercise or introducing new messaging / imagery, it is critical that you can identify and remedy old assets across your key digital channels.

Case study: Unilever

Leading FMCG company Unilever engaged in a rebranding exercise with one of its global beauty brands.

With Corsearch’s technology, Unilever’s brand team was able to identify that nearly 80% of the images that were still being broadcast online were from old marketing packs and no longer relevant to the brand.

This enabled Unilever’s team to isolate past digital assets content and remove it from websites, marketplaces, and social media platforms to prevent consumer confusion.

2. Social media audit – regaining control of lost active or dormant accounts

A Social Media Audit is the process of reviewing all social media entities associated with a brand (or brands) to create a managed inventory of active accounts to drive better consumer experience.

By monitoring your digital footprint, you can flag dormant or rogue social media accounts for removal and recover lost accounts and their followers.

Case study: Mondelēz International

Following a social media audit, global snacking company Mondelēz International used Corsearch’s technology to identify social media accounts previously run by external agencies and internal regional teams that were no longer under central control of the company and posed a risk to brand reputation.

It was key that these accounts were either brought under central control or removed to protect their online consumer experience.

During this exercise, Mondelēz also used Corsearch’s technology to identify all unofficial accounts that were trying to affiliate themselves with the company and lined them up for enforcement action.

What are the outcomes of cleaning your digital footprint?

• Better use of digital spend, more effective marketing campaigns, and increased traffic to new products/website content
• Aligned brand messaging across markets, preventing consumer confusion & diversion, and increased consumer trust
• More control of consumer experience across a known inventory of owned digital touchpoints

How to get control of your digital footprint

You’ve heard some of the use cases and the outcomes a successful strategy will deliver. Now time for the million-dollar question: “how do you monitor, clean & get control of your digital footprint”?

A combination of a Brand Protection technology solution and subject matter expertise is needed to overcome issues flagged during your digital footprint audit.

Consumers take an omnichannel view to engaging with brands online so you need technology to present a holistic, analyzed view of your brand online across all digital channels. Added to this you need expertise in regaining control of your brand to focus on active authorized digital assets, and then isolate or remove outdated, or otherwise irrelevant assets that are detracting from your brand’s image.

With this approach, you can deliver a managed inventory of your online assets for better control of brand standards and consumer experience.

1. Identify affected digital assets

Using sophisticated keyword and image matching technology, you can scour all channels for accounts, social pages, web pages, and other assets that use your branding. This is a useful exercise to understand the extent of the problem and opportunity for control for Marketing and Brand Protection teams.

2. Regain control of or remove assets

Combining this technology solution with the expertise from your Brand Protection Analyst team, you can regain full control of your wanted authorised assets, protecting followers and footfall.  Wanted assets not currently under your brand’s direct control can be recovered, or if the assets are no longer required or are unauthorized, you can have these removed.

Corsearch’s brand protection technology – Enterprise Brand Protection technology

Alongside sophisticated text, image & logo matching technology, Corsearch’s brand protection technology uses advanced capabilities including Network Analysis, to identify & analyze all digital touchpoints whether owned or unauthorized. All of this takes place in a single platform from which all remediation and enforcement actions are delivered.  

Whether you are looking to monitor your brand’s digital footprint, protect consumer experience or tackle brand exploitation, Corsearch’s brand protection technology, Corsearch’s Brand Protection platform, gives you a complete data picture across the online ecosystem. We ensure that you see what your consumers see and can now take action.

Get visibility and control of your brand, anywhere online. Find out how Corsearch helps businesses across industries achieve extraordinary results with a personalized technology demo below.