The 7 Best Brand Protection Software to Use in 2024

It’s 2013, just before the winter holidays. The weather is cold, but the shopping season is hotter than the Sahara desert. Target, one of the largest department store chains in the US, is expecting record profits. Then, boom! Breaking news hits! Hackers have stolen the personal and credit card data of over 40 million Target customers. The results are disastrous: the company loses over $200 million, earnings drop by 46%, and Target’s reputation is badly damaged. 

Brand protection software helps companies safeguard their brands from various online threats. It monitors the internet to protect the brand’s reputation, looks for counterfeit products, detects trademark infringement, and shields the brand against other online dangers.

The example of Target’s crisis and the resulting chaos highlights the importance of implementing a comprehensive brand protection strategy.

Comprehensive because your brand can face many different types of digital threats.

Malware, spam, data breaches, online reputation downfall, phishing, counterfeit products, trademark infringement, brand impersonation, fake reviews, ad fraud, cheating on affiliate programs, fake accounts… The list goes on!

So, without further ado, let me present you with the best brand protection solutions for various threats.

Top Brand Protection Software:

1. Brand24 for reputation protection
2. Red Points for anti-counterfeiting
3. Cofense PhishMe for phishing prevention
4. ZeroFox for comprehensive digital risk protection
5. Copyscape for plagiarism detection
6. DoubleVerify for ad fraud elimination
7. BrandVerity for affiliate partners’ compliance

01 Brand24 for reputation protection

Free 14-day trial.

Brand24 is an AI-powered media monitoring tool that perfectly streamlines your reputation protection efforts.

The tool offers real-time online brand monitoring by tracking public brand mentions published on multiple digital channels:

• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram, and Twitch)
• Non-social sites (news sites, blogs, forums, podcasts, video sites, review platforms, etc.).

You can imagine Brand24 as a friendly dude who constantly reads & analyzes everything people publish about your brand.

That’s a good personification because Brand24 not only gathers brand mentions. 

The tool offers a variety of analytics features to protect your brand reputation on the highest possible level.

Sentiment analysis is the real queen of Brand24’s capabilities. 

In short, the tool automatically attributes each mention detected to one of three categories: positive, negative, or neutral.

That helps you identify potential reputation issues early and prioritize your responses.

Okay, but what if you get hundreds or thousands of brand mentions daily? In such a situation, scrolling all your brand mentions must be freaking time-consuming!

Thankfully, Brand24 created a superhero – the AI Anomaly Detector.

Long story short – the AI Anomaly Detector observes your brand to detect any unusual behavior. 

If it identifies an unexpected pattern, the Anomaly Detector searches for the most probable cause and presents it in one to two essential sentences.

Imagine you usually get about 15,000 mentions a day. 

It’s 9:00 AM, and you’re brewing your favorite coffee, opening your laptop, going to the Brand24 dashboard, and suddenly seeing 38,000 new mentions.

Thirty-eight thousand! And 97% of them are negative!

Beep-beep! Something terrible is going on! Oh no, what’s going on?!

Stop panicking and breathe. Calmed?

Fine, so just open your Brand24 dashboard and check what the Anomaly Detector has to say.

Look at the example below. McDonald’s public relations team must have had a terrible day on March 9th.

Okay, but what if you must react immediately? Should you really refresh your Brand24 dashboard 24/7?

Of course not!
Storm Alerts are instant notifications you receive whenever Brand24 detects an unexpected increase in the reach or volume of your mentions.

For example, if you typically receive 100 mentions a day and suddenly get 300, you’ll receive a Storm Alert.

You can easily adjust the settings to suit your needs, such as defining the percentage change that triggers an alert.

Key features:

• Reputation Score
• Brand Mentions Volume
• Brand Mentions Reach
• Sentiment Analysis
• AI Anomaly Detector
• Storm Alerts
• Presence Score
• Context Analysis
• AI Emotion Analysis
• AI Metrics Analysis
• Personalized Reports

02 Red Points for anti-counterfeiting

Red Points is an online brand protection tool that addresses another type of risk your brand can face. It identifies and takes down fake product listings & sellers, social media scammers, fake websites, and piracy.

Red Points offers essentially four solutions for your brand protection. The tool:

1. Uses AI-boosted image recognition to discover potential fake products and presents the economic impact of your brand protection actions. In other words, the tool shows you how much you saved thanks to identifying fakes.
   
   
2. Detects all the domains that breach your intellectual property rights, i.e., by using your trademark with no right to do it.
   
   
3. Identifies online piracy by crawling sites, cyberlockers, apps, social media, and streaming platforms.
   
   
4. Discovers the social media accounts & websites that steal your traffic and trick people by imitating your brand online. 

According to the OECD Report, the global counterfeit market could be worth more than $1.8 trillion!

For such an amount, you could buy enough coffee beans to brew a cup for every person on Earth every single day for 350 years.

Key features:

• Online Marketplaces Monitoring
• Compliance Management
• Trademark Protection
• Access Revocation 

03 Cofense PhishMe for phishing prevention

Cofense PhishMe is a cloud-based phishing simulation & detection tool designed to protect brands from attacks, with a focus on phishing emails.

It is like a detective club with millions of members worldwide. Cofense PhishMe scans every email in your inbox and catches sneaky emails that your regular inbox may miss.

Besides, the tool provides you with simulations of real phishing attacks. You can choose real-life tricks hackers can use and send training phishing emails to check your stuff’s reaction.

Cofense PhishMe simply understood that the most effective way to protect any organization is to teach employees how to behave when someone tries to cheat them.

No tool, even the one with zillions of features (you’ll never use), would be more effective than aware people!

Key features:

• Threat Simulations
• Spam Quarantine
• Whitelisting/Blacklisting
• Email Attachment Protection 

04 ZeroFox for comprehensive digital risk protection

ZeroFox is one of the most multi-purpose brand protection tools available. The number of issues it can detect & eliminate can make you feel dizzy!

Picture ZeroFox as your personal bodyguard, looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. 

Your private Arnold is a kind of Terminator constantly watching social media platforms, forums, and the dark web to recognize and eliminate nearly any security threat. 

Namely, ZeroFox detects fake websites & social profiles impersonating your brand’s online presence, phishing & malware attacks, data breaches, executive threats, and fake products.

If your Terminator discovers a serious threat, it helps you shut fake websites down and even cooperate with law enforcement to stop cybercriminals.

ZeroFox is a pretty expensive brand protection solution. Therefore, this tool might exceed your budget if you’re not an enterprise-sized company.

Besides, ZeroFox is a bit old-fashioned regarding the user interface.

Key features:

• Deep and Dark Web Monitoring
• Real-Time Alerts
• Global Disruption Network Access

05 Copyscape for plagiarism detection

Copyscape is a plagiarism-checking tool that works in two directions.

On the one hand, it checks if the content published on your site is indeed original. On the other hand, Copyscape scans the web to discover an unauthorized use of your content.

Okay, but should plagiarism be treated as a risk for your brand?

100% yes!

In the times when companies struggle for customers with captivating content, plagiarism appears as one of the most touchable risks. Especially with the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini.

Using plagiarized content can seriously harm your search engine’s brand visibility and brand reputation.

If someone else uses your content without authorization, it can be like letting a competitor wear your brand’s clothes, confusing potential customers and weakening your message.

Now, imagine such a scenario. 

You have a corporate blog that you use to drive leads to your website when you offer chicken rentals (really, there is such a service!).

You log into your Fiverr account and publish a gig to write six blog articles. 

After 15 minutes, you get an offer from a copywriter that you decide to accept.

One week later, you receive all the articles and publish them on your blog.

After a month, you refresh your Google Analytics and realize that your business is getting much worse – there are 5000 fewer conversions than you expected!

Next, you log in to your Google Search Console and discover that your organic traffic got terrible since publishing these six articles.

You do a detailed analysis and discover that all six articles were plagiarized. Obviously, Google penalizes you.

If you use Copyscape before publishing, you’ll know that you made a deal with an unfair copywriter.

Key features:

• Plagiarism Checker
• Copy Theft Detection
• Duplicate Content Detection

06 DoubleVerify for ad fraud elimination

DoubleVerify is a digital advertising tool that helps protect the quality and transparency of the online ads ecosystem.

As for its brand protection capabilities, DoubleVerify works great in combating a specific type of online fraud called ad fraud.

Why is it important?

Because ad fraud steals your advertising budget and throws it down a digital black hole.

In that case, DoubleVerify acts like a financial guardian, stopping fraudulent fake clicks and impressions from draining your resources.

It detects unusual click patterns & suspicious traffic sources, blocks them, and gathers all the data in personalized reports.

This ensures your hard-earned advertising dollars reach real people who might be interested in your products or services, maximizing your return on investment (ROI).

Without this protection, you might unknowingly pay to advertise to bots or irrelevant audiences, ruining your campaign’s effectiveness and potentially damaging your brand image.

Key features:

• Ad Fraud Detection & Blocking
• Viewability Metrics
• Ad Verification & Reporting

07 BrandVerity for affiliate partners’ compliance

BrandVerity is a brand protection software specializing in monitoring and managing affiliate marketing programs.

It can help you by ensuring compliance with your affiliate guidelines and detecting unfair activities of your affiliates.

We don’t live in a perfect world.

Many scammer affiliates make commissions on things like ad hijacking, coupon spoofing, arbitrage, and many other ways of brand abuse.

All of these harm your brand image and cannibalize your marketing efforts.

According to the CHEQ study, affiliate frauds cost advertisers 1.4 billion dollars globally.

BrandVerity offers real-time monitoring of online sources and analyzes the content your affiliates use to promote your brand.

The tool checks if it complies with your program rules and flags all suspicious traffic sources & authors.

If you discover an affiliate scam, BrandVerity allows you to contact the authors of suspicious content, terminate affiliate agreements, and report them to the appropriate authorities.

Key features:

• Web Crawling & Social Listening
• Content Analysis
• Compliance Monitoring

How to choose the best brand protection software?

As you see, there are many different brand protection services and tools designed to shield your brand against various online scams.

The question is – how do you choose the right one?

I suggest you follow these three simple steps:

Step 1: Identify your top risks.

Your brand might be exceptionally fragile to one kind of online threat.

So, before choosing brand protection software, do your research and identify the areas where harming your brand is the most likely.

Use online reports, media monitoring, and competitor analysis to uncover the common crises in your niche.

For example, according to the survey by Deloitte, 87% of +300 executives surveyed ranked reputation as the most significant risk area for companies.

If you belong to the majority, Brand24 could be a perfect brand protection software.

Step 2: Determine your budget.

Next to the scope of software, money is the most critical factor when selecting brand protection software.

Open the Calculator app on your phone and count how much of your organization’s budget you can put into the brand protection box.

If you don’t have unlimited funds, this step will help narrow down your options.

Step 3: Test the software.

Brand protection tools usually offer a free trial or demo version. Take advantage of this opportunity!

Testing the software in practice is the best way to determine if it meets your needs.

Conclusion

You can’t prepare for everything life’s going to throw at you. There are so many online threats endangering your brand that it’s impossible to predict every scenario.

However, it doesn’t mean “YOLO, if it screws up, it screws up”.

No, that’s the wrong way.

If you treat your brand integrity & reputation seriously, reducing the risk of online scams should be your top priority.

When things go wrong, you will know that.

When you know that something is messing up, you can identify what caused that.

When you identify what caused that, you can strike quickly and minimize damages.

Brand protection solutions streamline all these processes. Choose the one that best suits your needs.

Final thoughts:

• Your brand can face a wide range of online threats that can damage its reputation & integrity, as well as hit you financially.
  
  
• Utilizing accurate brand protection software helps detect, address, and prevent these threats effectively.
  
  
• Brand reputation is considered the most significant risk area. Therefore, you should seriously think about media monitoring tools like Brand24.
  
  
• Choosing the right brand protection software requires discovering your top risks, calculating your budget, and—preferably—testing the particular tool.
  
  
• Prevention is better than cure. The sooner you start using brand protection measures, the better you can protect your brand’s reputation and finances.

Brand protection software works. Give a chance to Brand24 and sign up for a 14-day free trial!