7 benefits of media monitoring

[Mila Eryomina]

Having a 360 degree view of your brand and how the public perceives it is more important than ever. Luckily, it’s now far easier than it ever has been with media monitoring. But what are the real and impactful benefits of media monitoring?

You may be lucky (young) enough not to remember the media monitoring of old. Hefty clippings books, sent via post to PR and marketing teams. Pages and pages of manually curated snippets of conversation about campaigns, mentions in the press, even complaints – too late to be able to respond in good time.

Now, you can understand everything you need to know about the public’s perception of your organisation within a few clicks.

What are the benefits of media monitoring?

Brand monitoring products have taken the legwork out for media and comms teams. As well as informing how products should adapt and evolve, discovering more about competitors, and even identifying the micro-influencers who are your gateway to a potential new market.

In this primer, we’ll discuss seven benefits of media monitoring – and why it’s a no-brainer to invest.

1. Competitor analysis

If you don’t know what people are saying about your competitors, you’re walking into battle blind. With media monitoring tools, you can enter your rivals’ keywords and campaigns and track perception around them daily.

Benchmark your brand against those you want to keep ahead of. Uncover trends, see when they’re doing well, and when they aren’t.

You can even identify challenger brands that you may not have considered your competition – think about Monzo, and how they’ve grown via word of mouth – leaving traditional big banks in the dust. With a media monitoring tool, you’re able to see what your target audience are buying in to, giving you a competitive advantage. Always a winner.

2. Marketing measurement that really matters

With a solid media monitoring tool, you can say goodbye to vanity metrics and actually measure what you should be to see benefits and growth.

Mentions, full coverage and shares are fine. But going below the surface is possible with a media monitoring tool.

Learn more about the actual reach of your content, who is mentioning it in the media, and who their audience is. Learn more about the audiences who consume it – understand their demographics, so you can benchmark and measure against them.

With a tool, you can be agile in a way that you’d previously not been able to – with so many answers at your fingertips, you can quickly and easily see what’s working for your different teams, and adapt your approach accordingly.

3. Manage a crisis situation

Every comms team’s nightmare is seeing their brand go viral for the wrong reasons.

A poorly worded tweet, an unfortunate customer service situation, a campaign that has landed badly. A media pile-on can cause a real crisis for a brand; revenue can take a hit, and a previously good reputation can be left in tatters.

To respond in a timely manner, you need to be aware of the crisis as soon as it starts to grow.

With some media monitoring tools, that send intelligent and automated ‘alerts’ when your brand is mentioned in the media, you can track if your brand is mentioned more than usual. This awareness of a spike in media coverage allows you to dive straight in, understand what people are saying, and ensure you’re acting on it.

4. Newsjacking

Here’s something that would have been completely impossible pre-media monitoring – newsjacking. Newsjacking is when you spot something trending on social (or in the news) and jump straight on it – allowing your brand to be a part of the conversation.

It can be a tricky one to get right, though, so do be warned. Many brands have attempted to hop on a trending topic that has no actual relevance to their audience/market/messaging. And this is when it can go wrong. But, done right, it can be a huge success.

Arguably the most celebrated newsjacking is the Oreo Superbowl advert, posted just minutes after the power went out. Their ad, ‘don’t worry, you can still dunk in the dark’, went viral and is still heralded as newsjacking brilliance – even today, in 2019, right here in this article.

5. Improve your product

Your product teams feed off consumer intelligence. They want to know everything about your customers – what they like, what they don’t, what other products they’re using, their drivers and desires.

With media monitoring software, you’re able to deep dive into what consumers are saying, and really unpick what it is that you should be developing.

You might discover that lots of people are talking about needing a specific offering that doesn’t yet exist, or learn that the product your competitor has just launched is not hitting the spot.

By giving them a full view of what the world thinks about your landscape, your product teams are never left wanting.

6. Identify the right influencers

So much has been written already about finding influencers using media monitoring. But that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked.

You can identify the journalists and industry influencers with readerships and networks you need to reach. Then you can harness them to become an advocate of your brand – one of the biggest marketing revolutions of the past few years.

The explosion of influencer marketing has allowed brands to capitalise on the trend. And reach the same amount of people via their PR efforts. These audiences are far more engaged, and likely to interact with the brand that’s being about by an industry influencer.

7. Real-time translation

Now here’s a real exciting new one.

It’s all very well and good having access to millions of news sources and real-time alerts of mentions of your brand. But if you don’t understand them, you can’t act on them. Say your brand is being splashed across the news in Indonesia. You need a team that speak the language to provide you with useful insights.

But some more intelligent media monitoring tools even offer real-time translation. Meaning you can instantly understand the global conversation about your brand.

By monitoring news internationally in this way, you’re not limiting your brand to the languages you speak in-house. Allowing you to instantly see how your brand is performing across the world.

[Anna Roccova]

The data provided by BLUEPEAR https://bluepear.net/blog/benefits_of_advertising_monitoring_for_brand_visibility_and_protection has been crucial in helping us to identify areas where we can improve our marketing efforts. Thanks to their expertise, we've been able to achieve greater success and reach our target audience more effectively.