Numerous clients, tight deadlines, juggling with different projects… all of these are day-to-day jobs in marketing or PR agencies. Time is of the essence.
Time gives you the opportunity to give extra thought to your services, take up a new project, pay additional attention to an important launch, answer that extra email, etc.
And one of the most important tools that can give you the present of time when working in an agency is a good media monitoring tool.
? Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
Media monitoring refers to the process of tracking, analyzing, and interpreting media content across various platforms such as print, online, broadcast, and social media. By keeping a close eye on the media landscape, PR and marketing agencies can gain valuable insights into their target audience, stay up-to-date with industry trends, and effectively manage their reputation. All of this information is available in real-time and in a couple of clicks, saving you the time to go through everything manually.
In this blog post, we will explore why media monitoring is critical for PR and marketing agencies and how it can help them stay ahead of the curve in today’s highly competitive market.
Why is Media Monitoring Critical for PR and Marketing Agencies
Here are several ways media monitoring can be a competitive advantage for every PR and marketing agency.
Preparing a pitch
The crucial part of every great pitch is thorough research. How much time does it take?
78% of agencies claim a reasonable time frame to provide a pitch is more than 4 weeks. But they’re typically given 2-3. Here’s what media monitoring can do:
Analyze the client’s current image. When you insert the client’s brand name in a media monitoring tool, you can make a thorough analysis of its owned and earned channels, their key people, the overall sentiment towards the client, key phrases or words used in connection to the client, etc. Based on the findings, you’ll learn a lot about the potential client. And you’ll have a great starting point for your pitch.
Check out the competition. Insert your potential client’s competitors in the tool and focus on their weaknesses. The difference in sentiment, channels, influencers, etc. Nothing that a simple competitive report from Determ couldn’t cover.
Explore public opinion. Media monitoring can give you access to various forums and untagged mentions on social media. You can focus on their pain points and provide a solution that your client could benefit from.
By leveraging media monitoring tools and techniques, marketing and PR agencies can effectively prepare a pitch that is data-driven, informed, and tailored to the needs and preferences of their clients.
Read Writing a Marketing Pitch: How Social Listening Can Help You Land New Clients
Tracking your brand reputation
Apart from tracking your clients’ brand reputation, you can leverage media monitoring to track your own image and reputation. By monitoring media coverage across various channels, agencies can gain insights into the public’s perception of their image. What is more, they can use it as proof of their reputation on their website or while presenting a pitch.
Additionally, media monitoring can help agencies identify and address potential issues and crises before they escalate. This enables them to proactively manage their reputation. For example, you might be dealing with some clients who were dissatisfied. They may start a thread on social media or Reddit mentioning you in a very bad context. A media monitoring tool will deliver this mention to your feed and give you an opportunity to react on time.
Read Measuring Brand Reputation: Top 5 Metrics to Look Out For
Identifying emerging trends
How do you keep up with trends in your industry (or any industry, now that we’re saying?) Subscribe to newsletters? Check out the social media profiles of specific persons or brands? Go to conferences?
With media monitoring, you can learn a lot simply by setting up the right queries in your tool.
By tracking relevant media outlets and social media channels, these agencies can identify patterns in consumer behavior and preferences, as well as track the performance of their own campaigns. This information allows them to adjust their strategies and messaging accordingly, ensuring they remain relevant and effective in their efforts to engage with their target audience.
Monitoring competitors
By tracking the media coverage and social media presence of their competitors, agencies can gain insights into their competitors’ strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. For example, you can track which of their campaigns has had a very negative or very positive impact, and look into the reasons why that happened. Like this campaign from Burger King on Women’s day that had a precisely negative outreach.
In this way agencies identify areas where they can differentiate themselves and capitalize on gaps in the market. Additionally, media monitoring can help agencies to identify potential threats or negative publicity related to their competitors. This information enables marketing and PR agencies to make informed decisions and develop effective campaigns that help them stand out from the competition.
Determ Features to Use
Reports
Determ reports are a visual representation of all your mentions gathered through the tool. They provide a graphic display of various metrics like the number of mentions over time, sentiment, influencers, sources, locations, word cloud around your mentions, etc.
There are 2 types of reports available – predefined and custom reports. If there are more metrics you need to include or you need a certain type of custom report for your business, then you can use the custom reports option. Otherwise – predefined reports (advanced, basic, competitive and demographic) would be just about enough to show the value of your work.
Alerts and Digests
Alerts and digests help you keep track of your mentions on a day-to-day basis. You don’t need to have both features on, but we recommend doing so.
Just to clarify the distinction: alerts are real-time notifications you receive every time a new mention of your tracked keyword appears online.
Digests, on the other hand, are simply overviews of your mentions. They are a great alternative to alerts if you prefer receiving all your mentions from a specific period in one email or a file instead of receiving individual emails for every mention.
For example, you can schedule to receive your digests every workday at 7 AM. That way you’ll be able to go through your mentions from the previous day, detect the topics and questions that were mentioned the most, and set the agenda for the upcoming day.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment describes the general tone of the article in terms of attitude or opinion, which can be either positive, neutral, negative, or undefined. In this context, sentiment analysis helps you understand customers’ opinions and experiences across various channels.
Determ gives you the option to analyze each mention with a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment.
Analyzing sentiment daily provides an opportunity to react on time when there is a crisis brewing and to protect your reputation. In addition, it’s a great feature to reveal how the wider audience feels about your campaigns or marketing efforts which can direct your future strategies.
Read AI in PR: 16 Ways AI Will Transform The Game for PR Pros
Word cloud
Word Cloud shows you the context in which your topic was mentioned the most. It is a feature that can be found in Determ reports.
The size of the keyword increases proportionally to the number of times it was mentioned. The more the keyword was mentioned, the bigger the word in the word cloud (and vice versa, the less the keyword was mentioned, the smaller the word).
This feature can be useful to detect trends connected to a certain product or for the purpose of crisis management – if there are some unwanted words mentioned alongside the brand, ti might be useful to look closer into the context and discover why they appear.
Share of voice
Share of voice is a marketing metric referring to the percentage of a specific market or audience that a particular brand reaches or covers with its advertising or messaging. In this sense, this metric gives you information about your brand visibility, awareness, and the impact you have within a specific market or a particular audience.
What is more, this metric enables you to compare your efforts to your competitors and assess your current position. By tracking changes in SOV over time, you can easily identify trends and adjust your strategies accordingly to improve your performance and stay competitive.
Read Share of Voice: How to Track It and Why
Influencers
We all know what influencers mean in the world of PR and marketing. But what about those websites, portals, and social media profiles with a large following or a great influence rate that aren’t famous? Determ helps you detect precisely those.
Determ provides a list of top influencers by number of mentions, source, reach and sentiment, and you can use each of these according to your needs. You might be looking at influencers that speak very negatively about you or your competitors, our the ones that post mainly on Twitter or that have the highest reach and include them in your future strategies.
Conclusion
To conclude, media monitoring is a critical tool for PR and marketing agencies in today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving media landscape. By keeping track of relevant media outlets and social media channels, these agencies can stay up-to-date on emerging trends, identify potential threats, and conduct effective competitive analysis. This valuable information enables them to develop tailored strategies and messaging that resonate with their target audiences, differentiate their clients from their competitors, and ultimately drive business success. In a world where consumers are bombarded with information from multiple sources, media monitoring is the key to staying ahead of the game and delivering impactful results for clients.
If you’d like to try out our media monitoring tool Determ, book a demo. Our experts will be happy to show you the value for your business.
