Why Every Company Needs Media Monitoring

A holistic approach to public relations is actually only partly made up of your message — what you say, how you say it, when you say it, etc. The other parts — how the media responds to your message, and what you do with that response are often overlooked and crucially important.

If you don’t keep tabs on how the media and your targeted audience is responding to your message, then it begs these questions:

• How do you know that your outreach is effective?
• How do you know it is being relayed, targeted, and deployed correctly?
• How do you know it is resonating with your target audience?
• What is the return-on-investment (ROI) for your efforts?

These questions can’t be left up to chance, and they identify a few of the reasons why you need media monitoring.

What Are You Missing? You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

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Today’s digital media landscape has created more channels and influencers that can positively or negatively affect your brand than ever before, which means there’s a lot you could be missing. With technology at the level that it is at now, ignorance is no excuse for any communications team. You need to actively monitor across all media channels for key mentions that pertain to your brand, product or service. If a new competitor, product, or event happens that can potentially disrupt your industry, the last thing you need is your boss coming into your office referencing a news article that you had no idea about.

Prevent Crisis

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No one likes a crisis, but robust monitoring helps you become more adept at handling one. Your team should be poised to quickly identify and remediate PR issues, negative sentiment or potential pitfalls that could be brewing about your company, product or industry.

The right media monitoring solution empowers a company to stay ahead of these events and make sure the proper protocols are in place. The ability to identify a crisis before it takes place is the equivalent of having home insurance before an earthquake. Alerts that you can configure will help communications teams avoid and quickly diffuse crisis situations.

Media monitoring also acts as a barometer to help gauge real-time sentiment showing how people are responding to any given communications campaigns.

Conduct Market Research For Campaigns

Media monitoring can serve as market research analysis for campaigns or new products your company is developing. By setting up monitoring searches around similar industry topics as a way to test the water, your team can then start to answer some preliminary questions:

• Are there any audience backlashes against a similar product?
• What is the overall audience sentiment of the industry as a whole?

Comms must be able to acquire and understand market research quickly to fuel content and campaigns that take advantage of emerging trends.

Execute And Adjust Campaign Messaging On-the-Fly

Executing a campaign pitch, product launch, or new initiative is only the first step in the communications cycle. Effectively tracking efforts and making the right mid-campaign adjustments to messaging and content is imperative to overall success.

The right media monitoring solution enables your team to continuously track critical mentions, competitor reactions and overall audience engagement in an automated fashion that allows your teams to focus on the bigger picture.

Attribute Value For The Coverage You Create

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PR and comms are always looking for ways to better map campaigns to specific business objectives their executive stakeholders care about and gain better insight into how to architect future campaigns.

A reliable media monitoring solution should provide analytics that can illustrate your goals in an easy-to-understand format. This includes the staple PR metrics like share of voice, sentiment over time and coverage by media type. It can also tie into more sophisticated digital marketing metrics such as web traffic and conversion.

Analytics around coverage should also return audience demographic and firmographic data, helping you understand your target audience more effectively. While the goal may not always be to tie back to a dollar amount, professionals in this space need to be able to attribute value from their campaigns to show that messages are resonating with target audiences and support key business objectives.

Smarter Outreach

Does your company distribute press releases on prominent events? Or reach out to local or national influencers to help boost campaign visibility? Complimenting your outreach strategies with an all-encompassing media monitoring solution can help your team further understand which messages resonate best with your audiences and influencers.

Additionally, using this information to pinpoint the most influential individuals can help you make better decisions on journalist outreach. Furthermore, this type of understanding establishes the groundwork for future content and helps contribute to your content calendar planning for the year.

Are you ready to learn more about media monitoring? To discover what’s right for your company download The Ultimate Media Monitoring Buyer’s Guide today.