A stripped down definition of media monitoring is to be in the know of what is being said about your brand, the competitors, the community, as well as anything else that affects your business – All by keeping a track of coverage on media channels. Media monitoring has become fairly advanced – from the traditional cut and paste job it has evolved to include the usage of automated tools such as Mention and SentiOne that notify and update if there’s an activity regarding your brand in the media space.
While there are numerous benefits of tracking media here are some top ones that help you in your PR efforts –
Competition watch
From monitoring competitors’ media coverage, press releases, and various other public activities, you can gain valuable insights, that’ll help you make effective decisions that impact your own ventures. Ideas and inspirations can strike any time, even while tracking the media of your competition as well as other stakeholders. It’s a means of learning and the practice will only motivate you to develop your own efforts. This is also a way to know where one stands and can help to strategise and step up the game.
Boosting communication efforts
There are two things that you can leverage from tracking business related media. With media monitoring, you come to know of the media trends and online conversations which can help in choosing the best topics to plan the next campaign on. Secondly, you will also be able to identify the journalists, reporters, publications that write about your community and are hence better suited to your business. You can then proceed to plan on the best ways to engage with them and optimise your PR collaborations and media outreach.
Measuring the success of campaigns
Anything that can be measured can be improved. With media monitoring, you can pull insights with the data gathered from media monitoring of the current campaign and better plan future ones so as to enhance and increase their impact. In a business like PR, it’s rather difficult to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. But, with media monitoring, you can gather measurable data like social shares, media impressions and brand mentions to put numbers to validate the success or the shortcomings of any campaign.
Reputation management
- Risk management
What is being said about your brand and how to make use of that? Media monitoring not only helps businesses to gauge their weak points but also gives an idea into areas which need improvement and better serve the consumers. As social media has become a breeding ground, both for positive but more of negative complaints targeting any brand. Take for example, if someone posts a less than positive tweet, imagine the number of impressions. With media monitoring, you can get a wind of such online incidents and respond promptly. Consumers love being responded to, especially when you admit mistakes and promise to rectify them.
- Crisis management
With media monitoring, companies can interpret opinions and views that affect the brand image. Companies, big or small cannot afford to ignore negative feedback as it is detrimental to their reputation. This brings us to – crisis management. If you listen to the media, only then can one stay ahead of events and nip a potentially crisis situation before it blows up and becomes difficult to control.
If your business exists on the internet, no matter the scale and size of it, you should consider media monitoring. Reputation isn’t built in a day but it certainly can taint in lesser time. An essential part of PR, reputation management is the single most important factor that far outweighs other reasons to invest in media monitoring.
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