Media Monitoring Tools

This guide will explain the value media monitoring brings to any company or individual looking to enhance its overall brand awareness.

What is media monitoring?

Media monitoring is a process in which a company or individual keeps track of online content that mentions their brand, their competitors, or relevant news and trending topics within their industry.

In most cases, media monitoring is conducted to track both the volume of online traffic that covers a certain person or organization, as well as the sentiment of the discussions.

What was once a tedious and manual process in the days of print media has since become an essential task for countless high-level content marketing teams in the era of the Internet.

There are many different ways in which media monitoring processes can be carried out, and there are just as many ways in which the data from those processes can be used to benefit a brand looking to expand its presence online.

With digital growth being a goal for nearly every business with an online presence, media monitoring provides a unique ability to listen in to the conversations that target audiences and potential prospects are having on news sites, social media platforms, forums, blogs, and more.

By leveraging data pulled from media monitoring campaigns, companies can optimize their advertising, marketing, and sales campaigns to better position themselves within the market.

Why is media monitoring important?

There are multiple reasons to conduct media monitoring and they typically tie back to the desire to increase brand awareness. Some of the most common reasons include:

• Enhance consumer perception
• Track earned media mentions
• Provide customer support

Consumer Perception

Companies that conduct successful media monitoring campaigns will track every online conversation in which their brand name is mentioned. Similar campaigns will track the brand names of competitors, partners, and company representatives.

This is done to see how often consumers or target audience members are mentioning them by name, as well as to evaluate the sentiment of the conversations themselves.

Many professional content marketers will keep track of all of the instances in which a brand name or term is used in a positive context. This qualitative data is then reviewed and used to recreate the positive experiences the consumer has had with the brand. The same thing can be done with posts that portray the brand in a negative context, with the one difference being the action taken afterwards: companies will collect these posts to make improvements that will make customers perceive them in a different fashion.

Brands can also track popular industry stories to find new ways to insert themselves into trending conversations. This is a proactive way of using media monitoring - it provides brands with the opportunity to position themselves as an information authority within their industry. In other words, when consumers and prospective customers have questions, the brand is positioning itself to be the resource with all of the right answers.

These techniques prove to be effective at enhancing consumer perception, which has been shown to lead to long-term customer loyalty and increased sales revenue over time.

Earned Media Mentions

Media monitoring can also be used to track press coverage a company is receiving.

If a company is trying to or has already been recognized by major news outlets, influencers, or industry experts, they can conduct media monitoring to observe their digital growth and amplify their earned media mentions across their owned media channels.

If done correctly, media monitoring in this sense provides brands with a nice portfolio of earned media coverage, which is vital to reputation building and overall credibility.

Customer Support

Another unique way many companies have leveraged media monitoring is by using it to address the questions or problems users are experiencing online.

For instance, if a customer comments on a news article, asks about a new product or complains on social media about an issue they’ve run into, a brand can do two things.

First, they can address the issue at hand by providing immediate customer support, even if the user didn’t expect to get in contact with the company through their post.

Second, they can transform a post that may have been considered “negative” into a success story that other users will be able to see.

In both instances, media monitoring is used to assist customers directly while simultaneously improving consumer perception. A win-win situation.

What’s the best way to conduct media monitoring?

While manual media monitoring can still be conducted online, it’s much faster and more efficient to leverage an automated media monitoring service.

These kinds of services deploy effective targeting systems that can keep track of the terms, phrases, and names brands are looking to monitor.

Newswire’s Media Watch lets brands monitor content closely to measure article sentiment, track coverage, and discover trends. With Media Watch, companies can enhance their brand perception and increase overall brand awareness by using critical data to make informed decisions.