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Horizon scanning and new opportunities with media monitoring
Media monitoring offers a plethora of benefits to businesses. Many of which we’ve shared right here on this very blog (you can find them all here).
You can use media monitoring to measure the success of your PR campaigns, deal with a comms crisis quickly, and listen out for negative publicity. All without purchasing newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV broadcasts. Manual processes undertaken looking for media coverage of a specific campaign, client or company yourself.
But today we’re going to be focusing on how you using media monitoring can help you identify new opportunities. And why it will help you engage with influencers, edge ahead of the competition, and discover new markets.
Sound good? We thought so. Let’s get going….
Increase your reach and discover new markets
One use we absolutely love here at Signal AI is being able to understand emerging trends and markets. Not only this, but being able to do this globally.
We have an international client base who work across multiple geographies. They’ll need to monitor news and events globally to understand what’s affecting their organisation, regardless of location or language.
Historically this has been a tricky and costly problem to solve. Many media monitoring solutions don’t provide their customers with the ability to access and read foreign language content. Alternatively, the delivery of translations is slow and they charge a cost prohibitive fee per document.
We asked our chief data scientist and co-founder, Dr. Miguel Martinez, how media monitoring can help do this.
“The issue with human translation is that it is prohibitively expensive and takes way too long as each article needs to be read and translated individually.
The cost often limits how much coverage a user can track. Across-the-board and in non-English languages; forcing tradeoffs based on managing budget at the risk of missing articles. Even companies prepared to pay the per document fee are at risk of missing critical breaking news. This is because the turnaround time of human translation is often days rather than hours.”
Being able to apply real-time translation to your monitoring means you’ll be able to track across many regions. Enabling you to understand where and how to plot your next moves. And if there are strategic opportunities you can pounce on, not limited by geography.
Stay ahead of your competitors
Competitive intelligence might, to the uninitiated, sound like something you’d hear in a spy novel. That you’re sending one of your juniors out to market to hide behind the plants in your competitor’s reception area. Sneaking around and listening in to calls.
As fun as that sounds (and it does sound fun), there’s a far simpler way to gain competitive intelligence. Intelligence on how your competitors are performing in the market, their strengths, and their challenges.
Knowing who your competitors are is a great place to start. But with media monitoring you can learn so much more about them. This information will can give you the advantage and allow you to outperform them.
Using a media monitoring tool means you can simply set up searches that will indicate when:
- They’re being talked about a lot online
- Are being talked about more than your brand (or less)
- or are being talked about particularly negatively or positively.
So you can then drill down into the reasons why. This information can drive change in your own organisation. As an example, you might see that a competitor has recently released a new feature that you’re also working on.
By using a media monitoring tool, you’ll be able to see how the release went down with the public. And you’ll be able to review the feedback as and when it comes in.
You might see that people would like to change something specific about the feature – you can use that information!
Understand media perception
Understanding the media perception of your brand, your products and markets is incredibly important.
If you have positive media coverage, you’re of course going to be more likely to see more success. You’re going to see more sales, more downloads, more share of voice. If you’re seeing less than savoury coverage, being alerted to it sooner rather than later is paramount. This will allow you to adjust your strategy.
But it’s also important to track social media perception and brand awareness.
Word of mouth is one of the most trusted forms of marketing. People are far more likely to trust someone they know or a person, over a brand.
Take a heartfelt and passionate shampoo recommendation from a friend. (As heartfelt and passionate as one can be about shampoo, anyway.) It is much more likely to sway a person’s haircare decision. It’s certainly going to be far more compelling than a 30-second ad spot in the middle of a sports game.
As such, listening in to these conversations is super important.
Unpick your position in the market by tracking the way you’re perceived online means. From where you’re most popular and where you need to improve, to where there are new opportunities for your business.
Engage industry influencers
Another way to identify and act on new opportunities is by using…drum roll please…influencers!
Influencer marketing is not yet dead, my friends. In fact, AdWeek recently reported that the industry is due to hit $10 billion in worth by 2020. And while this seems obvious for B2C, it’s still very apparent for B2B businesses. There’s serious, serious money in it – and serious opportunities.
You can use a media monitoring tool like Signal AI to discover bloggers, thought leaders in your industry/space, and identify social media influencers. Armed with this information you can then build an influencer strategy and engage with them.
So, it is incredibly valuable to undertake audience analysis on influencers. It will help you see how much more scope you have to reach more people. Including people who you could convert to customers with a well-placed tweet here, or an industry influencer discussing your product in an article there.
Having trusted, influential people recommend you is worth a hundred tweets you put out yourself. (We’ve made that stat up, but you catch our drift.)
Identifying new opportunities with media monitoring
The long and short of it? There are many opportunities to be had.
But how are you making sure that you’re giving your organisation the greatest chance of success? Get ahead of the pack by using a solid media monitoring tool. One that will allow you to horizon scan and identify new opportunities.
Get a demo of Signal AI today.