Supercharge your PR with media monitoring

From press clippings to success with media monitoring

Public Relations and PR professionals have always had it tough. With PR and Comms suffering from internal ignorance of the purpose and importance of PR and a lack of exec buy-in. But even more significantly, difficult to measure metrics and antiquated processes. The challenges related to Public Relations are widespread.

The difficulties Public Relations professionals face are hangovers from the recent PR past. One of outdated and inadequate processes including press clippings, clippings books, and Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE). Other industries and sectors have moved with the times, so why hasn’t the PR and Comms industry?

The answer to that questions is that it has. Or, more accurately, some of it has. PR has graduated from the laborious process of manual news clipping to media monitoring using Google Arts, Boolean searches, and Twitter lists. But it’s nearly 2020 and these digital media monitoring methods have been around for over a decade.

The next phase of this evolution is automated, real-time media monitoring. (Crowds cheer.)

By using automated or AI-powered media monitoring platforms and processes, you can reinvigorate any PR strategy. So get ready to find out the ways media monitoring will revolutionise and supercharge your PR.

Improve PR efforts and increase productivity

Improve PR efforts

Media monitoring is crucial for every PR team and strategy. This is evident in the decades (if not centuries) that PRs have spent manually collecting physical clippings of media coverage. Media coverage has always been an established and accepted metric proving the results of your efforts. Ergo media monitoring’s importance. And not just in PR and Comms, but across the board in areas such as Marketing and Public Affairs.

As it is such a good indication of your successes, failures, and potential crises, it’s understandable that a PR tech industry has sprung up. An industry that is delivering AI-powered, real-time media monitoring platforms. And the development of these technologies means that Heads of PR can sleep soundly. They no longer have to worry about missing important news or media coverage because of the manual clippings process.

With a media monitoring software you can track the response your PR, Comms, and marketing activities are receiving. Information that is fundamental to improving your strategy. And you can expand overall public relations efforts by being outward facing. Keeping track of the industry, your clients, and sector events, will result in more opportunities to capitalise upon, risks to avoid, and your organisation with more exposure.

Which can all be tied back to a holistic PR strategy.

Increase productivity

This also means that PR teams can redistribute their time for proactive PR and outreach, a shift in their workflow that will absolutely increase productivity. But how? Well, with the proliferation of technology or AI-driven media monitoring platforms, a fundamental process that previously required hours of a junior PR’s day now takes no more than 20 minutes.

Through real-time alerts, easy to use reports, and instant translation of global content, a PRs time can be much more wisely spent – bringing actual value to the business.

Expand your media coverage

This value can be found in the proactive PR outreach made possible by conducting comprehensive media monitoring. With media monitoring across international sources PRs can find new, interesting and relevant  sector publications.

Having this additional layer of fact-finding, media monitoring allows for highly targeted PR pitching. Providing the ability to capitalise upon strategic PR opportunities that were previously unknown. Targeting the pitch of a press release or comments will increase the possibility of gaining media coverage, which in turn will help increase brand awareness and reputation. And will foster the creation of new partnerships.

Make sure PR campaigns are effective

A PR campaign is made up of a holistic set of activities (planned in advance) that relate to a venture undertaken by an organisation. This is in contrast to daily PR activities, such as responding to social interactions or events, providing ad hoc commentary, and paid advertising. As such, pre-campaign creation involves an enormous amount of market and media research.

The gathering of marketing and media intelligence is necessary to ensure that the right audience is reached through the right channels. Both for targeting the right media, publications, or journalists, so that the chance of publicity is increased, and for defining the campaign objectives.

So, how does media monitoring help with research? In a nut shell it cuts the need to pay expensive market research providers for external research. This can all be conducted in-house, at the fraction of the cost, using a tool that is useful across your PR strategy (and throughout the wider business). With the added benefit of continuously expanding your PR team’s knowledge and understanding of your competitive landscape.

Not only does media monitoring allow you to adequately plan and prepare for PR campaigns, but it continuously improves them. Campaign measurement enables you to develop and improve campaigns as they are happening. It also provides information and insight post-campaign that will prove what works, what campaign mistakes can be avoided, and the changes that will supercharge your next campaign.

Explore untapped markets

Some media monitoring tools (request a demo click through) offer translation services. Translation options provide you with a global picture of your competitive landscape and sector that you will never have had before. Which is not only useful for international PR outreach and supporting different regions of your business, but can enable the exploration of untapped markets.

The combination of instant translations with graphs and data visualisations of actionable insights is killer. Your understanding of the businesses’ international market will facilitate the expansion of your global opportunities.

By monitoring mentions of your brand, competitors, and products, with an AI-powered media monitoring tool that can recognise product-related words you can discover new opportunities. You may in fact find that your products or services are in demand in different industries, sectors, or geographies. Ones that you and the wider business hadn’t considered before.

Win win.

Create reports for your C-suite

Finally, the metrics collected via tracking media mentions will facilitate the building of PR reports. Public Relations teams have always had a hard time proving the value of PR and their work across the business. But it’ a problem no longer.

Media monitoring tools provide the raw data necessary to build impactful reports. This is incredibly useful. However, good media monitoring tools channel this information into data visualisations, charts, graphs, and PDF reports. Both to present and visually support the data.

Where to begin with media monitoring?

In conclusion, start media monitoring now. Done and dusted, right?

Well, actually no. Getting into media monitoring can seem like a daunting task. Do you begin with simple Google Alerts? Maybe not as then you’d have to figure out Boolean searches. What about depending on Twitter lists? No, that’s not ideal either as social listening doesn’t give you the best or most comprehensive picture.

Ultimately, the best way to kick start your media monitoring and supercharge your PR is to choose and implement a media monitoring tool. And not only that, but one that’s perfect for you and your business.

Select a platform that offers great features, seamless and helpful onboarding, and continuous and attentive customer care. Among other things. Maybe this is the right media monitoring tool for you?