Why You Should Use Media Monitoring Tools for Marketing

This is a guest article written by Jennifer Phillips, who is Director of Marketing Communications at CARMA, a leading provider of global media intelligence solutions.

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For public relations purposes, many organizations monitor online brand mentions and media coverage. What not everyone realizes is that they can also use media monitoring tools for marketing activities. Conducting searches for mentions of a company name, CEO, the latest buzz about products or services, and to watch for negative coverage, is now considered standard PR practice. Media monitoring also helps businesses look for opportunities, keep an eye on the competition, and watch out for impending crises. For some businesses on a budget, Google Alerts might be sufficient. But if your business already has a paid-for media monitoring tool, you should make sure you're making use of every feature to get the most for your money.    

How to Use Media Monitoring Tool for Marketing Initiatives

One of the ways to get more than just standard news results is to use your media monitoring tool to inform your marketing efforts. Let's take a look at some of the ways you can achieve this.  

Gauge Consumer Sentiment

If your media monitoring tool has the ability to track social media, you can get a good glimpse as to what topics matter to your customers. Depending on what keywords or search terms you use, you can track what is being said about your company or products, how your competitors are being discussed, and how your audience is engaging with brands like yours. Analyzing this type of information can provide direction on how to refine messaging so that it resonates. You can even watch for trends outside of your industry that attract your target audience, allowing you to craft creative and adaptive marketing plans that tap into cultural movements.  

Identify and Engage Influencers 

One of the dominant trends in marketing during the last few years is influencer marketing. Against a digital backdrop of interrupting ads and excessively promotional content, influencers have become a valuable bridge between brands and consumers. Influencer marketing leverages the popularity of figures who are important to your target audiences to convey your brand messages. Put another way, rather than marketing directly to your audience, influencer marketing takes a different route by identifying trusted voices and engaging them to carry your brand message. You can use media monitoring tools for marketing purposes here as well, by calibrating your platform to find influential voices in your sector and learn about them to ensure a good brand fit. Media monitoring can also be used to gauge the success of efforts on both social and traditional media channels, tracking the amplification effect of your chosen influencers and gauging the sentiment as described earlier.    

Engagement and Innovative Messaging

Communications efforts in PR and marketing have moved beyond one-way messaging directed at audiences. The success of a program now largely depends on how engaged an audience is, so brands need to spark and facilitate conversation. Media monitoring can both inform this process and track success. What motivates your audience? How do they respond? What are best practices in this area, and what strategies and tactics should you avoid? These questions can be answered by researching different aspects of a marketing initiative, including seeing what has worked for other brands in the same vertical space and identifying what might be missing within a market offering by analyzing consumer requests and complaints.  

Inbound and Outbound Marketing Activities

You can use a media monitoring tool for both inbound and outbound marketing tasks. For inbound marketing, you can use a media monitoring tool to identify items to include in email newsletters, or to find topics for blog posts. Many forms of content creation that fortify inbound marketing efforts can include topical, relevant information for your industry. Using a monitoring tool is a great way to find these items. Outbound marketing can be helped by using a media monitoring tool as well. News stories about broad industry categories can provide new leads for calls, and can also help identify trade show opportunities.  

Enhance Your Buyer Personas

Marketing leans heavily on the development of “buyer personas” to assist in the process of audience targeting. However, some buyer personas can feel static and shallow. Use a media monitoring tool to flag information like recently released survey data or important news items that provide additional insight into your key audiences. You’ll be able to add more depth to your personas—and may uncover untapped or seldom-recognized pockets of buyers who may be a perfect fit for your product or brand.   These tools are commonly used by only one area of a business when in reality they can benefit many.  Hopefully, the ideas listed above will lead to thinking creatively about new ways to use media monitoring tools for marketing ends. The lines between the differing communications practices of PR, marketing, and advertising continue to blur.    [search-tag]