What is media monitoring?
Media monitoring is the process of observing public information on print or digital platforms (including websites and social media) to find keywords, terms and phrases on specific topics.
Technological developments have not only increased the importance of media monitoring but have also provided media monitoring tools and services such as Meltwater, Cision, Hootsuite, Talkwalker, Prezly and Reputology, to help organizations easily scan for relevant public information on their business.
Media monitoring has changed along with the media and channels businesses must monitor. While they used to focus on broadcast and print media earlier, the shift to digital media has also shifted their focus to social media, online publications and other digital media outlets (like white papers etc).
Marketers and their businesses need to monitor the media as it provides valuable insights into public perceptions of their brand, products, services, marketing campaigns and even their competitors and industry.
An overwhelming majority of consumers read online reviews before deciding whether or not to purchase a product or service. A whopping 94% of consumers have said that a bad review has convinced them to avoid a business entirely.
In addition, review interactions, which include searching for or filtering reviews, or clicking to expand and read the entire review, have increased by 50% from pre-pandemic levels, indicating greater consumer sensitivity about which businesses to support.
This has also led to as many as 70% of consumers using rating filters when researching products, services and businesses. The most common filter is applied to view only businesses with four-star ratings or higher.
This makes reputation management imperative for businesses and in turn, makes media monitoring an indispensable tool for marketers.
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which marketing teams collectively identify high-value projects to collectively focus on them. An agile marketing team uses sprints (short, finite periods of intensive work) to complete such projects.
One such example is Dell, whose marketing team combines agile marketing with an inbound marketing approach. The company uses one-month sprints to support a worldwide team that organizes all its product lines.
Another example is ING Netherlands. In a bid to keep up with fintech start-ups, CEO Nick Jue learned agile marketing from companies like Google, Netflix and Spotify. ING then launched pilot agile marketing teams while creating a new structure for the 2,500 employees at its Netherlands headquarters. ING has since seen quicker time to market, a rise in employee engagement, fewer impediments and handoffs, and better client experience.
Agile marketing is typically characterized by:
- Teamwork and collaboration: Work silos and hierarchies are eschewed in favor of free collaboration across a team, with every team member usually involved in each project to a certain extent.
- Data-driven decision making: Agile marketers take a data-driven approach to marketing campaigns, often experimenting with new methods for boosting team performance, and relying on data to assess and improve their efforts.
- Rapid, iterative releases: Agile marketing teams often use sprints — short periods when a scrum team works – to complete a specified amount of work. The sprint cycle enables agile marketers to adjust their plan of action every few weeks, making for more flexibility in problem-solving and less drastic budget and timeline adjustments.
- Adherence to the Agile Marketing Manifesto: Agile marketing teams tend to closely follow the principles listed in the Agile Marketing Manifesto, which features seven core values and 10 principles that are vital to achieving and maintaining marketing agility.
Agile marketing is gaining traction due to its multiple benefits, one of which is maintaining brand relevance. Because the agile approach allows marketers to respond and adapt more quickly to changing customer needs, brands are better able to remain relevant and solidify their reputation.
It also offers more extensive consumer insights, so brands can understand their customers more intimately and tailor their marketing approach to serve different demographics better.
Agile marketing typically leverages technology to support the agile cycle’s data-heavy measurement and learning stages. This often involves using media monitoring tools to identify real-time PR opportunities, as well SEO tools to track website search performance.
Why agile marketing teams should take advantage of media monitoring
Media monitoring helps you understand your target audience — their likes, dislikes, and opinions of you and your competitors. Understanding this will help you develop techniques for more effective communications with your audience.
This will then help you to improve brand reputation and perception, as it can assist your business in identifying potential crises and mitigating damage, as well as creating an effective reputation management plan.
At the same time, media monitoring centralizes the workload of risk mitigation by identifying potential risk from legislative changes, market sentiments and observing competitors and their market perceptions.
It further aids in evaluating your efforts, letting you know if you are seeing any results, and what these results are, at the end of every campaign. This is also crucial for PR and marketing professionals and brand managers.
Just as important is how media monitoring helps to identify the most suitable journalists and influencers for outreach and therefore, improve a business’ media as well as influencer relations. Journalists who cover your competitors are likely to also be interested in what you do differently; getting media coverage will then raise your profile among your target audience.
Media monitoring can also identify detractors who may spread negative or misleading information about your business. This is as important as knowing which journalists to contact, as you must know who is saying what about your company and who is listening to them.
Agile applications of media monitoring
Social listening enables agile marketing by helping to determine segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP). Social listening tools filter data based on sentiment analysis, influence scores, and demographics, allowing marketers to better understand their audience and make informed decisions on market segmentation. It also supports real-time brand monitoring, not just of your brand but those of your competitors, thereby allowing you to gain a competitive edge over others in the market.
Social listening tools are vital to data-driven decision making — quantitative data lets you know which hashtag or campaign is getting the most attention, while qualitative data tells you if this attention is positive, neutral or negative.
With website monitoring, agile marketers can be alerted to new instances of particular keywords — such as mentions of their company’s brand and its competitors’ brands — and keep track of rival marketing strategies.
Agile marketers who want to up their media monitoring game can avail of resources on hiring SaaS marketers to match their business needs.
Agile marketing teams can also make use of RSS feeds to aggregate blog content from multiple individual feeds, which is especially useful as business blogging has become a prominent enterprise marketing tool. This allows agile marketers to stay on top of not just their content but that of their competitors.
The symbiotic relationship between agile marketing and media monitoring can be harnessed to great benefit for any business or brand looking to build brand reputation and customer loyalty.
