In the world of marketing, it is vital to regularly analyze the performance of your campaigns, track negative publicity, and attend to a crisis promptly. Earlier, marketers used to manually monitor different topics across media. This lengthy process included watching TV, sifting through newspapers, listening to the radio, and actively tracking other media outlets. Move forward a few years and now businesses are focused on monitoring online communication channels. To track and maintain brand reputation, they now focus on tracking and monitoring reviews, hashtags, comments, and campaigns.

The insights gathered from this exercise were crucial to form the future business strategy. While most of the companies have been doing it manually but this method is highly inefficient and could not deliver the desired result due to the time involved in the process. This led to the evolution of a range of media monitoring tools that have automated the media monitoring processes and enhanced the efficiency of the marketing teams’ manifolds.

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What are media monitoring tools?

Media monitoring is an exercise undertaken by companies to monitor different media outlets to access information related to specific topics. This information may have business, scientific, or commercial value. Under media monitoring, marketers use the latest tools to monitor media outlets like print, radio, TV, social media, and others. The focus of marketers under media monitoring is on the internet as eCommerce is ruling the roost. Through the combination of media monitoring and analysis, these tools help the marketers optimize key business operations like,

• Customer Feedback
• Brand Monitoring
• Customer Support
• Market Research
• Public Relations
• Hashtag Analytics
• Competition Research

How do Media Monitoring Tools Help?

Media monitoring plays a crucial role in a company’s marketing strategy. Many consumers use the internet to exchange ideas, share reviews, and seek product recommendations. With the extensive usage of smartphones and the internet, consumers have become influencers and can also impact the opinion of other customers regarding a brand’s perception. This is where media monitoring tools come into the picture. They help businesses improve their online presence by reaching out to consumers, managing their perceptions, and finally winning their trust. Here are some of the ways in which media monitoring tools help companies drive their growth:

1. Learn more about the customers:

The key to success for any company is to serve the target customers in a better way as compared to the competitors. To secure this advantage, you must monitor online conversations around the brand and determine the pain points. Through efficient media monitoring tools, you are in a better position to learn about the issues facing the customers and deliver the experiences that they desire in an effective manner. As you learn more about your customers, your performance would certainly improve.

2. Monitoring brand reputation:

Negative reviews shared online by customers tend to spread fast and can really hurt your reputation. With help of media monitoring tools, you can negate the potential adverse effects of any potential crises. You are in a better position to control the narrative of your brand on social media. Through robust media monitoring tools, you will be in a better position to manage both paid and unpaid media coverage.

3. Avoid Crises:

Crisis management gets a whole new definition when it comes to negative online reviews. It is crucial for your business to manage the situation better and emerge undamaged from it. The best way to ensure better crisis management is to spot a negative mention as soon as possible. With help of a media monitoring tool, you will always be one step ahead and will have a better opportunity to protect your brand from the adverse effects of any negative mentions.

4. Monitor the results of your marketing campaigns:

To boost the efficiency of your marketing campaigns, you need to monitor their results regularly. Else, you will not be able to optimize your communication and marketing strategy. With help of media monitoring tools, you are in a better position to know how well your marketing campaign is resonating with the target audience. Your team will get useful customer insights by monitoring the online conversations around the brand.

Top Media Monitoring Platforms and How They Are Used

Here are examples of some of the top media monitoring platforms from around the world:

1. Google Alerts:

It is a free media monitoring tool that gathers all the public mentions of your keyword and sends the report to your email id. But it lacks any analytics option.

2. Talkwalker:

It is a prominent media monitoring tool that focuses on offering results to corporate accounts. It covers paid and earned media in over 187 languages. Talkwalker uses AI to identify the most impactful information.

3. SEMrush:

It is a media monitoring tool that provides an interesting combination of SEO and media monitoring. Through this tool, you can also track unrelated brand mentions.

4. Prowly:

It is a popular media monitoring tool that helps you keep a track of your press releases. If you rely heavily on PRs for your marketing and work with leading media outlets, then it is a good tool.

Media monitoring tools have emerged as a potent resource for companies looking to leverage their media presence to drive growth. As the number of social media users grows and mobile internet becomes cheaper, their utility will rise further. It would be interesting to see what the future holds for these tools.

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