According to research, 30% of advertisers worldwide are cutting their 2023 ad budgets. Quite a number, right?
Not to mention that this same research showed that 75% of respondents said their budgets are under “heavy scrutiny,” even if they’re not currently planning a reduction.
Where’s the silver lining?
There are still ways to ensure your business growth without investing in ads. Enter media monitoring.
💡 Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
Media monitoring, or tracking and analyzing your brand through mentions in the online world, enables you to improve your brand reputation, keep your competitors under a close eye, identify new business opportunities, and mitigate crises.
How? Read on!
4 Ways Media Monitoring Fuels Your Business Growth
Improves Brand Reputation
Here’s a question: do you know much it takes to ruin a great brand’s reputation? In today’s digital age – only a bad social media comment.
And it’s easy to track these comments when they’re made on your social media accounts or when you’re tagged, and you get a notification for the mention. But how do you know who’s talking about you beyond these?
This is where a media monitoring tool jumps in. It enables you to set up a topic containing your brand name (or your campaign name or anything of your interest). Ultimately, it collects and delivers all your tagged and untagged mentions into one feed, giving you the opportunity to have full control over what is being said and where. And once you get this information, you can easily react in a corresponding way, reply or adjust your campaign or strategy accordingly.
Here’s a great example of an untagged mention by Starbucks, utilized to boost their brand reputation and maintain a positive image.
Read 5 Key Steps in Brand Reputation Measurement
What does it have to do with your business growth? Well, research says that every additional one-star Yelp rating causes an increase in the business’s revenue by as high as 9%.
Convinced now?
Helps Analyze Your Competition
Remember how we said that you could track all your tagged and untagged mentions in a single dashboard within your media monitoring tool? Well, you can do the very same thing for your competitors’ mentions, too.
This means that you can see what the wider audience thinks of their brand, how they respond to negative mentions and solve potential crises, what kind of campaigns they post, and the response they get and maybe discover some opportunities for your business.
Read How To Do Social Media Competitor Research
Media monitoring tool Determ has a separate report called Competitive Analysis, where you can compare directly your brand to one of your competitors and see how you’re doing. It looks something like this:
This can help you draw immediate conclusions about the areas you should focus on. Like which social media you should focus on more. Or in which contexts your competitors are mentioned and see why. You can also get a full list of influencers of your competitors and maybe look into opportunities to collaborate with them.
Influencers are of particular importance here, since Determ helps you track which media outlets or profiles have the highest influence. Additionally, you can filter the list by sentiment, and maybe decide to tackle those who speak particularly negatively about your brand and look into reasons why. Or quite the opposite – those who are the strongest positive influencers, and make them your brand ambassadors. Just to understand the market – a considerable percentage of 72% of marketers used Instagram for influencer campaigns in 2022. This number is predicted to grow by 4.1% in 2023.
Read What You Need to Know Before Trying Personal Selling
Identifies New Opportunites
Depending on your business niche, media monitoring can help you find new business opportunities in several ways. You can track industry-specific hashtags to identify emerging trends. Also, monitoring day-to-day conversations about your brand can reveal a lot about your customers’ needs, preferences and pain points. In this way you can identify gaps in the market that you can fill with your services. And as we’ve mentioned, you can track your existing competitors, or keep tabs on emerging competitors or disruptive startups.
Media monitoring tool Determ offers a range of data and media monitoring metrics in their reports which can help you identify new opportunities for business growth. Let’s take the share of voice for example.
We’ve taken a couple of well known sports brands and run their mentions through the tool. You can clearly see which brands are most talked about where in the world. And if you’re a brand, looking for business growth opportunities, this can easily be used when planning where to target your next campaigns. Or if you’re deciding which market to pay special attention to.
In addition, you can use the tips by Determ’s AI assistant Synthia. It analyzes your top mentions, draws conclusions and gives actional tips on your next steps. This can reveal some influencers you may have overlooked or hashtags you can make use if in your next campaigns.
Read 4 Ways of Using Customer Insights to Track Marketing Campaigns
Helps Mitigate Crises
If you think crises happen to somebody else, you might want to rethink that (remember 2020 and the pandemic?). In fact, 69% of business leaders reported experiencing a crisis over a period of five years, with the average number of crises being three. What can you do?
Well, having a crisis communication plan up and ready is a great start. But you can also gain a considerable advantage simply by detecting a crisis brewing on time. And this is where media monitoring comes in handy.
While tracking the mentions of your brand regularly and taking a look at the metrics in reports, you can easily detect what is going on. For example if you see an increase in the number of negative mentions in a certain period, you might want to take a look at what exactly happened. Determ gives you the option of real-time notifications, or Alerts, which notify you whenever you’re mentioned somewhere online (through Slack, email or mobile app). There is also an option of setting up Spike alerts, which let you know when there is an unusual increase in the number of mentions within a certain period. Or setting up Net Sentiment Spike Alerts, which are triggered when the sentiment around a specific topic related to a brand (or keyword) you’re tracking significantly shifts.
You can also take a deeper dive into the spike alerts through the Spike Alert email. It not only notifies you of trending topics but also highlights posts that may have triggered the increase in mentions. This feature provides immediate context, empowering you to take action or refine your strategies. In addition, the Spike Alert dashboard comprises a range of informative graphs and a concise Synthia summary for an in-depth analysis of the situation.
To Conclude
Media monitoring is a powerful tool that can help businesses drive growth in a variety of ways. By monitoring their brand reputation, tracking competitors, identifying new opportunities, and managing crises, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and achieve long-term success. With the right media monitoring tools and strategies in place, businesses can stay up-to-date on industry trends, respond quickly to customer feedback, and differentiate themselves from their competitors. As a result, media monitoring should be an essential component of any business growth strategy.
If you’d like to try out Determ, book a demo call and let our experts help you find growth opportunities.
