Media monitoring has always been essential to the roles of PR and communications. These teams need to be aware of when their brand is being discussed, who is saying it, and the implications of those conversations. Before the digital era, “clipping services” collected physical cut-outs of articles from newspapers and magazines, while television segments were recorded on VHS tapes to track brand mentions.
With the digital transformation of media fracturing the landscape more than ever before, PR professionals now face an overwhelming amount of content to monitor and report to their internal stakeholders. Gathering, analysing, and measuring this data against broader business objectives demands significant time, skill, and resources. Even the most equipped PR teams can feel inundated by the vast array of channels and conversations they need to convert into actionable insights.
While media monitoring is just one aspect of PR, it remains a crucial foundation. Without it, PR teams cannot effectively fulfil their roles.
What is Media Monitoring?
Media monitoring refers to tracking, analysing, and measuring various media channels for coverage of a particular brand, topic, or keyword.
These channels can include traditional media (newspapers and magazines), broadcast (radio and television), and digital media (online websites and social media). Analysing the data from these sources enables you to understand everything from public perception to the growing trends in your your industry or sector.
Types of Media Monitoring
Traditional Media Monitoring
Traditional media monitoring focuses on tracking coverage in print publications (such as newspapers and magazines), television (such as local and national news), and radio broadcasts. It involves scanning these sources for mentions of your brand, competitors, or relevant industry topics. Because traditional media monitoring can be a laborious task, requiring manual effort or specialised services to collect and analyse data from these offline sources, PR teams often rely on bespoke tools to gather this data and have a single source of truth.
Digital Media Monitoring
Digital media monitoring tracks online news websites, blogs, forums, and other web- based media like podcasts. This type of monitoring uses automated tools to scan the internet for relevant mentions, articles, and discussions.
It allows for realtime tracking of online content, providing quick insights into emerging trends and industry developments. PR teams often rely on digital media monitoring tools that offer features like sentiment analysis, reach and volume metrics, and content categorisation to better understand their online presence and reputation.
Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring involves tracking mentions, comments, and shares of your brand, product, or service across various social media channels like X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and so on.
Monitoring these channels enables PR teams to quickly capture customer feedback, understand audience sentiment around their brands, identify industry trends, and respond to all of it effectively. It also helps you see key influencers in your industry and potentially partner with them.
Why Does Media Monitoring Matter?
It enables you to gain a deeper knowledge of your audience of customers and potential customers – how they feel about your brand, your competitors, and the products or services you offer – so you can craft relevant communication that resonates and differentiates your brand. It’s also a way to improve your brand reputation by enabling you to proactively respond to feedback online and address any concerns or criticisms people may have.
More broadly speaking, media monitoring can be a useful tool for identifying industry trends or following certain sectors or topics. PR pros can use this insight to capitalise on opportunities that you simply wouldn’t see without trawling through myriad media channels one by one.
Monitoring is also a way to demonstrate the value of your comms strategy to the C-suite by showing them earned media wins and clear, quantitative evidence that your team’s efforts are moving the needle in terms of brand reputation and awareness.
In short, media monitoring provides critical insight that informs smarter decisions and more effective strategies.
Use Cases for Media Monitoring
Media monitoring can help you explore myriad sources and journalists covering your brand. Depending on the tools at your disposal, it can also dig deeper with analysis of common themes, geographical breakdowns, and much more.
Before getting into the various metrics media monitoring can track, let’s first look more closely at its use cases.
The Benefits of Media Monitoring
If you’re trying to justify the addition of media monitoring technology and services, here are four key considerations to highlight with both your team and those who make the buying decisions.
“Always on” monitoring means you won’t get caught off guard
The internet and social media never sleep. Conversations are happening all the time, and you need to be monitoring everything that pertains to your brand, product, or service. Media monitoring can provide efficient and insightful market research for your company’s campaigns or new solutions. By setting up relevant searches, your team can gather essential information for campaign planning: What are audiences saying about your company, products, or services? What misconceptions exist? What are they saying about competitors? Where are opportunities to change negative perceptions or reinforce positive ones? A good media monitoring solution equips PR and corporate comms teams with market intel to inform strategy and create resonant messages for target audiences. If a new competitor surfaces, a rival product or service hits the market, or an event happens that can potentially disrupt your business or industry, the last thing you need are your stakeholders coming to you with news you were completely unaware of.
Monitoring is an effective market research tool
Media monitoring can provide efficient and insightful market research for your company’s campaigns or new solutions. By setting up relevant searches, your team can gather essential information for campaign planning: What are audiences saying about your company, products, or services? What misconceptions exist? What are they saying about competitors? Where are opportunities to change negative perceptions or reinforce positive ones? A good media monitoring solution equips PR and corporate comms teams with market intel to inform strategy and create resonant messages for target audiences.
Monitoring helps execute and adjust campaign messaging
Executing a campaign around a product or service launch, upcoming event, new piece of content (such as a report or whitepaper), or any other initiative is only the first step in the communications cycle. Effectively tracking efforts and making the right mid-campaign adjustments to messaging and channels are critical to overall success.
Media monitoring enables your team to continuously track key mentions, competitor reactions, and overall audience engagement throughout your campaign’s lifecycle. Gaining realtime insight into campaign performance allows your teams to pivot as necessary while focusing on the bigger picture. Post campaign, media monitoring can help you understand effectiveness and inform your next campaign strategy based on lessons learned.
Monitoring can complement your journalist outreach
Does your organisation distribute press releases advertising big events? Or reach out to local or national influencers to help boost campaign visibility? Complementing your outreach strategies with an all-encompassing media monitoring solution can help you further understand which messages resonate best with your audiences and influencers. Additionally, using this information to pinpoint the most influential individuals can help you make better decisions about which journalists and media influencers to partner with. Furthermore, this type of understanding establishes the groundwork for future content and helps contribute to your content calendar planning for the year.
The Botton Line
Media monitoring is crucial for organisations who need to stay informed about their public image, track industry trends, and gauge public opinion. With an aligned and thoughtful approach to media monitoring, brands can gain valuable insights that steer their decision-making processes and strategic planning.
For modern PR teams, an effective media monitoring strategy requires both the right planning and the right tools, which will help streamline workflows, derive greater insights at scale, and make an even bigger impact. Perhaps even more importantly, such an approach will ultimately free up your team’s time to focus on the work you originally got into PR to do: Build meaningful relationships, create strategic campaigns, and tell stories that make a difference.
To find out more about media monitoring for your organisation, book a demo with us today so we can show you the power of Streem.