Media Monitoring: The Game-Changer for Advertising Agencies
At any given time, someone is talking about your company or clients, which is what any advertising agency aims to achieve with its strategic advertising and marketing campaigns. However, you need to tune in to those conversations and learn what people are saying to be able to measure the out-takes, outcomes, and impact of your campaigns on audiences so you can:
- Prove the value of your services to your clients
- Plan, adjust, and execute better campaigns in the future
More importantly, there comes a time when you need to be able to showcase the results of your campaigns to gain recognition from your industry peers and establish your advertising agency as a leader in the field. This recognition often comes in the form of prestigious awards within the advertising and marketing industry, including the Effie Awards, the Cannes Lions Awards, the CLIO Awards, the Webby Awards, etc.
To craft outstanding entries that can secure you those trophies, you need data-supported insights. That brings us to media monitoring, which entails researching and analysing the media presence of your brand and your clients, adding an extra layer of depth to your campaigns.
What is Media Monitoring?
Media monitoring refers to the process of systematically tracking, collecting, and analysing content from various media sources such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, websites, social media, and other online platforms. The goal is to keep an eye on mentions, conversations, and coverage related to a particular brand, company, individual, product, or topic of interest.
Media monitoring allows brands and advertising agencies to become a fly on the wall, giving them organic strategic insights that they would not necessarily get from a focus group or survey. Content gets monitored via social listening tools, which have integrated AI and natural language processing capabilities, enabling the analysis of vast amounts of data and identifying sentiment and context behind media mentions.
Media monitoring tasks can be performed internally by a specialised team or delegated to an external expert service provider, such as Perceptica, for efficient execution.
5 Ways Advertising Agencies Can Benefit From Media Monitoring
Advertising agencies must focus on understanding how their campaigns are received by their target audiences. Whether you are trying to improve your audience targeting approaches, test brand messages and designs, or prove the value of your services to your clients and your peers, you can use media monitoring to substantiate the impact of your advertising campaigns and provide the data necessary to enhance both client satisfaction and industry recognition.
Let us look at the five benefits of media monitoring for advertising agencies:
Increased Brand Awareness
Media monitoring is a component of communication measurement that helps you quantify and qualify the level of brand awareness. It provides insights into how many and what types of people are talking about your brand and the overall sentiment attached to their statements. It also shows you how well-known your brand or product offering is or how perceptions have changed following a campaign you ran.
Armed with this information, you can assess whether your messages are received by the right target audiences. You can learn how they resonate with them – positively or negatively – and if adjustments are needed so the responses align with your desired results. Having this data can help advertising agencies make more informed decisions and changes to their projects while simultaneously safeguarding both their own and the reputation of their clients.
Competitor Analysis
It is always a good idea to know what your competitors are doing. They can be your brand’s biggest threat but also serve as a blueprint for success. A lot of what happens in brand building and marketing is down to trial and error—you try something, and if it fails, you dissect, learn what you can, and go again. But competitors may have already tried those things, and by analysing their activity, you can learn from their successes and their failures.
The same media monitoring techniques and methodologies that you use to keep an eye on mentions of your brand and your clients, you can apply to your competitors. You can discover key insights into their marketing strategies, audience engagement tactics, and overall brand positioning.
Trend Spotting
What is the next big thing? It is a question that all brands and agencies ask themselves, as knowing the answer means they can lead and not follow. Having a comprehensive media monitoring strategy in place can help you spot ongoing and potential trends. This is done through period-over-period analysis of social media discussions and viral posts/products. You can receive daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly media analysis reports.
Ultimately, the goal of an advertising agency is to improve brand awareness and ensure clients can sell more products/services. Detecting the next big thing in its early stages and getting clients in on the ground floor is the key to a successful relationship.
Crisis Management
In an age of “cancel culture”, where one misplaced post can decimate a company’s reputation, crisis management is key. Media monitoring plays a role by recording and organising consumer comments, and with continuous monitoring, brands can recognise when a seemingly minor incident is snowballing into something much bigger. In the case of a full-blown crisis, they can swiftly identify and analyse growing complaints, gauge public sentiment, and strategically respond to mitigate potential damage.
This does not only apply to your agency’s clients. Advertising agencies are also susceptible to reputation damage, and it is arguably more of a concern for them. After all, why would a major brand choose to work with an advertising agency that cannot effectively manage its own reputation?
Identify Influencers
Influencer research plays an important role in any major advertising campaign. The goal is to make sure you are working with the right influencers, ones who have genuine engagement on their social media accounts and also have an audience that fits the required demographic.
Social listening tools that are used during the media monitoring process use key metrics such as reach (potential impact and exposure) and engagement (likes, comments, shares) that help determine the authenticity of an influencer’s engagement. You can see which of their posts perform the best and how their followers respond to them. With the right keywords, advertising agencies can use social listening platforms to research influencers in any specific niche and find the ones most likely to produce the results they seek.
Once the campaign begins, data collected from continuous monitoring will tell the agency how successful their influencer collaboration was.
How Can Your Advertising Agency Implement Media Monitoring?
At Perceptica, we provide advertising agencies and brands with a host of tools for media monitoring. We also offer media analysis as a complementary service that builds on our media monitoring capabilities and enables you to benefit from in-depth analysis of topics of key importance to you.
Lean on the expertise of our team. We have professional media analysts who can provide you with comprehensive media monitoring reports to help you make important business decisions, craft winning award entries, and improve your marketing and advertising strategies.