Can media monitoring motivate and not frustrate?

With monitoring and evaluation, there are many solutions and multiple sources, needing to bridge the gap between traditional media, social media and website analytics.

Since PR professionals are finding themselves with ever-expanding responsibilities, the most valuable commodity for them is time. So, monitoring and evaluation can often fall by the wayside, as it requires time and resources. However, it should be viewed as vital in managing responsibilities and time since it helps PRs make quicker and more informed decisions.

The research shows that 52% of global marcomms practitioners report on traditional media coverage. And of those, 49% look for a solution that encompasses all channels and data sources, 42% look for trend analysis on relevant themes and 41% also look for easily understood reporting (Talkwalker, 2020).

The key challenge
PR professionals have a wide range of responsibilities with limited time. Management of monitoring to draw relevant insight from evaluation and reports relating to PR activity therefore proves challenging. Talkwalker’s stats attest to this, seeing as 48% of marcomms still do not report on traditional coverage. But there are ways to effectively report on this if you know what metrics to review.

Is there a solution?
There’s no wonder that some PR professionals don’t report on their activity due to the sheer amount of data available. So, what are the appropriate metrics to choose from, how do you put them in context, and how can they inform future approaches?

Looking at an example from one of our clients will do best to illustrate. A client’s objective was to better understand brand affinity compared across each of their key market groups (e.g. Europe, EMEA, Americas). By working with loop, we have been able to monitor for and compare the sentiment (tone of the article towards the brand in question) and press release performance across these key market groups. We homed in on these two relevant metrics – sentiment and press release performance – and by integrating the two, we were able to track and provide the answer.

The sentiment is the kind of metric that is best looked at in context of other metrics, while press release performance is a metric that looks at how publications interacted with press releases on Newspress (in terms of Newspress engagement) and how much coverage they generated (in terms of reach). Although these two metrics can be seen as a proxy for other established concepts (and not without its charms), it’s the combination of those two that was able to help answer questions about the brand’s current momentum. Looking at the two metrics together, we can see a clearer narrative on whether the coverage for the brand is positive (vs. negative, ambivalent or neutral) and, more importantly, what kind of news attracted the most engagement and high-reaching positive media coverage.

This way, we were able to answer against the objective and determine brand affinity as well as draw insight as to what drives the brand affinity in each key market group. Drawing the insight from the data we collated through monitoring, we have been able to find which markets have the highest brand affinity – engaged and reported on brand’s news the most, and in the most positive manner.

More power
Working with the right evaluation team can advise you on the right metrics to monitor to build a stronger case for reporting successes. Our Monitoring and Insights team can work alongside you to introduce other ways of measuring, and creating better links between inputs (activities, campaigns, press releases) and PR outcomes.

Whether proving ROI to your C-suite or analysing a recent campaign for best practices, by monitoring the right metrics you can paint a clear picture of your successes, provide context to relative failures, demonstrate your value to the business, and inform future approaches.

loop can support you at every stage, from helping you research your customers, right through to talking to the right media, gaining great coverage and monitoring activity effectively using media intelligence and analysis to deliver what matters.