Media monitoring consists of monitoring the results of any advertising you are putting out in the world for your company. This can include both offline and online sources. You can study the results of anything from a flier you distributed to a blog post you wrote on the product you sale. While it’s easier to monitor online advertising simply because of the technology available to you, it’s important to also monitor offline sources like news shows and radio. The more marketing you get out there about yourself the better, but you want to make sure it’s marketing that’s actually bringing your business customers.
Media Monitoring can be split into two categories. The first is social media which is a big part of the advertising your company has to do. It’s where most people get a lot of their information. The other is TV and radio monitoring. People do still watch television and they do still listen to radio despite the advances in music streaming and DVR technology.
The Power of the Internet
First let’s take a look at monitoring social media and what the benefits of paying attention to your advertising campaigns are. The best thing you get from monitoring social media is a measure of the return on your investment. You can see pretty quickly what is working to drive traffic to your business and what isn’t. Social media monitoring can also allow you to see what your demographic is. Who is talking about your company? Who is liking on Facebook and sharing on Twitter. These are important things you need to know to build a customer profile.
Some other ways that monitoring your social media can help is by finding leads that you can turn into customers. Social media is a very personal way for you to reach out to someone and when people are interested in your posts then you can gage their interest with a private message. When you are monitoring the social media posts and advertisements you are putting out there you can see what type of people gravitate towards your business and where you get the most traffic from. You will see how many people who go to your site from the advertisements convert to sales. That’s the ultimate goal of marketing to get people to come to your site and become your customers. It’s how you make money, and while this is common sense it’s not always something people get right.
The task of watching all the social media data and collecting it is pretty daunting, and we haven’t even gotten to the other forms of media yet. You can see why you might hire a company like universal-info.com to help you figure out what is working and what isn’t.
That brings us to news, television, and radio media monitoring.
Old School Media
While online media outlets blogs, websites, and online advertising are a huge part of the media that helps your business, we’ll get to those a little later. There are still the news programs, television and radio advertisements, and good old fashioned paper fliers that you can put out as well. These are just as important as your online ads to catch those few people left in the world that don’t get on the internet. It also might catch the attention of someone who overlooked your ad in the saturated world of social media. You never know so you owe it to yourself to try all avenues and make sure to monitor the effectiveness of all of them.
The term old school only applies to this because of the huge emphasis on advertising via the internet. Television advertisements and sponsorships on shows are a good way to get your business out there to a wide audience. Monitoring the response these ads are getting is a bit trickier than monitoring online. This is where you might find focus groups really helpful because you can get real time reactions to your ads and see what people respond to well and what they don’t respond to at all. Learning how your television ads are impacting people will give you a much clearer picture of why you are putting those ads out there. When it comes to radio the same thing can happen with focus groups, you can also poll people on what they thought. With these two types of old school media you might find it pertinent to hire a company to help you.
Back to the Internet Again
We are going to come back to the internet again to discuss the outlets that need to be monitored outside of social media. These are online magazines, news media online, online radio broadcasts, blogs, and advertisements on other company’s websites. If you decide to use a media monitoring company then one of their services is gathering press clippings to see how your business is doing with the public.
When you put media out there you need to know that it’s hitting its mark. You don’t want to waste money and energy on media that isn’t going anywhere. Another benefit of media monitoring is to stay ahead of your PR so if your company stays in the news you will always know what’s being said about you. This is imperative if you are in the middle of a huge business deal or competing for a large client with another company. This way you will stay on top of your reputation in the news and be able to issue appropriate press releases and call press conferences. Another great thing you can use media monitoring for is other trending issues in your field. It is a great way to learn about what’s going on in your business area and what your company should be prepared for.
A quick review on what media monitoring can do for your business shows you that it helps you stay on top of your reputation in the public eye, keep up to date on the current state and trends of your industry and see where your traffic is coming from and who you should be targeting.