Media Intelligence in today’s Digital Age

Published: 30 Jan 2020

Do you know what your customers are talking about your brand? Can you find out their hidden needs easily? Have you successfully integrated your media monitoring functions with your business strategies? If you answered ‘yes’ to all the above questions then congratulations your organization is on the right path of exploiting media intelligence.

For all those who were unable to answer the questions above, it calls for the need to expose your enterprise to media intelligence. Media intelligence, a term often confused with media monitoring, is gaining huge importance in the current business scenario..

What exactly is Media Intelligence?

Media intelligence involves gaining insights from data captured by monitoring media and using it in driving strategic decisions, for example, product development, market releases, targeted marketing campaigns etc. Media intelligence helps you understand not only what your customers are talking about your business but also understand what is the buzz around your competitors.

A good media intelligence strategy helps you gain the competitive edge in providing solutions for your customers’ needs and helps you gain higher value.

Media intelligence detects the anomalies across data gathered for example, social media, and search engine marketing. These anomalies equip your organization to changes outside the company and increase the predictability of future happenings.

Media monitoring = Media intelligence?

Media monitoring forms an integral part of MI as it assists you in understanding the tonality, trending themes, and media mention spikes around your own brand. It also lets you know about other players in your market segment. When looking at media monitoring from a perspective of gaining quality insights it is essential that you know the following,

Share of voice: The amount of mentions you have received as compared to your competitors. (Including print, outdoor and online media.)
Trending themes: What are the keywords used in the discussions? (Look for the negative trends too as this will help you understand the most common complaints faced by the customers)
Sentiment Analysis: What is the tone of the conversations? Is it positive or negative? How is it with respect to your competitors?
Media Exposure: How is the brand awareness across segments being affected?
However, MI is much more than just monitoring responses gained across platforms and using natural language processing programs. Having a good media monitoring strategy does not guarantee quality MI.

What more do you need?

Let us have a look at what all can be done to gain effective consumer insights:

Integrating geo-location with coverage: Doing this can help you understand consumer discussions real time and help curb the negative feedbacks before it blasts out on media. (how this happens i.e help curb… is to be pointed out)

Fast redressals: Replying to online discussions revolving around your brand is essential, this can now be facilitated by use of various chatbots providing the human touch therein too. It’s important that companies understand that people talking with them are equally important when compared to the people talking about them. By developing a habit of fast replies on the web ensures that the consumer is involved with you throughout the conversation which helps you stay in control of how the situation evolves rather than losing the customer and resorting to damage control later. This provides you with unique inputs about your respective products and services, which serve as important takeaways when looking at changes.

Tracking referral traffic: For those who want to understand which channels for example, press releases, landing pages, blogs etc. are driving most of the earned coverage referral traffic is an essential element. The data obtained via this can be used to formulate your content strategy and make necessary changes, based on the consumer preference of language and themes. This can also help gain direction with respect to where you want the content to be published or which pages will give you maximum hits when used as landing pages.

Media Intelligence to Business Intelligence

Business intelligence comes into the picture when there is strategic decision making that takes place due to quality MI. Hence, it bridges the gap of just obtaining insights to actually implementing them effective for better value creation as compared to the other market players. Business may use the data gathered and so it’s necessary that you keep the metrics and the reporting format standard. As major media intelligence players dive into consulting we see MI turning into BI in the near future, calling for organizations to take cognizance of this and invest in quality media intelligence resources accordingly.

For a complimentary, no-obligation discussion around ideas on how to leverage Media Intelligence to understand your consumers better, contact us now!