In the world of public relations, marketing, and social media, every mention of your brand has the potential to provide valuable insight and opportunity. But in order to fully harness this potential, you need to locate and interpret these mentions.
Why is this such a challenge? Because, while we've seen the relative decline of print, TV has remained a staple in the daily routines of global consumers, with the average person watching between 2 and 5 hours of TV every day. At first, monitoring mentions of your brand in broadcast media might seem like a straightforward task, but considering there are approximately 22,000 television networks, 44,000 radio stations, and over 4 million podcasts, do you really have the time to find, filter, and interpret this data manually?
Instead, you can use a network broadcast monitoring tool like Meltwater to handle the legwork and find relevant mentions as they appear. But before we get into those details, let's explore what the broadcast media landscape looks like today and how media monitoring can help you tap into the insights it offers.
Contents
Redefining Broadcast Media
The Benefits of Using Broadcast Monitoring Software
Comprehensive Broadcast Media Monitoring: A Quick How-To
All-Encompassing Broadcast Monitoring from Meltwater
Redefining Broadcast Media
Today, the definition of broadcast media goes far beyond the platforms it's hosted on. It is a hybrid of smart TVs, internet devices, and social sharing - creating a new kind of network that blurs the lines between traditional and modern broadcasting. There is two-way feedback on content, some of it generated by users, and levels of interaction that simply weren't possible before.
And, while "Americans have been spending more time looking at their mobile device screens than they’ve spent watching TV since 2019", according to eMarketer, TV has also found its way onto those mobile devices, further perpetuating this hybrid trend across device borders. So how does this help PR and comms professionals define the current state of hybrid broadcasting? Let's briefly take a look at a few examples:
Connected TV
Also known as Smart TV, this technology is powered by the Internet and gives marketers and advertisers exciting new opportunities to embrace multimedia. Esther Maguire, SVP of Marketing for VideoAmp hails Connected TV as "a powerful medium for connecting the dots between awareness and attribution in 2021" because "it’s important to reach people when they’re most receptive to consuming ads". In this way, TV news monitoring remains a powerful tool for savvy marketers who want to stay in touch with consumer reactions and brand mentions.
Podcasts
Digital audio has blown up over the course of the last few years. There are now thousands of internationally recognized podcasters. The shows they create, often accompanied by a video clip for each episode, are streamed on global audio platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Tip: See the best PR podcasts, social media podcasts, tech podcasts, finance podcasts, SEO podcasts, e-commerce podcasts, retail podcasts, marketing podcasts, and branding podcasts
Social Videos
On the opposite (but related) end of TV news, engaging, short-format video is all the rage on social media. In fact, 74% of marketers said that video had a better ROI than static images, according to a 2021 survey released by Biteable.
When social giant Instagram launched its video segment, Reels, in late 2020, they created a way for users to produce their own 15-second video content. Today it is used by everybody from Louis Vuitton (7 million views) to the NBA, showcasing its ability to facilitate two-way social broadcasting with impact.
Tip: Learn more in our Instagram Reels guide, and learn how to schedule Instagram Reels
TikTok then soared into the stratosphere, offering Covid house-bound teens a haven of entertainment. TikTok quickly blossomed into an extremely popular app for all ages, providing brands a unique opportunity to connect with wider audiences.
Tip: Get more information on the best times to post on TikTok, the most followed TikTok accounts, and using TikTok for business.
Digital Broadcast News
Digital or online news broadcasting brought journalism to the world stage in a more global way. Now consumers have regular and instant access to news stories from around the world. This can be broadly categorized into two groups: traditional journalists appearing on news channels or promoting their own work on sites like Substack, and the newer school of citizen journalists, using the power of the internet to piece together the news as it happens.
These are just a few examples of platforms that generate broadcast news content on a regular basis. But one things for certain: it has created an interwoven environment that is impossible to monitor manually.
As marketers, this presents us with complex challenges in terms of reaching consumers, managing communities and measuring the impact of our messaging. To address these challenges, we recommend tapping into the power of a media monitoring software.
The Benefits of Using Broadcast Monitoring Software
Network broadcast monitoring tools are essential for staying on top of your brand mentions. You can be alerted in real time when sentiment shifts occur, when unusual spikes in mentions happen, and much more. From this information you can:
- Manage your reputation
- Keep up to date with consumer trends
- Have access to all mentions of your brand
- Stay ahead of your competitors
- Find out how consumers feel about your media content by analyzing media coverage
- Measure returns
- Justify spend on broadcast campaigns
- Learn who interacts with your media
- Use AI to avoid human error and get more accurate results
- Analyze broadcast trends alongside your news and social media coverage
- Quickly generate media monitoring reports that clients will love
- Make easy work of TV monitoring
Want to get a free demo of our media monitoring solution? Fill out the form at the bottom of this blog and we'll be in touch!
Comprehensive Broadcast Media Monitoring: A Quick How-To
With the right broadcast monitoring system, you can make quick work of finding relevant insights from global coverage. There's no need to rely on ancient methods like using a clipping service, manually filtering through media, or relying on time-intensive research methods. It's become a simpler and more efficient process for marketers with access to the right broadcast monitoring software. Let's explore how.
1. Establish objectives. While goal-setting is typically a good place to begin any research project, you'll need some context in place before you identify your main objectives. Your first task is to get a sense of the current digital broadcasting landscape through social listening, and use this research to spot the gaps you aim to address. This can be done at a broad level or refined to give you more granular detail.
Tip: Check out our Social Listening for Benchmarking Guide for more info.
2. Identify trends. Once you know what you're looking for, you can segment your monitoring strategy into phases to identify key trends in your mentions. With social listening, you can follow range of channels to understand how consumers feel about your brand using sentiment analysis, find out which of your partnerships are paying off, and use these insights to improve your overall marketing strategy. With Meltwater's broadcast monitoring, you'll also be able to download your captured clips so that you'll always have a copy of the brand or news mention.
All-Encompassing Broadcast Monitoring Services from Meltwater
Choose Meltwater for a centralized solution that gives you full-fledged functionality and deep insight into the network broadcasting world online. Our AI-powered media and PR tools crawl billions of data points to help you understand the virtual reality your brand operates in.
Use a broadcast monitoring service to analyze consumer reactions and perceptions about content shared on every channel, from TV stations to burgeoning social media platforms, and even in speech-to-text and closed-caption text scenarios.
Set a real-time alert in our app to find out every time your brand is mentioned. Know your target customer better than they know themselves. And, most importantly, prepare your brand for future changes and adaptations in a digital landscape that is at best promising but volatile and at worst, a breeding ground for crises.
The Meltwater platform really is the gold standard for communications professionals who want to create data-driven strategies and better understand their worth and network.
Interested in learning more in a free demo? Fill out the form below to connect with our team.
