CEX.IO

Optimized media outreach

When Becky Sarwate took the lead as CEX.IO’s Head of Communications in 2021, the department relied on expensive, inefficient services to spread the word about the company. “I came in to make people around the world more aware of who we are, and media and PR really is key to that strategy,” she says. But when it came time for media outreach, she and her team depended on a PR agency to send out press releases at a cost of hundreds of dollars apiece. “It was extremely frustrating, both from an empowerment perspective, as well as process and budget wasting.”

They now use the Newswire distribution service in the Meltwater platform to create and send out press releases themselves, giving them direct control of the process. CEX.IO’s communications team no longer has to pay per press release, saving them thousands of dollars a year. Plus, their Meltwater account representative helps them customize the platform’s modules to their needs.

“In my last job, we used Cision, and I'll say I wasn't a fan. You get one training session, and then you're on your own. If you're a busy person, you don't really have hours to spend on configuration,” Sarwate says. For her, close support during the set-up phase was a deciding factor in choosing Meltwater. 

Now, two hours after a release is sent, Meltwater PR Reporting delivers a performance report straight to Sarwate’s inbox, telling her which media outlets picked it up. Meanwhile, the mobile app lets her monitor coverage and access analytics on the go. If she needs custom reports or has a question about the data, her account representative is just a quick call away. “My Meltwater account representative has been very responsive,” she says. “If I didn't have the ability to ask a question, get a quick response from a human, and then possibly discuss how I might need to tweak my tool, I'd be behind very quickly.”

Social media strategy alignment

Accurate, bespoke reporting is especially an asset as the lines between social, PR, marketing, and communications continue to blur. Before partnering with Meltwater, CEX.IO’s international social media marketing and communications teams operated in silos. This made for inefficient processes and fragmented performance data.

With Meltwater support, Sarwate customized the real-time alerting service to send performance reports to a dedicated Slack channel. This lets her and her team stay on top of traffic spikes even when they aren’t logged into the platform itself. Meanwhile, monthly reports give them a comprehensive look at what is and isn’t resonating with their audience.

The data revealed a blind spot: Brand content — like corporate announcements and thought leadership from the C-suite — performed better on LinkedIn than marketing content. Using the social insights reports, Sawarte recommended making a change to the company’s social media management strategy. Realignment on CEX.IO’s approach to content means Sawarte and her team now have direct access to the company’s LinkedIn account so that they can quickly and reactively post corporate news when needed. 

Soon after the communications team gained that access, engagement with CEX.IO’s LinkedIn account started to increase. “In a 30-day period, just from focusing more on brand content, we grew our engagement 30% organically without a dollar spent,” Sarwate says. 

Competitive analysis and benchmarking

Along with media outreach and reporting, Sarwate leverages Explore, Meltwater’s social listening and media monitoring solution, to increase CEX.IO’s share of voice relative to its closest competitors. But when she first set out to reach this KPI, she lacked a reliable, data-driven view of who those competitors are and what their market share is. Luckily, as soon as Sawarte’s Meltwater training was completed, she was able to leverage the platform for competitive analysis and benchmarking. “That saved us immediate money, immediate time and was far more empowering for my team than the process we depended on before,” she says.

Sarwate and her team use the platform’s benchmarking features and digital marketing insight reports to identify competitors and understand their shares of voice. Analytic visualizations give them high-level data overviews, such as drivers of sentiment and perception shifts. These insights reveal timely opportunities for CEX.IO to take the lead in the global cryptocurrency conversation with positive media coverage or relevant brand news.

Getting crucial data and analytics quickly set CEX.IO’s communications team up for immediate success. “If the year were over now — and we’re only in May — I would've achieved that KPI, and that would not have been doable without having some idea of where we are versus where we started from,” she says. “On a monthly, weekly, and daily basis, I'm able to track changes. It's been instrumental in letting me sleep at night knowing that what we're doing in terms of our tactics is actually showing up in results.”