Country Road

Challenge

As a responsible business, Country Road needed a communications tool that would allow the company's 30-strong marketing and communications team to plan and track its media coverage and measure its impact. Ashley Martin, Country Road's PR and Partnerships Specialist, said the company wanted to make sure its marketing and its message were reaching the right places.

"We measure success based on the quality of the articles, rather than the quantity," she said. "So, success for us looks like showing up in the right places, with the right messaging being conveyed. The reach of any campaign or any marketing activity is also more important than the number of placements. We need to be able to look at the data that is coming in, in a quite detailed way."

Country Road also needed a solution to help it plan and track its influencer partnerships.

"We have a really tight network of influencers and we need to be able to monitor and report on the content they're creating. Outside of that, we also needed a tool that would help us find the right people to work with," she said.

In short, Country Road needed:

• Reliable and effective media monitoring of its marketing activities
• The ability to create detailed, segmented reporting of its marketing and communications successes
• A tool to identify potential influencer partners
• Monitoring and analysis capabilities for influencer campaigns

Solution

In September 2020, Country Road chose Meltwater to provide a media monitoring and influencer engagement solution to help the brand meet its marketing objectives. Charlie Watt, Country Road's Brand Marketing Manager, said: "Meltwater really works for us when it comes to reporting and insights. It's quite easy to navigate and set up. The ability for us to be able to tag content is particularly helpful because we're not always reporting on general Country Road content. Sometimes we need to segregate out different campaigns, like Mother's Day or home accessories. I like that we're able to segment our media monitoring in quite a detailed way."

"I check Meltwater daily to see how the brand is showing up across our media network, just to make sure that if we have a relevant campaign running that it is being talked about. It gives us a good indication of whether we need to focus more on a campaign."

But what about those important influencer relationships? Ashley said Country Road is using Meltwater's Klear platform to identify and track those partnerships. "It's a very useful tool for having a deep dive into the background of the talent that we're looking to work with," she said. "It's really helpful for us to see the detailed insights of someone's audience before we engage with them. Predominantly we're looking at their actual reach, their actual engagement or the percentage of their audience that is based locally. It's good to see if they're working with our industry peers too."