Media Monitoring companies in India, like Meltwater, help organizations understand the conversations taking place around their brands, their competitors and their industry. Today, media monitoring has come a long way since the basic news clipping services of the past. Meltwater’s own proprietary software for example, relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to mine and make sense of billions of online data sources, so executives and communications teams can make more informed corporate decisions. So, what are some of the use cases for media monitoring in India? you may ask. Let’s take a look.
Showcasing a Return on Investment from Marketing and PR
Marketeers and PR professionals work tirelessly to generate earned media exposure, social media engagement and ultimately, greater business interest from prospective customers. The problem however, is that tying the outcomes of communications campaigns with a company’s bottom line objectives can often be a challenge. Advanced media monitoring tools allow companies in India, and across the world, to not only have a detailed record of the online response to a particular campaign or press release, but the ability to then start connecting the dots between the multitude of branded touchpoints and actual bottom line KPIs.
As a basic example, imagine being able to track the website traffic generated from a particular online press release. With this information, it would be possible for you to explore a potential corresponding rise in website leads over the same period of time. This in turn, would allow you to track actual sales generated from a single PR campaign and thereby report the kind of ROI that directors and C-suite care about. As marketing ROI attribution models become increasingly complex, so the need for accurate PR measurement will continue to grow.
Further to this, your marketing and PR efforts don’t occur in a vacuum. While you may think your quarterly PR strategy was a smash success, the reality is that it’s only when we benchmark our results against competitors do we get an accurate understanding of whose share of voice was dominant (and by extension, who reached the most potential customers).
Online Reputation Management
The world today is not as it was twenty, or even ten years ago. The rapid development of technology alongside the mass proliferation of mobile phone devices has seen a decentralisation of news publishing power. Today, anyone with an internet connection can shape public opinion about your brand, and what’s worse is that the news they share doesn’t even have to be true for it to impact on your share price or client count.
Before we look at the management of a brand, let’s first define what a PR crisis is.
Quite simply, a real PR crisis is a negative story about your brand that has gained momentum and threatens the reputation of your business.
Crises are an inevitable consequence of being in business over the long term, what is optional however, is whether your company chooses to prepare for them or not. Businesses that don’t acknowledge the importance of reputation (and how to preserve it) all too often find themselves scrambling to undo the damage of an unforeseen brand slip-up – and in most cases this is simply a matter of too little too late. Further to this, the commercial ramifications of their lack of preparation tend to linger long past their time spent in the spotlight.
Forward thinking brands are putting in place crisis communications strategies as a proactive step toward safeguarding their most valuable intangible asset. At the cornerstone of these blueprints is almost always a comprehensive offline and online media monitoring tool, and when your reputation is at stake, it’s important you choose wisely.
Statistical analysis of ten corporate crises in South Africa found that the greater the speed and number of positive steps taken in the two weeks after a crisis, the less the company share price fell (Coldwell and Joosub, 2011). With this in mind, be sure to opt for a service or tool that allows for access to data in “real-time”, or as it happens; response time is paramount when mitigating the spread of a crisis.
By investing in online reputation management, an organization improves its ability to protect shareholder value, corporate viability and long term potential, often becoming more adaptive and agile as a result. In short, it improves its business resilience.
Identify New Markets and Customers
In the age of social media, market research is less about surveys, and more about listening to actual conversations happening across your field or industry. Media monitoring companies in India allow local brands to gain insight into the readiness of other geographic markets for their product or service. The benefit here is two-fold: 1) You don’t have to coerce people into filling out lengthy surveys, and 2) natural conversations are less likely to be biased.
In the global economy, many products and services need not be limited to the physical location or country of your premises. With the aid of a high-end media monitoring tool you can identify prospective customers in places you’d never thought to look.
Improve Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) has been said to be “the next competitive battleground”. Gone are the days where price point dominated patterns in consumer decision making. Companies are now obliged to deliver a memorable end-to-end customer journey or face being ditched for those who can. A recent Oracle survey predicted a fall of up to 20% in annual revenues for brands that don’t offer a rewarding CX.
From Mumbai, Kolkata to New Delhi, companies in India that harness the power of social media listening tools can glean instant feedback on not only their brand touchpoints, but how those link together to provide an overall experience. Putting in place structures to recycle this feedback can help business become more agile in their response to changes in customer preference, ensuring that systems evolve to maximise overall user satisfaction over time.
Conclusion
In an increasingly connected society, media monitoring services offer companies the chance to make sense of a world drowning in data. If you’re serious about making more informed corporate decisions using external information, then contact the Meltwater India team and learn how Outside Insight can give you a competitive advantage.