The Scottish people have embraced immersive technologies, supported a movement towards more liberal human rights policies (by and large) and embraced low-carbon behaviours faster than many of their global counterparts. How do we know this? Well, we’ve done the research and looked into what Scottish audiences, in particular, are talking about.
Through survey data, event info, government policies and behavioural insights, a brand can start to gain a fundamental understanding of who they are talking to in a specific location. However, gaining this insight can involve a lot of manual labour and can be very time consuming.
In a fast-paced environment, where popular themes and discussions change daily (within greater conversations) it can be difficult to keep up using traditional methods. As brand custodians this presents us with a few difficult challenges when speaking to Scottish consumers – especially in a digital world.
Overcoming the challenges
It’s easy to miss mentions about specific topics, as well as brand complaints and slander due to the sheer magnitude of information on the internet. According to statistics directly from the Scottish government, 97% of adults said they used the internet at home. With this level of accessibility, drastically higher than in most parts of the world, a flood of opinion-based content can be released about your brand, and you might not know until it’s too late.
- Scottish audiences have phenomenal access (compared globally) to the internet and are not afraid to share their opinions online – which makes this audience a potentially lethal opponent to any brand.
- Scots are tech-savvy. And, this isn’t an assumption based on connectivity alone. In a report by Public, 3 Scottish cities were named among the most digitally savvy urban areas of the UK, namely: Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Generally, we know that tech-savvy audiences expect user-friendly, familiar interfaces, instant gratification and high levels of customer service and delivery.
- Scotland is a leader in terms of global conversations and highly conscientious. Twitter data shows that topics, such as climate change and politics have been highly prioritised by Scottish audiences.
- Mobile take-up is high, reportedly at 70% since 2016, according to Ofcom. Therefore, a mobile-first approach is necessary for brands targeting emerging audiences.
So, with all of this in mind, you’ve got a powerful audience embracing digital on a daily basis. How will you ensure that your brand stays positioned in a positive light? And that you meet these growing needs of this computer literate and plugged in market?
Start with social
The Herald Scotland claims that one third of Scots are ‘addicted to social media’. According to a survey by polling firm Censuswide Scotland, ‘17% of Scots feel anxious if they cannot access their social accounts, while 14% say they could not go 48 hours without visiting them’.
In light of this, your brand needs to be where its consumers are, monitoring the conversation on popular social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. So, how do you do this “social listening”?
You can start with media monitoring software and set the monitoring location to Scotland. Essentially, this software will trawl social channels for you looking for specific keywords or mentions of your brand, which you choose. It centralises the instances where these words or related themes have come up into a dashboard, where you can quickly see top tweets and posts in a few minutes. This helps you to assess which of them needs to be addressed urgently as the top mentions will have the biggest social impact.
At the same time, you can view the sentiment of each post, marked by positive, neutral or negative indicators. You can also see an overview of sentiment for all mentions, over a time period that you select. This way, you can quickly establish if there is a crisis brewing or if your consumers are generally saying positive things about your brand on social media.
There are a number of metrics you can set to monitor and help you stay on top of social, and each is easily downloadable or in ready to report format.
Keep an eye on the digital landscape
Beyond the social, lies an equally important world of media and editorial content from third-parties and journalists looking to discuss relevant topics and brands. It’s easy for your company to be in the public eye before you’ve even become aware of it, and while most journalists will request a direct comment from you in line with a mention.
However, in the famous announcement from Forbes, we as humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, which is almost unfathomable. There’s no way that you could manually crawl through all of that yourself. A search engine is a good starting point but it doesn’t allow you as much control over what you need to see first and how you can share that data. In the same breath, the digital landscape is about more than just your brand. It’s about threats and opportunities too.
Monitoring the media with a data-driven mechanism allows you to suss out your competitors, identify opportunities for new creative ideas and products and find out who is doing what you do, but better. You aren’t limited in terms of the keywords you can use, which opens up a gateway of curated information that can revolutionise the way you do business.
Other important benefits to monitoring Scottish media
If you think back to earlier in this post, we spoke about Scots being a generally tech-savvy audience with high expectations. In light of what we know about media monitoring, this is an extremely relevant point. Scottish consumers have expectations for excellent customer service and many of them turn to the media to have these expectations met – particularly social media.
With monitoring software, you can pick up on complaints about your brand even if they aren’t tagged, clearing up disputes from disgruntled customers before they escalate. You can also preemptively offer your services and exceed expectations when it’s so easy to see who is talking about what.
Take the next step
Want to really connect with and understand your Scottish audiences? Have a look at our media monitoring software and see how easy it is to do so. Simply contact us and we’ll give you a free demo.