PR is a dynamic industry. Working in a PR agency almost certainly means that you’re constantly in a fast-paced environment. Often, PR people are focused on creating content and managing relationships with clients and media, which leaves them little time to do the massive task of creating PR reports and presenting them to their boss.
💡 Read Digital PR Explained: Best Strategies and Tools
Media monitoring is the solution if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to create PR reports for your managers and automate many of the time-consuming PR tasks that you have to do daily. Let’s see why media monitoring tools should be your go-to helper if you work in PR.
Various Benefits of Using Media Monitoring Tools for PR
Media monitoring tools, such as Determ, help transform your PR efforts and change the way you create your PR reports and present the value of your work to your managers.
By using media monitoring tools to automate parts of your work, you’ll get to dedicate more time to creating PR releases, fostering sponsorships and partnerships for your clients, and more.
Media monitoring tools make media monitoring more effortless than ever, help brands engage with their customers, and prevent crises.
And that’s only a part of all the benefits PR people can reap when using media monitoring tools to save their time and boost their PR efforts. However, it’s not always easy to convince your managers to invest in software.
We’ve created this guide on using the features and benefits of media monitoring tools to report to your higher-ups. Or, if you’re the manager who received this article from your employees, welcome!
Let’s jump in and see why media monitoring tools are the go-to helper of every PR person.
8 Benefits of Using Determ
Media monitoring is crucial for businesses of all sizes and niches. However, if you don’t know which metrics to keep an eye on and what to make of raw data, you’ll bury yourself in work that won’t bring any value. That’s why it’s essential to find a reliable, user-friendly tool that can help you manage the most challenging parts of your work. Our suggestion is to try out Determ. Here are some ways it can help boost your PR efforts and speed up creating your PR reports.
#1 Transform your PR efforts
In our success stories and case studies, we’ve covered examples of how Determ helps various businesses daily. This article will explain how this tool can help you save time on repetitive PR tasks, such as measuring ROI or competitor analysis and help you create unique reports you can share with your managers and clients.
Monitoring what’s being said online about specific topics is crucial to back up all your PR activities. But, when done manually, media monitoring can be daunting. That’s why it’s essential to use the help of media monitoring tools that do all the monitoring work for you – from analyzing the data to present it in customized PR reports.
When it comes to your keywords of interest (for instance, your client’s company), Determ can help you track all online mentions, trends, and other data that can shape your PR strategy. Furthermore, you can use the tool to analyze the effectiveness of your PR and marketing campaigns.
#2 Save your time
One of the most significant benefits your managers will be interested in is how much media monitoring tools can streamline your process and save you time.
The less time you spend on time-consuming work like creating PR reports, the more time you’ll have to focus on your daily tasks and the fun, creative, and non-automatable parts of your work.
We all know how important creativity is in PR. If you want to assist your clients in reaching their goals and standing out from the rest, you’ll need to have time to focus on out-of-the-box content. Besides that, the online behavior of your client’s target audience and their competitors can give you insight into what topics your client should cover in future content.
Although media monitoring focuses on business automation, specific PR tasks are better done manually. The only way you’ll have the time to do non-automatable parts of your job is if you let media monitoring take over the automatable parts.
When you think about the most memorable PR campaigns, you think of videos and slogans that broke the mold. You’ll need relevant data and enough time to make the same impact.
This is where Determ steps in. The tool will help you collect relevant data you can use to shape your PR strategy. Imagine not having to spend time creating reports. Or, imagine saving time on crisis management by being ahead of any negative narratives that include your brand. When using a media monitoring tool, this becomes a reality.
In addition to predefined reports you can use to speed up your research and analysis, there is a Newsletter feature which allows you to share key information from the tool faster and easier and directly to your stakeholders’ inboxes.
#3 Quickly create branded reports
Brand reports are crucial for analysis and showing clients the benefits of working with your company.
PR is not as easily measurable as PPC ads, especially if you don’t want to waste money on frequent canvassing and focus groups. PR has a qualitative rather than quantitative value in most cases, which doesn’t always translate directly to sales.
That’s why it can be challenging to provide clients with exact measures of your PR efforts. And companies usually hire PR agencies to help them avoid crises. They may think that their products and services speak for themselves and don’t need the help of PR agencies on an everyday basis.
However, there is a way to provide clients with tangible value. To explain to potential clients that PR is a continuous effort and that you’re not designated only to put out fires, you have to be able to prove your value even when things are going smoothly for companies. This means that you have to find ways to measure your success and present it in the best way.
Determ’s Branded Reports can help you do just that.
Branded reports in Determ
With Determ, you can create PR reports that showcase how you track mentions on websites, social media, blogs, forums, etc. Your clients will love seeing measurable results of PR activities such as engagement and campaign reach, mentions by day, week and month, and more.
Furthermore, suppose you’re working with influencers. In that case, the tool can help you get a detailed influencer dashboard that shows top sources, most engaged influencers, top locations and languages, and a list of your most engaging posts.
Since the tool is collecting all the relevant data for you, the creation of your reports takes only a few minutes. All you have to do is select the information you want to include in the report.
Since branding is also an essential part of PR reports, Determ’s reports come with an option to be fully customized – with logos, colors, titles, and more that match your clients’ brand identity.
#4 Accurately measure ROI
Although PR doesn’t necessarily translate to direct sales, we’ve already mentioned that there are ways to measure your client’s return on investment to show them why it is crucial to hire a PR agency.
You can measure ROI through:
- Earned media value
- Sentiment
- Engagement
- Share or voice
- Customer satisfaction
- Mentions
- Impressions
Let’s create a short overview.
Earned media value measures how much PR efforts are worth. It’s an umbrella term that includes social media engagement, content on third-party sites (like forums and blogs), impressions, etc.
You can calculate it in more ways than one. However, it’s not the most reliable measurement, and here is why.
A standard formula for determining earned media value is by multiplying impressions by cost per mille (the amount you pay for publishing content that makes 1,000 impressions) and the adjustment variable.
EMV = impressions x CPM x adjustment variable
You can choose the adjustment variable based on your needs and goals. Seeing how this number can make or break your ROI calculations, it’s easy to see why it’s not a bulletproof strategy.
Luckily, you don’t have to calculate these metrics by hand. You can easily see all mentioned earned media value in your Determ dashboard.
Sentiment
It provides context to your mentions. If you collect data without understanding whether it’s positive or negative and whether it has any value for your clients, you’re missing a massive chunk of intel.
Determ allows you to automate sentiment analysis. It will help you understand how your audience perceives specific campaigns and your branding efforts in general.
Share of voice (SOV)
It is calculated through a simple formula that focuses on measuring your place in the market.
Number of mentions of your brand/total number of brand mentions (yours + your competitors’) x 100 = SOV
Share of voice is a good metric that shows your clients’ pain points. If they have multiple products and services, you can easily see which ones their target audience likes and which ones they should focus on more in their PR & marketing campaigns.
Read Share of Voice: How to Track It and Why
Customer satisfaction
Businesses can massively improve customer satisfaction through media monitoring. You can track what your clients’ customers say about the brand online. Since the monitoring is conducted in real-time – you’ll be able to reply to potential clients while their inquiries and comments are still relevant.
Your clients can build a relationship with their current and potential customers. Also, it’s an excellent way for companies to present themselves as a company that takes people’s opinions and feedback seriously and cares about public perception.
Additional metrics
Demographics, engagement, mentions, and impressions provide a good look into which type of content your client’s audience finds attractive, which can help you shape a better content strategy.
Being able to provide your managers and clients with reports that showcase the value of your work can transform your approach. It will give you more confidence and material in future negotiations and budgeting agreements.
#5 Conduct competitor analysis
Furthermore, Determ can help you create social media competitor analysis. This means that you no longer have to spend hours filling in Excel sheets and looking for a common thread.
The tool can help you conduct:
- Hashtag research
- Research thematic groups on Facebook or LinkedIn to understand competitor presence
- Research of competitors
- Content analysis
- Influencer research by finding the top influencers in your industry
Once you gather this critical data, you can quickly unite it into a beautifully designed report.
If your clients are interested in a complete competitive analysis, Determ has a solution. As you already know, creating a SWOT or PEST analysis can be daunting and lacking.
Determ can help you speed up the process by providing excellent competitor data.
Moreover, the only way you can perform in-depth interviews is to understand the current problems your clients are facing, backed up with a detailed analysis of their competitors and possible threats. Gain those insights through Determ and shorten the process of competitor data collection.
Share of voice and sentiment analysis in Determ
Determ’s reports will show the metrics mentioned above, such as the share of voice – a strategy that compares brand awareness on different platforms to its competitors.
You can also include sentiment analysis in your PR reports. That will help you understand whether your client’s audience has positive, negative, or neutral opinions of their brand. The data will also give you insight into which platform your clients are mostly mentioned on, which can aid you in shifting the focus of social media strategy towards the most profitable one.
It’s essential to go to your audience instead of expecting them to come to you. However, it can be hard to determine which platforms your target audience is the most present. With Determ by your side, you no longer have to conduct time-wasting analyses.
The tool will help you monitor your competitors in real-time, which is essential in the fast-paced time of the online world.
#6 Make the most of UGC
One of the most authentic pieces of content is the one your audience creates. If your clients love your solution and share that excitement with their friends and followers, they become brand ambassadors that help you build trust with potential leads.
User-generated content is used as sales leverage for people in the latter stages of your sales funnel. Furthermore, you can use it in your marketing campaigns to encourage other customers to share their experiences. You’re likely always on the lookout for great user-generated content to aid the sales team.
Media monitoring can help you with this process, too. Determ keeps track of particular hashtags, mentions, social trends, keywords, etc. This is how you can do it today when trying out the tool for a free trial.
When conducting your keyword research, include:
- The name of the company
- The name of the brand
- The names of your products
- Names of the people associated with the company
- Hashtags
Try putting yourself in your audiences’ shoes – what would they find interesting enough to share online.
You’ll create an excellent overview of the user-generated content you can use in future campaigns.
Word Cloud in Determ
Determ’s Word Cloud feature can offer even more help with user-generated content. It can give you insight into what context is used when people mention a specific brand online. Seeing what is written about the brand, its products, services, and customer support gives you a closer look into whether you should advise your clients to better their customer success strategy.
Another great feature of Determ’s Word Cloud is detecting any emerging trends, giving you enough time to create content around it.
#7 Help your client improve their customer success strategy
Media monitoring can help you improve your clients’ relationships with their audience. If you’re thinking in the long term, it’s only natural you’d want to understand the audience’s needs and find ways to address them. That way, you can help enhance your client’s reliability and improve the trust of their customers.
To ensure customer success, it’s not enough to analyze the potential leads that come through customer service and the ones that never contact anyone in your company.
Combining all mentioned cases with the public reviews you can get the bigger picture of your customer success strategy.
Determ will help you find positive but, more importantly, harmful online content about your client – which gives you the perfect opportunity to manage your client’s online reputation. Reaching out to people and ensuring that they’re being heard and understood can change the way people feel about a brand.
Determ will help you understand who is creating content about specific brands, on which platforms they are talking about brands, at what time, what the sentiment of the mentions is, and how others are responding to it. The tool has enough data to give you comprehensive analytics, which play a vital role in assessing the situation and coming up with a response.
All this can help you not just answer individual complaints but also shift brand messaging to convey your client’s values better. For instance, If you find out that people don’t understand the benefits your client can offer, you can advise investing in educational and promotional content.
Since your client’s audience should be at the center of all your PR campaigns, you need to understand their online behavior. That can give you insight into what topics they would like you to cover in your future content.
#8 Prevent crises
PR crises are unpleasant and can happen to any business at any time. But, when you have a reliable tool that helps you in your time of need, you can resolve all of them before they escalate.
Determ’s real-time alerts notify you whenever you’re mentioned somewhere online, meaning you can notice right away if you’re mentioned in a bad context. This gives you more than enough time to construct your response. Giving out a statement and extinguishing a fire before it escalates is one of the most important steps you can take in situations like these.
Since Determ collects data 24/7, you don’t have to fear a crisis brewing around the corner. Suppose you ever find yourself in this type of situation. In that case, Determ will empower you and give you the needed data and enough time to assess the situation and come out the other side unscathed.
This is one of the most significant benefits of media monitoring. Crisis management can be complicated and time-consuming, so it’s essential to rely on a media monitoring tool to do all the automatable work.
Determ understands the importance of a fast response, so we’ve designed an alert system to keep you in the loop if the situation progresses.
How to have all the essential data in one place
Now that we’ve seen the main ways media monitoring tools like Determ are beneficial in PR, let’s emphasize how they can help you and your team personally.
All of the data you can analyze with Determ would benefit your clients, your boss, and your overall team.
Imagine receiving an email from your boss asking you to deliver specific competitor analysis data. It would take you weeks to manually gather and analyze the data. Then, it would take you a respectable amount of time to put all this data in a logical, visually attractive report which you could send to your manager. Sounds exhausting, right?
But imagine the pride you would feel if you could deliver essential data to your manager in only a few seconds. Not only that, imagine how glad your whole team would be if you could provide critical, real-time reports to your existing clients and attract new clients based on your excellent, timely PR efforts. And most importantly, imagine how satisfied your clients would be if you used all the insights from media monitoring tools and significantly improved their public image.
Keep this in mind when telling your boss about Determ – we’re only a few clicks away.
Improve Your PR Efforts Today
As we’ve briefly explained in this blog, Determ is a powerful tool that can help you at every step of your PR process. From monitoring to reporting, measuring the return of investment, and more, Determ is the go-to helper of any PR agency.
We’ve demonstrated how you can use it to speed up your work, and we’re sure this guide will help you convince your managers to invest in it.
Join the thousands of PR people worldwide using this award-winning tool by starting your free trial today and experience the ease of working with a reliable partner that understands your needs.