People are talking about your brand right now on social, in the media and in real life. How can you harness those conversations, glean insights from them and use those insights to improve your brand’s communication?
The answer is monitoring.
Cision’s new white paper, “The 3 Audiences Real-Time Monitoring Unlocks For Brands,” shares tips on how you can monitor your audiences’ conversations to learn valuable information about your target audience’s needs, what your competitors are doing and what is making an impact in your industry.
Looking to establish your brand as a leader? Here are the three audiences you need to monitor:
Industry
When breaking news hits or a topic trends, your brand needs to jump on the opportunity to own the conversation, before your competitors do. By monitoring conversations, you’ll know as soon as something happens, so you can react right away with the right message.
Start by planning your monitoring strategy in advance. With a plan in place, you’ll be prepared when real-time events happen. The more time you take to prepare, the less time you’ll waste scrambling to play catchup, and the more time you can spend inserting your brand into the conversation.
When setting up your media monitoring, don’t limit yourself to just what your audience is saying. You want to get the big picture and capture the entire discussion. That means monitoring all the people and organizations affecting the conversation, including reporters, influencers, competitors, industry leaders and more.
Competitors
To stay ahead of the game, you need to know what your competitors are saying and doing online and in the media. Listen to competitor brands in the same way you monitor your own brand to understand their communication tactics and how your target audience responds.
If you’re listening closely, you may be able to pick up on your competitors’ strategies and even predict their product roadmap. Tune in to clues, such as a CEO discussing the future of the industry, to foresee what your competitors may have in store.
Listening to competitors will also help your brand gauge its own progress and improve its communication strategies. Are competitors’ social posts gaining a lot of attention? Use your insights to refocus your brand’s content strategy and spark more engagement on your channels.
Target audience
Monitoring allows you to acquire an enormous amount of data about your target audience. From demographics like age and sex to psychographics such as personality and interests, this data will help you inform your communication and tailor it to your audience’s specific needs.
When monitoring, segment your audience by age, geography and more. By separating these groups out, you can identify what type of content will likely resonate with each group.
For example, a retail brand may want to focus communication about baby care products toward mothers. The data gathered from monitoring can help that brand identify mothers that may be interested in the brand and provide the messaging that will introduce them to its offerings.
