In the world of public relations, marketing, and social media, every mention of your brand has the potential to provide valuable insight and opportunity. But in order to fully harness this potential, you need to locate and interpret these mentions.
Why is this such a challenge? Because despite the relative decline of print, TV has remained a staple in the daily routines of global consumers. The average person watches between 2 and 5 hours of TV every day and the box remains one of the most popular forms of news consumption. At first, monitoring mentions of your brand in broadcast media might seem like a straightforward task but considering there are approximately 22,000 television networks, 44,000 radio stations, and over 48 million podcasts, do you have the resources to find, filter, and interpret this data manually?
With our broadcast monitoring, you don't have to. This monitoring service means you're spared from watching every documentary, kid's cartoon, and news cycle in case your brand comes up, endlessly searching for real-time data. Instead, you can use Meltwater to handle the legwork and find keyword-relevant mentions as they appear. But before we get into those details, let's explore what the new broadcast media landscape looks like and how media monitoring can help you tap into the insights it offers.
Table of contents
Redefining Broadcast Media
The Benefits of Using Broadcast Monitoring Software
Comprehensive Broadcast Media Monitoring: A Quick How-To
Meltwater Offers Truly All-Encompassing Broadcast Monitoring Services
Redefining Broadcast Media
Today, the definition of broadcast media goes far beyond the platforms it's hosted on. It is a hybrid of smart TVs, internet devices, and social sharing - creating a new kind of network that blurs the lines between traditional and modern broadcasting. There is two-way feedback on content, some of it generated by users, and levels of interaction that simply weren't possible before.
And, while "Americans have been spending more time looking at their mobile device screens than they’ve spent watching TV since 2019", according to eMarketer, TV has also found its way onto those mobile devices, further perpetuating this hybrid trend across device borders. So how does this help PR and comms professionals define the current state of hybrid broadcasting? Let's briefly take a look at a few examples:
Connected TV
Also known as Smart TV, this technology is powered by the Internet and gives marketers and advertisers exciting new opportunities to embrace multimedia. Esther Maguire, SVP of Marketing for VideoAmp hails Connected TV as "a powerful medium for connecting the dots between awareness and attribution in 2021" because "it’s important to reach people when they’re most receptive to consuming ads". In this way, TV news monitoring remains a powerful tool for savvy marketers who want to stay in touch with consumer reactions and brand mentions.
Podcasts
Digital audio has blown up over the course of the last few years. Fame that was previously reserved for popstars is now enjoyed by the likes of Joe Rogan, Cariad Lloyd, Brene Brown and thousands of internationally recognised podcasters. The shows they create, often accompanied by a video clip for each episode, are streamed on global audio platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Instagram Reels and Social Videos
On the opposite (but related) end of TV news, engaging, short-format video is all the rage on social media - where it's used to capture the attention of audiences far more effectively than with standalone visuals. In fact, 74% of marketers said that video had a better ROI than static images, according to a 2021 survey released by Biteable.
When social giant Instagram launched its video segment, Reels, in late 2020, they created a way for users to produce their own 15-second video content. Today it is used by everybody from Louis Vuitton (7 million views) to the NBA, showcasing its ability to facilitate two-way social broadcasting with impact.
Digital Broadcast News
Digital or online news broadcasting brings journalism to the world's stage in a more global way - now providing instant access to news stories from around the world. This can be broadly categorised into two groups: traditional journalists appearing on news channels and the newer school of citizen journalists, using the power of the Internet to piece together the news, as it happens.
These are just a few examples of platforms that generate broadcast content on a regular basis - creating an interwoven environment that becomes impossible to monitor manually.
As marketers, this presents us with complex challenges in terms of reaching consumers, managing communities and measuring the impact of our messaging - challenges that should practically be addressed with the right media monitoring software. This is where media monitoring and management become so important.
The Benefits of Using Broadcast Monitoring Software
- Manage your reputation
- Keep up to date with consumer trends
- Have access to all mentions of your brand
- Stay ahead of your competitors
- Find out how consumers feel about your media content by analysing media coverage
- Measure returns
- Justify spend on broadcast campaigns
- Learn who interacts with your media
- Use software to avoid human error and get more accurate results
- Analyse broadcast trends alongside news and social media
- Quickly create media monitoring reports that clients will love
- Make easy work of TV monitoring
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Comprehensive Broadcast Media Monitoring: A Quick How-To
With the right broadcast monitoring system, you can make quick work of finding relevant insights from global coverage. There's no need to rely on ancient methods like using a clipping service or manually filtering through media or relying on heavily work-intensive research methods. It's become a simpler and more efficient process for marketers with access to the right tools. Let's explore how.
While goal-setting is typically a good place to begin any research project, you'll need some context in place before you identify your objectives. Your first task is to listen to the digital broadcasting landscape and conduct contextual research in order to spot the gaps you aim to address. This can be done at a broader level or refined into the granular detail of finding an example mention in a clip.
From there, you can segment your monitoring strategy into phases, experimenting with new focuses as you improve on the old ones. Using social listening, you need to listen across a range of channels, understand how consumers feel about your brand using sentiment analysis, identify important trends, find out which paid partnerships are paying off, and improve your overall marketing strategy using these insights. With Meltwater's broadcast monitoring, you'll also be able to download your captured clips so that you'll always have a copy of the brand or news mention.
Meltwater Offers Truly All-Encompassing Broadcast Monitoring Services
Choose Meltwater for a centralised solution that gives you full-fledged functionality and deep insight into the broadcasting world online. Our AI-powered media and PR tools crawl billions of data points to help you understand the virtual reality your brand operates in.
Use a broadcast monitoring service to analyse consumer reactions and perceptions about content shared on every channel, from TV stations to burgeoning social media platforms, and even in speech-to-text and closed-caption text scenarios. Set a real-time alert in our app to find out every time your brand is mentioned. Know your target customer better than they know themselves. And, most importantly, prepare your brand for future changes and adaptations in a digital landscape that is at best promising but volatile and at worst, a breeding ground for crises.
The Meltwater platform really is the gold standard for communications professionals who want to create data-driven strategies and better understand their worth and network.
