How much does media monitoring cost?

Table of content

• Introduction
• What is media monitoring?
• Why do you need media monitoring?
• How does media monitoring work?
• Media monitoring success story: UNICEF MENA case study
• What is the pricing model for media monitoring?
• Some media monitoring tools to have on your radar
• Conclusion

Introduction

Consumers are leaving digital footprints across the web, social media, and blogs. Previously, brands and marketers relied on third-party cookies to measure and track consumer behavior online. However, nowadays brands are planning for a first-party data framework that allows them to track and understand the whole customer journey.

According to Talkwalker’s latest Shape Tomorrow white paper, brands must make the shift from retroactive data models toward proactive ones that look forward. Meaning, brands that want to win big in the future must continuously innovate and ‘predict’ market shifts before becoming mainstream.

Media monitoring allows brands to know what consumers are saying, doing, or thinking online. Analyzing the signals across various mediums gives marketers the ability to focus on the big picture and anticipate trends before they happen. Therefore, leveraging AI-powered analytics with real-time data is the first step towards predicting consumer needs.

Brands investing in getting closer to their consumers through data, technology, and talent are the ones that will be able to shape the future. Consumer data will empower marketers to create sustainable brands, enable businesses to innovate, and increase agility in the face of future adversities.

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Media monitoring costs are often difficult to justify because their impact cannot be directly attributed to or felt. Though, one way to justify the cost of investing in a media monitoring solution is to consider the impact of not having one.

First, without having a media monitoring solution, marketers spend a lot of time manually tracking brand mentions and analyzing the sentiment around them. If a brand gets thousands of mentions per day, marketers would have to manually track those brand mentions, leading to not having time to extract actionable insights. Also, marketers and brand managers would probably have no time left to do other crucial things like content marketing, email marketing, or community building.

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Second, not having a media monitoring solution in place means your brand could miss out on opportunities. Consumers are increasingly relying on reviews and online conversations to form an opinion about a brand. If you’re not on top of online conversations surrounding your brand, the competition could leverage them to create marketing campaigns that win your consumers’ hearts. If a social media influencer is engaging with your brand on social media, it's an opportunity for marketers to show that the brand is approachable and relevant.

Carpe diem, seize the opportunity

Third, there could be a potential brand risk that you might not be aware of. Brand monitoring is the act of observing where and how a certain brand is being mentioned either in words, photos, videos, or audio.

The importance of media monitoring is that it allows brand managers to understand the sentiment at scale. For example, brand managers can see if the logo is appearing in memes or in counterfeit products that are hurting the brand’s reputation. Another way that marketers could leverage media monitoring is to engage with user-generated content and create long-lasting relationships.

It is clear that media monitoring costs are small when compared to the devastating impact of a tarnished brand.

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However, from a monetary perspective, media monitoring costs are determined by a series of technical factors that are designed to match your specific needs. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to pricing media monitoring solutions, and that’s a good thing.

Customizing media monitoring solutions ensures that everyone has affordable access to them. As a result, several media monitoring platforms on the market have flexible pricing models depending on the number of channels, topics, and more.

Now that we have established that media monitoring brings great value to brands, let’s discover what it is and how it transforms your marketing strategy.

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What is media monitoring?

All media, whether digital or analog, are channels of communication that allow for the transmission of information from one place to another. The interpretation of such information depends on how the message is packaged and delivered through those mediums. Plus, the meaning and insights extracted from bespoke messages are highly influenced by the recipient’s previous experiences and acquired knowledge.

It is important to understand that at every stage of media creation, distribution, and reception, tremendous amounts of data are generated. In fact, it is estimated that the world generates over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. Among all these data are valuable insights revealing how consumers are engaging in a certain online conversation.

Media monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing online data to identify where, when, and how a certain topic or brand has been mentioned online. Media monitoring allows marketers and brand managers to assess how their brand is being perceived. Plus, for global brands, it is important to measure and track brand mentions on media in all languages and channels.

Which media channels are monitored?

Media monitoring solutions allow marketers to cut through the noise and identify where brands or topics are being mentioned on:

• Social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch)
• Blogs
• Images and videos
• Podcasts (Hint: did you know that Talkwalker allows you to keep track of audio brand mentions within podcasts?
• Forums (Quora, Reddit, Github, etc.)
• News sites
• All other publicly available mentions on the web, TV, or radio

Talkwalker’s image recognition technology allows marketers to automatically monitor where their logo is appearing on videos or images

The value of an AI-powered media monitoring platform lies in its ability to collect, filter through, organize, and visualize data.

What types of data could be collected from media monitoring?

The types of data the media monitoring allows you to collect:

• The volume of brand mentions across channels
• Share of voice
• Sentiment analysis of brand mentions (contextual analysis)
• Number of engagements
• Geographic data: where the brand mentions are coming from
• Reach and virality of brand mentions
• The context and main themes surrounding your brand
• The most prominent influencers and authors driving the conversation

For example, if we wanted to look at media mentions of Coca-Cola during the past 30 days, we can do so with Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform. Real-time data that is interactive and flexible allows us to better understand the forces that are increasing or decreasing brand mentions.

Top themes surrounding ‘Coca Cola’ during the past 30 days from around the world. Elon Musk had recently tweeted about buying Coca-Cola.

Plus, media monitoring is the activity of tracing and measuring the impact of business activities on brand mentions. In order to do so, marketers need to have access to historical data that shows the evolution across time and channels. Interactive data is an important component of media monitoring because it allows marketers to make cross analyses, competitive comparisons, and KPI measurements.

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Why do you need media monitoring?

There are numerous use cases that necessitate the use of media monitoring on a daily basis. Whether you’re a marketer, PR professional, brand manager, or communications expert, media monitoring helps you turn data and analytics into actionable strategies.

Some of the use cases that media monitoring allows you to do:

• Competitive analysis: understand and evaluate what your competitors are doing successfully or learn from their mistakes
• Public relations crisis management: assess and control the narrative as it happens in real time. Also, understand the reach and impact of a press release.
• Newsjacking: Take advantage of ongoing conversations to position your brand as relevant, approachable, and likable
• Finding influencers: identify the key stakeholders who are shaping the narrative around your brand or topic
• Customer and market insights: be ahead of the trends curve
• Perform sentiment analysis at scale
• Product, customer, and user experience improvements
• Understanding social proofing and customer feedback on review sites
• Engaging your target audience through social media publishing
• Use the right message and hashtag
• Brand reputation management and protection
• Risk mitigation: More important than crisis management is to mitigate risk entirely, saving you money, time, and effort in the long run
• Monitoring results and KPIs: Understanding the drivers of success

Media monitoring is only one piece of the puzzle, however, it contributes to streamlining business operations across all consumer touchpoints. Brands that leverage media monitoring are more likely to have improved customer service and provide an overall more enjoyable customer experience.

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How does media monitoring work?

Technically speaking, AI-powered media monitoring uses crawlers that search and index the internet for any brand/topic mentions you need. This technology only scrapes publicly available information online, meaning it doesn’t pick up brand mentions from closed platforms. Once the data has been indexed, the end-user can search those media outlets for brand mentions, customer reviews, specific product mentions, people, and basically any topic.

One key example of media monitoring would be social listening. As the name entails, social listening extracts insights from ongoing social media consumer conversations, in order for brands to make well-informed decisions.

Media monitoring works by identifying, processing, and filtering large amounts of information, to provide the end-user with insights into key topics and search words.

Track your campaigns and hashtags on social media in real-time. Find out what people are saying about you, your competitors and your industry.

Once the keywords and topics are established, data dashboards and reports must be created in order to make sense of the numbers. Using Talkwalker’s reporting capabilities, marketers can automate and curate dashboards that include data on the topics or brands they’re monitoring.

The data digest can be scheduled to be delivered at certain times and frequencies. Also, marketers can adjust those dashboards depending on who’s reading them. For example, the CEO wants high-level insights, whereas the head of consumer insights needs daily insights into brand sentiment related to a new product.

These reports allow stakeholders to understand relevant media mentions at any level of detail needed. Team members will be able to ask better questions and make informed decisions.

In the age of ‘now’ consumers, brand managers, and marketers are operating in the real-time economy where consumers expect to be catered to immediately. Therefore, real-time alerts provide an instant gauge of how a brand is rated against its competitors, or how a certain product is perceived by consumers.

At the end of the day, media monitoring’s true value lies in the actions made as a result of those insights.

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Media monitoring success story: UNICEF MENA case study

Talkwalker recently published a case study with UNICEF MENA, revealing how the international organization leverages data insights to create on-the-ground impact. The case study examines how UNICEF MENA used conversational insights to shift the narrative around COVID-19 vaccines and limit the spread of misinformation in the MENA region.

By leveraging media monitoring, UNICEF MENA was able to enrich its ongoing initiatives with reliable data that helped them better focus their efforts.

The case study explains the steps taken by UNICEF MENA and its partners to reduce vaccine hesitancy, engage the community, and raise awareness.

Some of the lessons learned include:

• Telling a simple, more grasping story has a better impact on people's acceptance of COVID vaccines. Combating misinformation with accurate information alone is not enough.
• Main MENA misinformation narrative clouds revolve around vaccine efficacy, mRNA impacting your genome, whether it's halal or not, and other conspiracy theories.
• MENA sentiment around COVID/vaccines was heavily affected by social proofing, seeing government leaders taking the vaccine and social media.

Download the case study today

What is the pricing model for media monitoring?

Media monitoring solutions are priced using a flexible and dynamic model. Meaning, the cost of buying a media monitoring platform depends on your needs and the scope you want it to cover.

Customers can choose what features, channels, and data sources they need and the price would adapt. Some platforms offer a monthly subscription model or a trial period, which allows users to experiment with media monitoring before investing large amounts of money.

On the other hand, dynamic pricing allows providers to cater to different markets and company sizes.

The flexibility and customization allow prospecting buyers to pay exactly for the insights they are looking for. Therefore, the ROI of such investment is easier to measure and track.

For example, let’s assume you are a PR account manager looking to have a media monitoring solution for your client that allows you to:

• Automatically identify and collect media clippings mentioning their brand
• Accurately analyze consumer sentiment towards the brand
• Extract media mentions emanating from Twitter (1 channel)
• Have a maximum of 1000 brand mentions during a month

Once you have determined your criteria, you attempt to identify the key use cases for your client. In this scenario, you want a media monitoring solution to manage the reputation of your brand, measure the reach of your public relations activities, and manage influencers.

At this stage of your research, you’d reach out to a media monitoring solution provider and schedule a call with them. The call often includes a live demo and a discussion to better understand your needs and develop an offer suitable for your budget and timeline.

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What factors determine the media monitoring cost?

Depending on which media monitoring solution you’re considering, there are several factors that determine the cost. For example, Talkwalker offers coverage of over 180M sites including news, blogs, forums, and websites. Knowing that Talkwalker is an official partner of Twitter, clients have access to Twitter’s Firehose – meaning they get several layers of data that would otherwise be unavailable.

Talkwalker provides industry-leading data coverage of more than 20 social media networks and 187 languages with automatic translations. Furthermore, the end user will have access to an AI engine for fast data filtering and insights, in addition to data exporting, and embedding functionalities.

There’s a general framework that adds flexibility to the overall cost:

• Number of topics you want to monitor
• Number of filters you want to have implemented into the platform
• Number of channels you want to monitor
• Balance of monthly results/mentions
• Image/video recognition features
• Historical data access (and how far it goes)

Ultimately, the business impact created by utilizing media monitoring on a daily basis far outweighs the initial investment. Forward-looking brands are leveraging such tools to continuously innovate, increase their reach, and become sustainable.

Some media monitoring tools to have on your radar

Talkwalker

Screenshot of Talkwalker’s Consumer Intelligence Acceleration Platform™ where we see a birdseye view of the performance of Coca-Cola during the past 30 day period.

Talkwalker is the industry-leading consumer intelligence platform. The platform empowers brand managers to monitor numerous media channels from a centralized platform that is enriched with real-time data. Furthermore, Talkwalker’s platform offers extensive media monitoring coverage across 187 languages, in 190 countries - making it the ideal tool to keep a finger on the pulse of a brand.

A unique feature of Talkwalker’s AI-enabled platform is its ability to analyze and detect shifts in consumer sentiment. Meaning that the platform is able to give the end-user an understanding of how consumers are positioning the brand and discussing it on social media.

Anewstip

Screenshot of Anewstip’s platform which acts as a search engine for journalists covering a particular topic.

Anewstip is a media relationship management platform that helps brand managers and marketers find relevant media contacts, monitor news articles, build media lists, and reach out to relevant journalists with personalized pitches.

Covered Press

Screenshot of Covered Press’ platform with data visualization on publications covering a certain news story over time.

Covered Press is an automated media coverage software designed to streamline coordination between journalists, publicists, and editors. The media monitoring solution allows publicists to send better pitches to relevant media outlets who are interested in covering that particular topic.

Reputology

Screenshot of Reputology’s platform integrated into Hootsuite.

Reputology is a media monitoring and management platform. The Reputology app (shown above integrated within Hootsuite) allows users to monitor ratings and reviews on Google, Facebook, and more. Reputology tracks reviews for multiple locations: restaurants, hospitals, auto dealers, hotels, retail stores, marketing agencies, consultants, and more.

Mention

Screenshot of Mention’s media monitoring platform which allows brand managers to instantly be notified of brand mentions across channels.

Mention is a media monitoring solution that helps agencies to monitor over 1 billion sources across the web daily.

Conclusion

Media monitoring is a powerful tactic to leverage in today’s digital world. It gives brands a competitive edge by enabling them to always anticipate consumer needs and expectations. Before buying a media monitoring solution, it is important to know your needs and the anticipated results from investing in one.