Since the beginning of the Talkwalker adventure, it’s been our goal to give brands access to all the conversations that matter, starting with text, and later moving into image and video recognition. Given the rise in popularity of podcasts and other audio-based channels, Speech Analytics was the logical next step.
As a major source of news and entertainment, podcasts hold an extensive amount of information that brands cannot ignore when looking to capture the voice of the customer. Here are four ways in which Podcast Monitoring can become a part of your holistic social listening strategy:
- Brand monitoring - Extract hidden mentions of your brand
- Influencer detection - Discover new influencers for your brand and products
- Trend research - Leverage Podcast Monitoring at scale to find new market opportunities
- Campaign measurement and optimization - Get a 360° view of your brand and competitors across text, image, video, and audio
1. Brand monitoring - Extract hidden mentions of your brand
Brands must have full visibility over what is being said about them in order to prepare their future communication and campaigns. Podcast Monitoring gives companies access to a new realm of conversations from which they can gather insights that will help them protect their brand and drive more revenue.
It’s no longer necessary to try to guess what podcasts might discuss your industry at length, or wait for any organic brand mentions. You can use Podcast Monitoring to get insights from a variety of podcasts in a few seconds, rather than having to listen to hundreds of hours of audio.
Even though the news about Verizon spiked in February, we found a noteworthy podcast commenting on the news weeks after.
Let’s look at recent mentions of the telecommunications brand Verizon as an example. At the end of February, several news sources picked up that American investor and business tycoon, Warren Buffett, had recently bought shares of Verizon. In this case, the spike fell quickly, but when this happens, brands must closely monitor the topic for a few weeks in case the news resurfaces and a response is required.
Through Podcast Monitoring, we found key mentions of Verizon and their stock resurface in a conversation in The Tape, a podcast owned by Bloomberg, a few weeks after. We listened to the specific section talking about Verizon directly on our platform, and the analysis was very positive, mentioning how their stock was a great opportunity given their heavy investments in the 5G network across the United States.
With Podcast Monitoring we found that Bloomberg discussed Verizon weeks after the news spiked.
Key takeaway: As a brand, it’s crucial to detect when experts or influencers are talking about you, especially by tapping into unscripted conversations such as podcasts, to monitor how your brand is perceived.
Given the wide audience of Bloomberg, this mention in particular is likely to have an impact on investors’ behavior towards Verizon’s stock. Being able to find this type of hidden mention allows the brand to react appropriately, share across its different channels, and potentially create a campaign around the advancements of their 5G network.
2. Influencer detection - Discover new influencers for your brand and products
Having access to the vast world of podcasts gives you the opportunity to expand your current network of influencers by finding podcast hosts who are already interested in your content, and talk about it organically. This is a way for you to tap into niche audiences that were previously out of your reach.
Searching for your brand and competitors is the fastest way to finding market opportunities. We decided to dive into video games by checking Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox, and found that they are all discussed pretty evenly across multiple podcasts.
The share of voice of Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox has been pretty much divided equally in podcasts.
Diving a bit deeper into Nintendo, we saw a recurrent podcast coming up, Nintendo Switch Craft. This specific program focuses on everything related to the Switch console and its different games. Looking at one of the episodes, we saw the different moments where the brand was directly mentioned.
With Podcast Monitoring, it's possible to see the precise moments where your topic of interest gets mentioned within a podcast.
This podcast has more than 600 episodes, and all revolve around one brand. For Nintendo it could be interesting to monitor what’s being said about their new releases and games to have a clear picture of what an influencer, who also has an account on Twitch, and 2.1K followers on Twitter, could say, and how their followers might respond. Below we gathered the main reactions to Nintendo Switch Craft’s content for a 30-day period, and found that even though there are many positive terms, the brand could also get insights on what to improve for future releases.
The main reactions around Nintendo Switch Craft’s content were varied, especially given the wide range of games and updates covered.
Key takeaway: Getting to hear what influential people are saying about your brand is a good way to hear directly from a group of consumers that have access to a niche audience. Doing this exercise on podcasts is key for companies like Nintendo to get insights from unscripted conversations.
3. Trend research - Leverage Podcast Monitoring at scale to find new market opportunities
In today’s dynamic world, it’s key to move swiftly, find insights, and act before it is too late. With Podcast Monitoring, brands can filter through results and focus on what’s relevant for them.
In an industry like finance, where innovation is key to keep yourself at the forefront of your competitors, podcasts can help you understand where conversations are going, and what topics are more prevalent. Below, you can find the number of podcasts within a 7-day period that mentioned finance, and the number of podcasts that specifically discussed innovation in finance.
Even though many podcasts discuss finance, a smaller amount focuses on innovation within the industry.
Reducing the overall number of podcasts to monitor makes it possible to analyze only relevant content, finding insights that are related to a specific campaign or decision. After narrowing down the total results, we looked into the top themes being discussed and cryptocurrencies, AI, and cloud services were at the forefront of the conversations.
From podcasts discussing innovation in finance, we saw that cryptos, AI, and cloud services were the most noteworthy topics.
Key takeaway: Having oversight over what is being said across discovery sites like Apple Podcasts is a good way to know what experts are saying, and more importantly, what consumers are listening to. Digging deeper into these topics can help you find your competitor’s latest AI advancements, or give you the groundwork to develop a new way to adopt cryptocurrencies into your platform.
4. Campaign measurement and optimization - Get a 360° view of your brand and competitors across text, image, video, and audio
Including Podcast Monitoring in your projects is the perfect way to have full coverage of what’s being said about your brand across different platforms and types of media. Combining the different features offered in the Talkwalker platform is the best way to gain insights directly from customers and stay ahead of your competition.
To exemplify this, we chose the market for plant-based meats, given that at the beginning of 2021, Beyond Meat launched its new sausages in Walmart stores across the United States. As you can see below, this explains the large volume of mentions that this brand has versus its competitors.
Combining these two visuals gives us a view into the total conversations around the plant-based alternatives, and also the share of voice among its players.
Looking into what was being said across social media, we saw that people were talking positively about vegan cheese, the taste of plant-based meats, and vegan burgers overall. On the other hand, terms that included the words synthetic or fake were driving negative conversations. An interesting insight for Beyond Meat is that their new product did not come up in written conversations.
With sentiment analysis, we found that terms like vegan meat and vegan cheese led the positive sentiment within the topic of plant-based alternatives.
When using visual recognition to find logos from plant-based alternatives in images, it was clear that Beyond Meat’s products and logo were being shared the most compared to other visuals, given their recent launch in Walmart stores. This explains that what’s driving the total mentions of the brand are images shared about its products, and not comments mentioning the sausages.
Our visual recognition technology allowed us to find that Beyond Meat images took a large share amongst the most engaging posts.
With Beyond Meat venturing into plant-based sausages, we also thought about the importance of checking what other players are doing, and that’s where Podcast Monitoring came in handy. Analyzing conversations taking place in podcasts, we were able to discover a growing competitor, Eat Just, a brand that’s venturing into plant-based alternatives for poultry. Their share of voice amongst their competitors is small, but as other players continue to focus on meat-substitutes, they could gain greater market share with their differentiated product.
This podcast from the BBC discussed plant-based alternatives and focused on lab-grown chickens as the next innovation.
Key takeaway: For 2021, brands will need to reconcile data and insights from all sources to tap into the voice of the customer. With Talkwalker’s Podcast Monitoring feature you’ll be able to find hidden mentions of your brand, discover market opportunities and influencers, and launch more comprehensive marketing campaigns.
What else is new on the Talkwalker enterprise listening platform?
Better workflows with new integration into enterprise communication platforms
We have integrated our platform with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat so you can now share reports and alerts directly on these channels, and not necessarily through email. This was done to foster collaboration across teams and break down the data silos in organizations.
Better accessibility with Talkwalker’s mobile app
We’ve launched an application, available in Android and iOS. Through the app, you can get notifications on any new reports or alerts, access your dashboards, and have all the insights you need at your fingertips regardless of where you are.
Better coverage with new data sources
The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and brands need a unified platform more than ever, to analyze all of their customer and consumer data. You can now access reviews from Google Play Store Apps directly on Channel Analytics, as well as embed Google Trends into your different dashboards, and much, much more!
