Three questions PR pros should ask their media monitoring provider

6 Aug 2021

Industry Insights
Utilising the right media monitoring service will provide you with valuable insights into your brand’s media coverage — and it serves as proof that you are meeting your deliverables. Your clients are sure to love that. 

But how do you ensure that you choose the correct monitoring service and that you are getting bang for your buck? By asking all the right questions, of course!

Now, let’s take a look at the three most important questions to ask:

1. How thorough are your reports? 

When choosing a media monitoring service, your goal should be to find the offering that best accommodates your specific needs, and presents a clear-cut report for your brand.

You want a tool  that can provide you with reports that filter out unrelated mentions and get the fundamentals right

Newsclip’s Gate5 Delivery Platform, for example, gathers all your media coverage — be it traditional media or social media mentions, it’s all in one place! You can access each mention of your brand or media clip as soon as it is published or broadcasted. It’s immediate, which is a must since social media and the media moves at such a fast pace. 

This is useful because it allows you to see all of your different types of media coverage without having to switch between platforms.

Gate5 also offers an automatic report generator. Here, sales consultants select a few reports out of the 150 reports that they have available. These are based on each client’s reporting requirements. They will then set up a scheduled statistical report document to be automatically delivered to each client on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

The scheduled statistical reports will then be loaded onto the client’s Gate5 profile, which are readily available to be generated as and when required.

Examples of the types of reports available are: 
  • Circulation: This gives you insight into the circulation figures of any publications that have mentioned your brand.
  • Regional reach: With this report, you can see which regions your brand is getting the most traction in.
  • Byline reports: This report will be particularly useful for those in the communications industry as it helps you to identify which journalists are covering stories about your brand.
  • Period on period: As the name suggests, this report compares your coverage over different periods.

Additionally, Gate5 allows for the sorting and managing of clips, along with the ability to view previously allocated coverage data.

These filters allow for quick and easy access to specific media coverage; they include service, region and media type. 

This, coupled with the insights gathered from the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and Alexa, an Amazon company, result in more comprehensive coverage. 

It doesn’t get more thorough than that, does it?

2. Do you monitor the media my client needs? 

When choosing a monitoring service provider, you must pick a company that will return coverage that is insightful and valuable for your client. 

As every brand will have unique needs, your provider must be able to tailor their service according to each client's needs. 

For example, if you are a PR pro that is running a campaign on social media and radio, your service provider needs to monitor traditional and social media. 

Newsclip’s solutions aim to meet every brand tracking and media monitoring need — all the way from print, broadcast and online monitoring to advert tracking, media analysis and social media monitoring. 

By monitoring the full media landscape, you have access to receive coverage relevant specially to you. 

3. How will media monitoring help my PR agency?

Media monitoring is a must for PR pros because it allows them to keep their fingers on the pulse when it comes to their media spend and brand conversations. 

Additionally, the insights garnered from media monitoring can help PR pros to create more fruitful campaigns, stay on top of negative publicity and deal with crises more effectively. 

At Newsclip, we provide PR tools to help brands and agencies succeed, as well as meaningful and measurable insights. 

For example, our digital ebook, RedBook, allows you to present all your client’s media coverage in a clean-cut format, which is also customisable. 
Do you want to know more about how PR pros can utilise media monitoring? Then be sure to check out these Three reasons why PR pros need media coverage reports.