In this article, Focal Points will provide an explanation of the role that media analysis plays and what its benefits are. By combining academic research and industry insights, this article will briefly outline the major objectives and advantages of media analysis.
What Is the Point of Media Analysis?
There are several objectives of media analysis. Perhaps the most fundamental objective is to develop strategic insights into different media trends and topics. Knowing how your brand/business is portrayed in the media, how your messages are received, and how different media sources report on different trends or issues affecting you, is enormously valuable. These insights can help you to formulate better, and more nuanced, strategies to engage with the media and the public more generally, so as to boost your brand awareness and perception.
Similarly, media analysis can provide you with strategic insights into your industry or marketplace. Specifically, media analysis offers you a deeper understanding of your competitors, allowing you to measure yourself against them in key performance areas. It also offers you a chance to see which industry topics are being addressed and by whom.
Media analysis is also helpful in establishing the likely impact of key messaging on public audiences. A measure like ‘share of voice’ can tell you how much of the media space your brand or your messages are occupying, while narrative insights can let you see how efficiently your messages are being carried out by the media. Together, these methods, along with numerous others, can shine a light on the likely impact of your communications output on public perception.
Finally, how do you know whether your media relations strategies are working? Media analysis serves to give you an overview of your media relations. It can tell you whether your key messages are being picked up, how often, when and where, as well as how that content is being portrayed in the media. This provides you with a critical understanding of how effective your media relations strategies are, giving you the opportunity to develop and improve them with fact-based insights.
How Can Media Analysis Help You?
Media analysis has numerous benefits. Here are eight ways it can help you:
1. Assessing your communications output:
As mentioned earlier, one of the key roles of media analysis is to evaluate the effectiveness of your media relations strategies. In particular, media analysis gives you key insights into your PR output (i.e., you learn what gets published/shared by the media), enabling you to see whether your strategies are working or not. This is especially useful, as it can inform a new and improved communications blueprint.
2. Targeting media with key messaging:
Knowing more about the demographics of the media audience receiving your content can help focus your strategies. And with key statistics about who is giving you lengthy or favourable coverage, you can also maximise your media exposure by engaging with selected journalists, media sources, etc. By knowing who is creating content about your brand, you can develop strategic relationships and convert unfavourable mentions into favourable ones.
3. Receiving strategic insights into issues affecting your brand:
Since the media not only reflects public opinion but also influences it, knowing how the media portray issues relating to your brand is imperative for understanding and shaping the public perception of your brand. With the information provided by various media analysis solutions, you can predict the likely effects of media content on the public. This, in turn, can help you to develop strategies to maximise your positive coverage and minimise your negative coverage.
4. Gaining reputation insights:
Media analysis can help you with managing your brand image. You can stay up to date with reputation insights by identifying favourable or unfavourable messages that are gaining media traction, or by tracking reputation ‘drivers’ and influences. This can help you to optimise your communications strategies, whether by fine-tuning or overhauling them in response to an ever-changing world.
5. Getting competitor analysis:
Good media analysis can give you a competitive advantage. With the ability to identify your competitors’ activities, messaging, and positioning on key issues, you can receive an excellent overview of their communications strategies and the public perception of their brand.
6. Obtaining trend analysis:
Trend analysis involves looking at various topics, trends, and movements in the media. Subjects are assessed through different parameters – e.g., volume or tone – which give you valuable information about issues you are interested in, whether they are client- or industry-related, or even if they illuminate an area highlighted for a new business venture.
7. Tracking events, campaigns, and initiatives:
What did the media say about your event? How was your campaign covered in the media? Who shared information about your launch? The easiest way to stay on top of media coverage concerning your organisational output is through media analysis. This gives you insights into your coverage so that you have the opportunity to maximise your mentions by timing press releases better and avoiding negative sentiment in the future.
8. Following crises:
Media analysis is an extremely useful tool for seeing how a negative issue unfolds in the media. As everyone knows, a major crisis can cause serious harm to your brand’s reputation. Media analysis is crucial, because it allows you to respond rapidly and ensure effective crisis management by pinpointing key problem areas.
Additional benefits:
Another benefit of performing media analysis is that reports can be received on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. The best timeframes for you will depend on how much media coverage your brand generates and what your internal reporting requirements are. Reporting regularly makes comparisons with previous periods incredibly simple and allows you to effectively comment on matters.
Media analysis is also non-intrusive. Analysis is done anonymously, without the involvement of competitors, customers, or media sources. This means that the data are not prone to contamination by ‘response generation’, which is often seen in polls and surveys, where audiences respond in ways that they think researchers want them to.
If you have an effective media monitoring solution, then you are able to capture high volumes of data. This means that you lessen the chances of missing out on any coverage – particularly important if that coverage requires you to respond to an issue. Crucially, the larger the dataset, the more reliable your results and the more valuable your insights will be, as the media coverage will have a better chance of being representative of public perception.
Finally, media analysis is an extremely cost-effective way of getting insights into your communications strategy. Compared to conducting your own surveys and market research, which can be hugely labour-intensive (and then still produce unreliable data), media analysis is more time-efficient and delivers accurate results.
Conclusion
Media analysis is highly beneficial to companies and other organisations. It can offer you strategic insights into your media coverage, as well as your competitors’, evaluate the effectiveness of your media relations, and assess how effective your key messaging is. There are a wide variety of benefits to media analysis; on top of giving you valuable insights, media analysis can save you time, money, and effort.