MAKING THE MOST OF MEDIA INTELLIGENCE

Constant monitoring and reacting to data are key to making the most of modern channels, writes BPG Cohn & Wolfe’s Hameed Yousuf.

Are you being served ads that have no relevance to you? With the amount of data users share in the digital space, most advertisers now reach out to audiences with high affinity, with the objective of conversion. Campaigns now have the dual responsibilities of driving awareness and conversions, which – to an extent – can be executed if done smartly . Media intelligence is one way of helping brands make these strategic decisions.

Often confused with social listening, media intelligence functions like a human brain that differentiates between music and noise around it, and effectively processes it to take action and respond.

Media intelligence adds to the data pool by gathering public data available through social and digital content in the form of editorial, and analyses them further to extract relevant insights. This enables brands to feel the pulse of the consumers and keep a close eye on their competition.

There are various tools available in the market to extract this information and represent it in beautiful charts, but how can this guide your decision-making process?

Simple: monitor everything relevant on a daily basis. For starters, use brand keywords, followed by keywords used for search engine marketing (SEM) that will cover your products and services and make additions based on existing and new campaigns. As well as keywords, include hashtags and individual social handles to track conversations in the social space and set daily alerts to be on top of the game.

With new algorithms kicking in on social media platforms, brand visibility will continue to diminish, making it crucial to measure the impact of campaigns. Although the level of measurement has evolved over the years, without the right infrastructure essential data can be lost if not tracked. By tracking activity on the website through analytics, deep-linking every page on the website and monitoring placements through tracking pixels, every brand asset needs to be connected with more than a call to action.

Once this framework is built, tactics such as remarketing and strategies such as dynamic retargeting can be employed to function seamlessly, deciphering the data to tweak strategies and existing campaigns.

Measurement isn’t limited to calculating return on investment. Brands need to up their game and have answers to questions such as why users on platform A like their products more than users on platform B. Traditionally, allocating more budgets to platform A was a solution, but the game has changed and brands need to pace up to understand the different mindsets of the consumer. Hameed Yousuf is digital account director at BPG Cohn & Wolfe