When it comes to industry trends and staying on top, or even ahead of them, it is all about who you know and what you know.
Finding out what is trending right now isn’t that difficult. Every social media platform has a list; but how do these trending topics apply to your consumers? Which topics are important to them? Which topics are relevant to them? Media intelligence helps you stay on top of and ahead of the trending curve because knowledge is power for any industry.
Media monitoring software gives you the power and knowledge by helping companies collect and analyse data, such that you can stay ahead of the trending topics and then know how they apply to your audience. Plus, that’s not even the end of it all.
Media monitoring also helps you to then segment the data and use it in many different personalised marketing applications such as social media, email marketing, and overall marketing strategy. These tools help you communicate with your customers, about the trends that are important to them in ways that are relevant, depending on their segmentation and where they are at, in their consumer lifecycle.
Here are 5 key ways by which, media intelligence data can help management stay on top of industry trends: tracking consumer interests and problems, real-time engagement with customers, leveraging influencers, staying on top of the trending topics, and predicting industry trends.
One of the most fascinating areas of media intelligence is gauging sentiment. The software tools that are being developed will eventually take the guessing or detailed human intervention out of the data analysis and show you, how audiences feel about certain topics that are of interest to you in a quick and automated fashion.
However this technology is not quite there yet, so human intervention is still needed for accurately gauging sentiments. The sentiment information allows you to see trends in consumer interests and also problem areas. Of course, media monitoring comes into the picture to help you sort through the information and pick up the right keywords you have been looking for.
When you use media monitoring tools to search for topics and keywords relevant to your industry, you can see trends and patterns. The longer you employ the media monitoring software and tools, the more data is collected and more patterns are developed. Those patterns over time will allow you to see trends and predict them ahead of the curve.
When you use this information to communicate with your audiences, they are appreciative of personalized relevant communications with them. This leads to happier customers, and in turn results in more conversions for your company.
If you haven’t already recognised it, consumers expect a lot more from brands than they used to. They expect your technology to be at par with the competition and expect a higher level of communication in your marketing communications.
Real-time engagement is one of the crucial aspects of higher level communication that your customers will be looking for. With social media becoming a more popular platform for consumers to communicate with brands and vice versa, you must be making relevant conversation points with your consumer.
Everyone wants instant satisfaction and on social media, you can’t be trying to talk about yesterday’s trending topic or yesterday’s news. Media monitoring helps you stay on top of real time communications by helping you see when your brand, keywords, competitors, or industry topics are being discussed.
This gives you the opportunity to respond and converse about it in real time. The future of real time engagement is not just capitalising on a current trend and tweeting about it. The future of real time engagement is actually engaging and conversing with your audience in a relevant and useful manner that helps to draw them in and adopt your brand as their own.
Media monitoring also helps your marketing strategy and reach in a way that is very important today, which is by identifying influencers in your industry. Once you identify, connect with, and then leverage the influencers in your industry, they can help do the job of dispersing your brand identity and value to more consumers.
The consumers trust influencers since they are a reliable outside source. It is important to choose influencers with authority and a likeability factor to leverage and seek assistance to stay on top of the trends.
Staying on top of the trending topics requires nuance and experience. You can learn from other brand’s mistakes in this area. As trending topics has grown, you can see many companies trying to jump onto it and quite a few failing miserably at it as well. Here are four tips for keeping on top of the trends successfully:
Our final key piece of advice on staying on top of the trends is to lead the way by predicting the trends. When you collate the information gathered through media intelligence software and tools, the information you receive can forewarn you of industry trends. This might be through patterns, or it can be through emerging keyword trending topics.
Media can help forecast trends in just about any industry, so making most of the tools available at your disposal would create great advantage for your company in this area. Data analysis moves much more quickly than word of mouth or waiting to see what the trending topics are on the various platforms. When you know what they are going to be, you can lead the way, giving your company the respect, authority and attention that your marketing plan deserves.
Author credit:
Patrick Baume is Group Communications Manager at Isentia. He is an all media expert with over 20 years in communication roles. Patrick also has an extensive broadcast on-air experience, being successful manager of high performing digital communications team with experience leading, company messaging through rebranding and IPO to the ASX200.
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