Digital Marketing Insights

The digital world is filled with conversations comprising of question-answers, reviews-suggestions, critiques- compliments for your brand or its products and services. You need a mechanism to channelize this rich feedback into your strategy in order to understand your audience in a better way. That’s where online monitoring comes into the digital marketing mix.
Let us take a look at the steps that need to be followed for a successful monitoring campaign.

The Objective
The initial stage of your activity should be zeroing in on the objectives of you campaign. The objective should loosely define what it is your trying to figure out at the end of this monitoring process .The objective could be short term which involves monitoring a particular event or a continuous process which reflects the online scenario of the brand.
Recommended Short Term Objectives: Event monitoring, news announcement, product release
Recommended Long Term Objectives: Competitors mapping, online trend analysis

The Pre-Requisites
Once the objective is fixed you need to efficiently set up the tools required to kick-start the process. This process is crucial as the outcome depends on how effectively this stage is executed. The set up includes the following

Keyword short-listing: This stage involves shortlisitng of certain keywords associated with the campaign. The keywords will include the brand words, campaign hash-tags, competitors listing, any particular service or product, technical words and jargons.

Sentiment Analysis: If your objective is to measure the online sentiment and segregate the conversations accordingly, you need to set up the keywords for the same as well.

Geo targeting: If you are looking to pick up conversations from certain geography, you need to set up the geo targeting to that particular location.
Eg. Online conversations related to the performance of a particular municipal corporation.

Sources: Some monitoring tools allow you to select the sources of the conversations and exclude the one you want to skip.
Eg. Number of press mentions for a particular product release, we may plug-in only the news websites as the source of the mentions.

The Set-Up
You should pay special heed to this process as your outcome and success of the campaign depends on how efficiently. Some of the tools provide you with the estimated mentions related to the keywords. Modify (include or exclude) the keyword structure basis the priority of the keyword. Involve the APIs of any platform which for better analysis

Reports and Findings
It is better to perform the analysis on different dashboards. The reporting can consist of following
•River of News: The actual conversations picked up by the monitoring tool. It is the aggregation of the content related to your campaign in one single place.
•Word Cloud: It is a visual representation of the text data related to your conversation. It is convenient to spot the frequencies and hence the impact of the words .The most frequently used words form the centre part of the word cloud and represented in bold words.
•Share of Voice: It provides you with the share of conversation your brand has as compared to the competitors in the ecosystem. This also helps you to tap the moment by your competitor.
•Sentiment Analysis: You understand the market sentiment for your brand or product and can strategically tackle the issues if need be.

Hope this guide has been useful to you if you’re trying set-up an Online Monitoring Campaign. If you are looking at maximizing the impact of your campaign I suggest that you contact a Digital Marketing Agency to help you with the same.

Abhishek Arekar

Abhishek is a part of the Ethinos search team and helps client with various search techniques.