How can you identify gaps in your messaging with media monitoring?

1 Define your goals and key messages

Before you start monitoring, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your PR efforts and what you want to convey to your target audiences. Your goals and key messages should be aligned with your brand values, vision, and mission, and should be consistent across all your communication channels. You should also define your key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks to measure your progress and success.

2 Choose your media sources and tools

Depending on your goals and target audiences, you may want to monitor different types of media sources, such as online, print, broadcast, or social media. You should also consider the quality, relevance, and credibility of the sources, as well as the tone, sentiment, and reach of the coverage. You can use various tools to help you monitor and analyze the media, such as Google Alerts, social media listening platforms, or media monitoring software. These tools can help you collect, filter, organize, and visualize the data you need.

3 Compare your messages with the media coverage

Once you have collected and analyzed the media data, you can compare it to your goals and key messages. Patterns, trends, gaps, and discrepancies can be identified in terms of volume, sentiment, tone, themes, keywords, sources, and audiences. Volume refers to how much coverage you are getting compared to competitors or industry standards. Sentiment looks at the positivity or negativity of the coverage or public opinion about your brand or topics. Tone examines how media outlets or influencers frame or present your brand or topics. Themes explore the main topics or issues discussed about your brand or topics. Keywords refer to the most frequently used words or phrases associated with your brand or topics. Sources assess which media outlets or influencers are covering or mentioning your brand or topics and how influential they are. Audiences investigate who is being reached by the media outlets or influencers and if they match with your target audiences.

4 Identify and address the gaps in your messaging

Comparing your messages with media coverage can reveal gaps in your messaging, which can be either positive or negative. Positive gaps are when the media coverage or public opinion exceeds your expectations, indicating opportunities to amplify your messages. Negative gaps are when the media coverage or public opinion falls short of your expectations, indicating challenges or risks to mitigate or overcome your messages. Examples include getting less coverage than competitors, negative or neutral coverage, inconsistent or contradictory coverage, irrelevant coverage, and coverage from outlets not aligned with target audiences. To address the gaps in your messaging, you need to take action like creating and distributing compelling content, engaging with relevant influencers, monitoring and responding to feedback, and adjusting goals and key messages. Media monitoring can help you identify and address the gaps in your messaging to improve PR strategy and results. By tracking and analyzing media coverage and public opinion about your brand or topics, you can identify the positive and negative gaps in your messaging, take action to leverage, mitigate, or overcome them, enhance reputation and relationships with stakeholders, and achieve PR objectives.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?