Written by Lewis Muller, Managing Director, Public Affairs
As a strategic advisor to my clients, part of my job is to stay ahead of the curve on where potential opportunities or pitfalls exist throughout the media landscape. Not surprisingly, I rely on numerous data resources for curating actionable information and reports that are relevant and easily disseminated by clients. The goal is obvious - I want to provide intelligence that empowers my clients to do their job more effectively and communicate up their internal ladders with confidence.
The challenge resides in determining what readily available data (not custom polling) is actually helpful and actionable information versus what could be classified as interesting data points, but are ultimately useless. In my experience, I’ve relied on a few different categories of information which I will share in this email, but in the interest of trying to stay ahead of the curve, I want to hear from you - are you in agreement with me? Are there buckets I’m missing? What other information are you using to do your job more effectively as media and communications professionals? Please take our quick five-minute survey!
Here are the categories of information that have been most meaningful to my clients and where I want to hear feedback from you!
Relevant News Articles or Mentions
Let’s start with the obvious. Typically, the first thing we do when we wake up is check the weather and read through our daily rundown of news. However, sometimes sifting through numerous publishers and newsletters to find articles that are most relevant to your company/organization, your industry, or your cause can be a taxing process. How do you create that daily or weekly newsletter that is custom to you?
Advertising Trends
We all know that the advertising landscape across devices/screens and content mediums has become increasingly complex and is constantly changing at a rapid pace. Still, when executing an advertising campaign on any budget level, we are required to know what are the most effective and best practices, what emerging tactics or creative trends we should be testing, and how we are measuring the efficacy of our ad dollars.
Audience Insights
Understanding the demographics, motivations, and preferences of the audiences we are communicating with regularly is critical. Just as critical is identifying those new audiences who we might not be reaching yet, but could be instrumental champions of your brand or cause. Outside of your own instincts, what data resources are you relying on for audience intelligence?
Competitive Intelligence
Where is your opposition spending (or not spending)? What is the messaging in their ads? What are they saying about you publically? The questions I probably get asked most by my clients are about what their opposition is doing and if they should be doing something to combat their efforts. How are you monitoring your opposition?
Social Media Listening
This one can sometimes be a tough one to glean realistic insights because the loudest and most engaged people on social media create inherent biases in the data, but if you dig deep, you can find some gold nuggets. For example, there could be a social media influencer engaging with your brand or cause who you might want to recruit for amplifying your message. Also, you can monitor the social media actions (likes, tweets, comments, etc.) of the specific individuals within your target audience which can provide more insightful data than metrics like impressions or click-thru rates. How do you monitor the conversation on social media?
What other data sources do you pay attention to? Take our five-minute survey and help us curate information custom to you!
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