The Value of Broadcast News Monitoring for PR Agencies: Win New Clients & Impress Current Ones

Broadcast media monitoring provides PR agencies a competitive advantage that helps attract and retain clients.

Television remains the most influential news medium. Almost all American households own at least one television, and about 50 percent of Americans obtain their news most frequently from television, compared to 43 percent who often get their news online, according to Pew Research.

While many news organizations put some of their newscasts on their websites or on YouTube, not all stories from the live broadcast are posted online and stories are often not posted in their entirety. To monitor TV news broadcasts completely, it’s important to monitor the video broadcast directly using a national broadcast monitoring service. TV broadcast monitoring services in the U.S. usually monitor the closed caption text. In other countries, services use transcriptions of the audio and/or speech to text software.

PR agencies can grow their business and impress clients by offering broadcast monitoring services, according to a new playbook from TVEyes, a broadcast media search engine.

Win New Clients with Broadcast Monitoring Services

Here’s how PR and marketing agencies can win new clients through research of TV broadcasts: 

Track news events in specific product niches to become expert and to identify opportunities. A new product launch can create need for public relations among competitors that may make ideal new clients for an agency in that niche. Example: When Apple announced its new smartwatch, Motorola also announced an expansion of its own smartwatch but attracted limited media attention. That’s an opportunity to pitch campaign ideas to the company to win its business.

Learn about potential clients and competitors. An analysis of a prospective client’s previous broadcast coverage and their competition’s coverage can provide insight on the companies that need improved media relations and PR services. It can also provide a baseline from which the agency can pitch enhanced media relations services.

Bring the new business pitch to life. Incorporating video clips about current clients into presentations to prospective clients helps an agency stand out among competitors.

Strengthen Loyalty of Current Agency Clients

The following are some ways that PR agencies can use broadcast monitoring to help current clients and strengthen the clients’ loyalty to the agency:

Uncover non-verbal nuances. Watching the video clips produced by broadcast monitoring frequently reveals nuances that are not shown through conventional web searches or by reading a transcript. For instance, sometimes the adversarial tone of a journalist or the perceived insincerity of a corporate spokesperson can only be determined from a review of the video clip.

Create more effective messaging. Interviews with the “man on the street” help companies better understand the tone of and attitude behind comments. Analysis of appearances of corporate executives can identify how to strengthen corporate messages in interviews.

Improve media training. Before and after video clips can hone a client’s media interviewing skills and eliminate bad interview habits. Clips of a journalist’s previous interviews with other executives can prepare an executive for an on-camera interview with the reporter.

Track top competitors. News that a competitor has released a new product or is fined by a regulator enables an agency to recommend appropriate reactions to the client.

Stay on top of social and political issues that affect your client, providing you a “first-mover advantage.”

Improve crisis management. Broadcast monitoring provides near real-time insights into the events, organizations, and people involved in a crisis as well as a way to track the success of recovery or rebuilding messaging.

“Unlike any other tool, broadcast monitoring will set your agency apart during every stage of the client life cycle: attract, acquire, develop, retain, and build loyalty,” the TVEyes playbook states.

Comprehensive Media Monitoring

While TV news monitoring offers many benefits for both agencies and clients, it’s also advantageous to integrate TV news monitoring into a comprehensive media monitoring service such as Glean.info.

TV networks and local stations now promote their programs and engage with their audience on social media where viewers share and discuss TV news stories. That means it’s important to seek a media monitoring service that integrates TV and social media data.

The best media monitoring services integrate into a single dashboard for easy viewing the analytics from all media and social networks, including the client’s Google Analytics. If all media mentions are under a single umbrella, online reputation management and media measurement is much more comprehensive, accurate and convenient.

It’s may be more economical to employ a media monitoring service that permits clients to subscribe to only the closed-caption text of broadcast news or one that will do customized keyword searches after broadcast. Clients can then choose to see a preview video of only the most important clips that the monitoring service has identified. Learn more about how to select a media monitoring vendor.

More Advice for Television News Monitoring

In setting up TV news monitoring, select specific keywords terms to locate relevant videos. Concentrating on specific high-priority searches, such as a brand initiative, is more effective and affordable that attempting to monitor every brand mention. In broadcast monitoring, it’s important to include spelling variations, and common misspellings of the company, brand, and high-level executives. To minimize irrelevant video clips, it’s often beneficial to use Boolean search queries for companies, brands or executives with common names such as “Adele” AND (song OR singer OR Top 50 OR album).

Bottom Line: Broadcast news monitoring can help PR agencies win new clients and greatly improve services to current clients. It gives PR agencies a competitive advantage that distinguishes them from competitors. Despite the recent acceptance of online news, television remains the most popular source for news. As a result, national monitoring of TV news has become a must-have service for agencies serving major corporations and not-for-profit organizations.