If your job description includes content marketing activities, you may spend a lot of your time searching the web.

Whether it’s looking for inspiration, tracking which websites published your content or identifying guest blogging opportunities, all this manual work can take up most of your day. Imagine having spent it actually producing new content instead?

Luckily, you can overcome writer’s block and automate some otherwise boresome tasks to maximize your efforts and efficiency by using media monitoring tools. Tracking whenever your brand, products or competitors are mentioned online can provide valuable insights and help you create more relevant and engaging content.

In this blog, you’ll learn 8 ways of using media monitoring to step up your content marketing game. Let’s start!

#1) Conduct topic research

In order to create relevant and unique content, you must identify relevant topics that engage your audience. Furthermore, you should learn what issues people are dealing with and provide a solution to ease their troubles.

Problem-solving is the key to building lasting relationships. This is exactly what media monitoring tools such as Determ enable you to track, with the added benefit of powerful data analytics.

Let’s say you need to produce content surrounding running shoes. Simply start tracking the topic, and your real-time feed will be filled with feedback on running shoes, problems people might be experiencing, and content other creators are already posting regarding the topic.

The same could be applied to any topic. It’s a good practice to track a topic of interest alongside keywords such as “advice”, “recommendation”, “suggestion”, “issue”, “problem”, etc. to get a better understanding of your customers’ experience and behavior based on their feedback.

You might learn there are a lot of discussions related to marathon running shoes. But, not a lot of existing articles on the topic really answer people’s questions and concerns.

That means you’ve identified the sweet spot for your next blog(s). Now, you could start tracking that specific topic. As a result, you’ll be able to learn more about the sentiment (i.e., how your audience feels towards the topic), the channels it is talked about the most on, or analyze the Word cloud for some added inspiration.

#2) Get to know your target audience

Other than learning more about people’s opinions, preferences, and experiences, scrolling through your feed of mentions could offer even more guidelines for creating relevant content. Every mention contains information about the reach, number of interactions, engagement rate, and influence.

All of these metrics provide insight into what types of content are the most engaging and spark the most interest among users. Thus, you can easily adjust the type of content to best fit the preferences of your target audience.

Likewise, you can use the powerful analytics aspect of media monitoring to see which channels people are using the most when talking about a certain subject. In other words, you can easily identify which platform is the preferred one for your audience.

That also means that you’ll spend less of your budget testing various channels. Hence, you can focus your efforts and finances into the ones you know are the right choice for content distribution.

#3) Find user-generated content

By tracking mentions of your brand or your products, you will most likely stumble upon posts created by users. Specifically, those who liked your running shoes so much, they decided to share their satisfaction with their friends and followers. That is what we call user-generated content.

Word of mouth recommendations still has the most credibility, even in the age of digital media. In fact, a study shows that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other consumers more than branded content.

So, rather than solely relying on paid advertising, your brand could gain a lot of value by sharing authentic, non-paid content created by your own happy customers.

Turn customers into brand ambassadors by reposting their content or implementing it into your own. It’s a great way to reach a wider audience in a way that is genuine and lends credibility to your products and your brand.

#4) Ease your way into influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is bigger than ever. With reports of influencer marketing delivering 11 times more ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing, there’s no reason for you not to delve into it.

What’s crucial is finding the right brand ambassador to spread the message of your brand to its loyal audience. Many marketers consider this to be a challenge, but they might not be acquainted with how easy this process is with media monitoring.

Tools like Determ will often automatically list the top influencers for any query you track and sort it by the number of mentions, reach, source and sentiment. That way you can easily track who are the most popular “authors” on a certain topic. You could analyze their content, or contact them directly for a potential collaboration.

#5) Build backlinks to rank your content better

As one of the main pillars of SEO, backlinks have great importance in content marketing as well. They can directly affect how your content is ranked on the search engine results page. Providing references to your sources also earns you credibility with your audience and your peers.

You may not think of correlating SEO link building and media monitoring, but the two actually go hand in hand.

Firstly, think of how many authors mention you and don’t put a backlink to your website or reference you as a source of certain data. In that case, media monitoring would allow you to track those mentions and directly contact the author.

Simply adding a backlink to an already written blog post is much easier than negotiating a collaboration from scratch. After all, when someone cites you or uses your brand name to prove a point, linking to you is a common courtesy.

In cases when authors do put a link to your website, it would be a great idea to thank them. Not only are you being professional and polite, but you are building a relationship with them. Having such a connection with a number of authors and websites could equate to more backlinks in the future, which is surely a nice bonus for such a simple act of kindness.

#6) Find guest blogging opportunities

Continuing on the topic of building backlinks, what better way to do so than with some guest blogging? Other than garnering links that build page authority on Google, fresh ideas from a different perspective might be a great boost to one’s usual content.

Although it’s not always simple to find an opportunity to do a guest blogging collaboration, it’s much easier with a media monitoring tool. Instead of manually searching the web, you could track queries such as “guest blogging”, “guest article”, “guest posting guidelines”, “become an author”, “write for us” and any additional phrase you might think of.

Once the tool has gathered mentions such as the one above, you’ll be able to see them in your real-time feed, along with all the information about the author. Then, it’s easy to contact them directly and send them your guest post pitch.

#7) Do a detailed analysis of your content marketing efforts

There is a saying that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and the same goes for content marketing. You could write the best guide the world has ever seen, but if you don’t target and promote it properly, it could all be for nothing.

Hence, it’s important to keep track of some of the main metrics. Monitor the title, keywords or hashtags you created to be in the loop. Thus, you could see:

• Which websites (re)published your content
• Your audience’s feedback
• The number of interactions and the engagement rate
• The reach of your content
• The channels your content was mentioned on the most
• The language and location of mentions
• The overall sentiment toward your content
• The top influencers that are talking about your content

Use this data to adjust and improve your content marketing strategy. You’ll get to know your audience better, as well as learn what your own strengths and weaknesses are.

#8) Track competitor’s content marketing strategy

It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on your competitors. By tracking their content, you’ll get a clear picture of what type of content they’re producing, what channels they’re using the most, the feedback of their audience and much more information.

Some media monitoring tools offer Competitive analysis feature that allows you to compare your own performance to your competitor. Measure who had a better reach, sentiment, or whose social media strategy is providing greater results.

If you notice your competitor is thriving on a certain social media channel, it might be a good idea to rethink your strategy and assess how you could disrupt their dominance.

This is also a great learning opportunity. Monitoring your competitors will give you an idea of what type of content is performing really well, and what isn’t. If they’re successful, you’ll have an insight into what strategies and tactics are working for others in your industry. Likewise, they could work for you as well.

In conclusion

Producing relevant and helpful content for your audience inevitably reflects in a better customer relationship. It also improves your brand image by positioning you as a leader in a certain area or industry.

As many brands realize that, it becomes harder to create content that is unique and will have your audience coming back for more. Luckily, media monitoring tools can be of great help in both situations.

Try some of these tips and let us know what has worked the best for you!

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