Social media has become a very crucial tool in modern marketing. While traditional and “offline” channels of communication still work, businesses need to truly stand out with the content they are presenting. Being unique is not enough — as a company, you have to be noticed by both your customers and your competition. 

The financial industry is no different here. It is constantly gaining its high position in being an exceptionally promising business using media monitoring. Online presence is an important factor defining a brand’s success — especially for banks and financial institutions which are not associated with the most youthful approach to marketing. Not yet.

Today, we’re going to cover good practices and examples to follow when it comes to media monitoring in the finance industry. You will surely bookmark this article if you run any financial sector business! 

What exactly is media monitoring? 

It is a tool helping brands understand current trends about themselves — who, when, and in what way is talking about the subject. It usually applies to companies, but also to political issues, global trade markets, and science. With today’s world standards, media monitoring must include online sources among traditional ones. 

Why use media monitoring for your institution? 

The answer is simple.

• It allows companies to be up-to-date with social media trends while being a relevant brand in the digital era of marketing.
• Media monitoring helps brands spot mentions that they can then post via a marketing calendar on their own social media accounts
• The Internet is a blessing and a curse at the same time — while it can have a great positive impact on the market perception on your business, it may also be used against you if not maintained accordingly. 
• Media monitoring also works a tool to measure your employer branding value. The more positive your brand reputation is, the more likely people want to join your team. 
• Media monitoring plays a crucial role in environmental research, such as familiarizing with the target audience, understanding and foreshadowing the competition next steps as well as improving the level of customer service.

Curious to find out how to use media monitoring in a beneficial way? Let’s have a closer look at the benefits coming from it!

Discover your customers’ needs

If media monitoring only rings a bell for you in terms of Internet-related businesses you should think about it twice. The ability to understand your customers and their consumer choices is a key factor defining successful marketing of a brand. Thanks to social media, it is now easier than ever to reach hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of people through one channel of communication. It is important to keep in mind that with over 4 billion SM users worldwide the potential of learning customer needs and trends is extraordinary. It’s essential for every business, especially for financial institutions, to be able to use the maximum of possibilities when learning about their target audience. By using media monitoring you are able to see so-called sentiment towards your brand. It is done by measuring the number of mentions and their emotional context — whether they are positive, negative, or neutral. This data allows marketing and PR specialists to better guide and run future campaigns, as well as improve the company’s current presence on the market. 

What is also crucial with learning about customers while using media monitoring is finding linked themes and points of discussion with your field of business, either as a brand or a specific service. Thanks to that, advertisements can have a greater impact on consumers as they are targeted at a specific group of receivers — sharing common interests, values, and even similar worldviews. Dividing target audiences into different “families” is beneficial from the marketing point of view as it lets specialists communicate more solid messages. Direct and relatable marketing works well only if a brand is able to understand specifications and needs of its target audience. Checking your institution’s mentions and linking them together with a group of your recipients is the first step to a successful recognition of your market’s specifics. Depending on the situation, focusing the majority of resources on social media platforms that your brand is trending on may have an impact on changing priorities in your marketing plans for the future.  Remember to implement new strategies according to thorough research — for instance, you need to think about why customers tend to use one specific platform over others.

Support customers better

Media monitoring plays an important role also in upgrading customer support. By understanding the nature of your brand’s mentions over the Internet you will be more likely to grasp which sectors of PR and marketing need improvement. While the banking industry may face its own reputation of being not as youthful as others, with a well-led and believable campaign based on media research finance has a great potential to become the fastest growing branch of business in SM.

• The Internet is a place where everything happens — which means that customers can share their experiences with your products, both positive and negative. If your clients tend to discuss and share information about your business on rather closed forums or groups it may be a signal to improve the clarity of your existing networks, such as an official webpage or a popular social media account.
• Frequent mentions can communicate the importance of the valued experience your customers have with the products. The same goes for rather negative feedback which advocates for certain improvement steps to be taken in the near future, such as additional quality checks or adjusting marketing actions.
  

Using media monitoring can be also beneficial for other financial institutions, such as insurance companies. By being one step ahead, you can respond to the issues the customers have before negative feedback and opinion spreads online. This allows all kinds of businesses to avoid unnecessary and rather negative publicity by solving customer issues more internally.

Customers are the backbone of every business and their loyalty is measured mainly by the level of service they receive. Traditionally, banking industry clients could communicate with the company (which could use a Lookup solution like The Data Group‘s to see caller information) via phone calls or by face-to-face conversations with a representative directly at the bank’s branch.

Nowadays, users prefer to have the option of handling their issues through apps or official websites. That is why more and more financial institutions provide services such as round-the-clock chats that are used by their customers from the whole world, not limiting themselves to a specific timezone. Of course, due to the safety and confidentiality of sensitive data such actions have to be tested and checked thoroughly before launching.

Be aware of the competition

Competition never sleeps and neither should you. Thanks to the media monitoring finance industry companies can:

• Check how they stack up against their rivals on the market. It can be done by using competitive reports correlating both your business and opposition based on e.g. customer activity and the number of reached mentions. 
• Have a detailed insight into other businesses’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as users’ experience with competition’s products or services. Learning from someone else’s mistakes can be extremely beneficial, the same goes for motivation in attaining excellence. 

Identify and work with influencers

Media monitoring is a great tool if your company is taking into consideration working with social media celebrities. Nowadays, their role is much more serious than ever — macro- and mega-influencers have the power to sky-rocket a company or crumble it to dust using just a few posts and a hashtag.

Choosing the right person (or account in that case) is a crucial part of modern online marketing. Many media monitoring tools provide information regarding the most popular and frequently mentioned SM accounts, including networks like Instagram, Twitter or Reddit. It can allow the finance industry to filter potential associates to collaborate with that are suitable for this role. As it is now, social media influencers become the faces of the companies they represent — it is very important to do proper market research before submitting a collaboration proposal.

What’s fascinating, the area of products and services influencers promote is constantly growing. Just a few years ago, these people were able to advertise items of clothing or beauty products at their best. Now, brands from every side of the business are eager to work together with influencers, as they truly set trends and have a real impact on consumers’ behavior. A challenging part of finding collaborations with social media celebrities is the fact that the finance industry is limited due to strict regulations. Many brands are unenthusiastic with the idea of being out of the line. Still, social media holds great power and potential of growth for every business, no matter how strictly regulated it may be. 

Make sure your product is ready for launch

Media monitoring can help your business during the exciting but stressful time of important company events such as launching a new product. If your company needs to gauge the size of a marketing campaign prepared exclusively for the launch, using the available reports from media monitoring tools will do the job perfectly. The first 48 hours after entering a new product are the most crucial — that’s the time when analyzing your company’s mentions on social media tends to get the most chaotic. To keep things from getting out of hand too quickly it is advised to set alerts and monitor queries accordingly, as they are updated in real-time.

For marketing and PR specialists, it is important to draw conclusions from the launch media monitoring. For instance, understanding how social media platforms respond to the latest announcements and where exactly it got the most attention — was it a positive or a negative response? Where the discussions were the most heated, Twitter or Reddit? This kind of information helps in better marketing development and successful launches in the future.