Traditionally, the media monitoring industry has been offering local monitoring only. They claim that media monitoring is a local business, while international press cutting being expensive and requiring multiple external vendors. However, our experience shows that clients want it differently – they turn towards international online monitoring offerings for several reasons:
Reason No.1. Their business depends more on international relations – be it international competitors or international vendors. News about these – such as M&A, innovation and product launches is a key to understand upcoming changes even in the local market as well as to their ability to compete locally. Some call it market intelligence – others include it as part of their complete media monitoring programme.
Reason No.2. Most businesses operate across borders – either because their clients need their services in several countries or because they have started exporting and have an international strategy. Due to this, they need cost-efficient monitoring in multiple countries – available to the local branch offices as well as to the HQ.
Reason No.3. PR-offices need to benchmark brand coverage – and monitoring the coverage of competing brands locally as well as internationally gives valuable indexes for benchmarking.
Reason No.4. Online monitoring of international markets has become cheap and accessible, making it possible to test out new ways of using international monitoring.
Reason No.5. PR-offices act as the media and monitoring experts of their respective organisations. If they limit their monitoring to local markets only – they leave to other parts of the organisation to go externally for international monitoring (for market intelligence, sales intelligence and industry overview).
We have created a special offer to assist PR offices looking for innovative use of online monitoring within the organization. We believe this can strengthen the PR-offices’ position and credibility, as their expertise can be used more widely and budgets may be increased or even be sponsored by other divisions.