How To Use Social Media Monitoring Tools To Gauge Offline Marketing Efforts

It often seems like a rare occasion when offline marketing efforts blend with social media. One of the best ways to use social media to aid offline efforts is to gauge the public’s perception with social media monitoring tools. By using monitoring tools, companies can monitor public opinion about a specific offline campaign.

Probably one of the most publicized efforts to gauge offline marketing with social media monitoring was Brand Bowl 2010. Here we saw Mullen and monitoring powerhouse Radian6 teamed up to monitor the public’s response to Super Bowl ads in real time. While this example was done more as a publicity stunt in its own right, its not far off from how you might want to run your monitoring campaigns internally.

5 Tips to gauge offline marketing

1. Prepare your monitoring campaigns way in advance to your offline campaigns beginning. Not only will you be prepared to start monitoring as soon as the campaign has begun, but you will also be able to monitor any buzz that is being generated leading up to launch.




2. Pick your monitoring keywords carefully. You don’t want to only monitor for your base brand names. Doing so may make it difficult to filter through regular dialog about your brand and dialogue specifically to your campaign. Consider monitoring catch phrases that appear in the campaign. If the campaign is humorous, monitor social sites for the “punchline”. If you are using content sharing sites like YouTube or Flickr with your offline efforts, try monitoring for the URLs that your content is at. Having your own URL shortener can help with this.




3. Use boolean operators such as AND and OR to mix campaign specific key terms with the medium that your campaign is utilizing. For example if you are using print media, you can combine the names of the publications you are targeting and campaign terms.




4. Pick a monitoring tool that indexes mentions at a high frequency. Knowing exactly when users are talking about your offline efforts is crucial. Having this type of data on hand can help not only gauge how the public talks about your campaign but also during what times of the day/week your campaign is most successful.




5. Pick a monitoring tool that includes sentiment analysis. Be wary of automated sentiment analysis and try to pick a platform that easily facilitates manual sentiment analysis. Understanding the overall public sentiment is extremely important. Remember even campaigns that people hate get tons of traffic, so understanding sentiment is a must when monitoring any offline campaign.

Using social media monitoring tools can aid in offline marketing tactics by gauging the public’s opinion and response. Overtime, combining data from previous campaigns can reveal trends and expose many of the caveats missed with traditional media.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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Joe Hall