Every day, journalists write about organisations: their products, their people, their decisions. Media monitoring collects those mentions and reports back on how often an organisation was covered, where, and in what light. But a monthly tally of mentions, outlets and sentiment scores only records what was said. It doesn’t tell a leadership team what it meant for their business.
A media analysis report should make that connection. It connects the figures to the things a business cares about: whether awareness grew, whether reputation remained constant or shifted, and whether the audiences the organisation is trying to reach noticed at all.
To determine whether a media report is doing its job, businesses should ask four questions:
- If our coverage doubled tomorrow, what would change for the business?
More coverage tells you that the organisation appeared in the media more often. It does not tell you whether more of the right people became aware of your organisation, or whether the additional coverage changed anything beyond the number of mentions.
- Did our key messages reach the audiences we care about?
Coverage can be extensive yet still fail to convey the organisation’s intended story. A coherently conveyed message that resonates with the correct audience, helps expose that gap.
A good report should show whether priority messages appeared consistently and where they gained traction. It should also help a communications team see whether the narrative being reported is the one it was trying to establish. That provides a leadership team with data that informs business strategic business decisions and not just another piece of coverage.
- Can we connect media results to reputation, trust, or stakeholder decisions?
Sentiment and tone become more useful when they are tracked over time. One month of negative coverage may reflect a short-lived issue. A pattern that persists across several reporting periods suggests something different about how the organisation is being portrayed.
Share of voice adds competitive context. Issue and narrative tracking can also show when a concern is gathering momentum before it becomes an issue that is harder to manage.
None of these measures proves a business outcome on its own. The connection becomes stronger when media data is read alongside evidence of what changed beyond the coverage itself, because those outcomes also need to be measured.
- Are we measuring both reach and resonance?
Reach is an estimate of how many people a piece of coverage could have been seen by, based on the readership, viewership or listenership of the outlet that carried it. It measures potential audience, not the people who actually read, watched or listened.
That is why a large reach figure never tells the whole story. I also want to know where it came from and which audiences it was likely to reach, because a big number can hide the fact that the story meant very little to the people the organisation most needed to reach.
Message pull-through asks a different question: did the organisation’s own messages make it into the coverage? Being mentioned is not the same as being understood. Pull-through shows whether what the organisation wanted to say was carried into the story, or whether the coverage was framed around something else entirely.
At Novus Group, this is the distinction we try to keep in view when analysing media performance. Established media metrics remain essential. Without accurate and consistent monitoring across print, broadcast, online, and social media, there is no reliable foundation for the analysis that follows. The analysis should connect those results back to what the organisation is trying to achieve.
A strong media report should show what happened in the media and help leadership understand what those findings may mean for their business. That might be a shift in reputation or an emerging issue that needs attention. It could also show whether a priority message is gaining ground with the people the organisation needs to reach.
When those connections are visible, communications teams have a stronger basis for showing the value of their work and deciding where to focus next.
By Khathutshelo Rammela, Senior Analyst at Novus Group