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How Will Leading Agencies Use Meltwater In 2024?


Jess Smith

Dec 21, 2023

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Meltwater works with over 30,000 agency and brand clients all over the world. Operating in many diverse markets gives us unique insight into the challenges marketing agencies like yours face when it comes to staying agile and demonstrating results. Leading agencies are using Meltwater to address these challenges with ease. Together, we can explore how these agencies are transforming their efforts and proving their value thanks to the power of technology and insight.

Our aim is to provide a single source of truth for your agency as well as your clients.

Table of contents

Tip: Learn how to hire a marketing agency.

Agency Brand Management with Meltwater

We understand that branding is about so much more than just the brand. It is a complex discipline which comprises your social footprint, pre-planned designs, concepts and products. It can be easy to create a brand, but building that brand takes time and commitment. In the same breathe, agencies and in-house teams alike are required to quantify results and every client has their own preferences or objectives in terms of KPIs. Without the right tools, it can be resource intensive, but in the end, the dedication to your brand is paramount, because a company can only build and maintain an emotional relationship with the customer through branding.

Agency clients use Meltwater to measure and monitor brand performance, by creating custom searches - including media exposure, sentiment, and potential reach. With Meltwater, making sense of the data is simplified with the provision of clear and centralised dashboards and presentation-ready reports. This enables our clients to understand their brand's impact in real-time, while making use of interactive visual dashboards and analysing the metrics that matter.

Did you know? Now there are also TikTok scheduling tools available!

Another crucial aspect of brand management involves benchmarking against competitors or peers in the market place. So, how do you discover which competitors are gaining traction across news and social media channels? Let's take a look...

3 agency quotes

Campaign Tracking for Agencies

It isn't always easy to validate the cost of a campaign, however, agencies can demonstrate performance by getting down to the cold, hard facts. Collect accurate data in real-time, tally your wins for clients and create more in-depth strategies. 

How do you validate the cost of a campaign? Return on Investment (ROI). Those three letters can sometimes feel illusive when you're working on multiple projects with different clients. That being said, Meltwater can help you centralise your information in one place enabling you to monitor and track a campaign from beginning to end and analyse the results within the platform collaboratively.

Analyse to optimise - our clients use campaign tracking as a crucial tool when it comes to adapting their strategic thinking; digging deep to draw meaningful insights that formulate new ideas and facilitate more meaningful proposals.

Campaign tracking also helps you justify spend or increased budget requests and prove that your work is (quite literally) paying off.

Monitoring ROI - simplified:

  • Attribute the value of your earned media to revenue
  • Determine whether you're meeting your core goals and KPIs
  • Monitor and analyse traffic, leads and conversions
  • Use Custom Scoring to determine the quality of mentions
  • Plug into a CRM to customise and track your user's experience.
  • Compare channel performance to determine where your energy and resources are most effective.

Influencer Marketing and Management for Your Clients

As influencer marketing becomes more popular, not just for B2C but B2B, NGOs and Direct To Consumer (DTC) organisations, it’s important to have a robust system in place that allows you to find, vet, contact and manage influencers.

Social media influencers can help spread your message to a wider audience online, adding a level of authenticity that can only come from the endorsement of a trusted third party. The best influencers spend years building up organic audiences which trust their recommendations, and they can give brands a significant performance boost through well-planned partnerships.

But influencer marketing is hard to get right, and there are a lot of pitfalls for marketers who aren't adequately prepared to navigate this evolving landscape. With an explosion of social media influencers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other social platforms, it can be difficult to find the right creators to work with, and to manage those relationships.

Meltwater helps clients build an influencer marketing hub for your brand that streamlines the entire process and helps you increase ROI from influencer partnerships. Plus, it makes managing your campaigns more productive (as an agency and for clients).

  • Find the best influencers that align with your objectives and brand
  • Use our powerful analytics to build an influencer marketing strategy
  • Streamline influencer campaign management with a purpose-built CRM platform 
  • Automate reporting and analytics to track ROI.

Whatever industry you’re in, our influencer tool can help you pinpoint the most influential voices in the space and verify that their audiences are genuine, so you never have to worry about wasting time with fakers.

The filters help you focus your search on topics, regions, and channels while audience demographics can help you target the right audiences through influence.

And it’s not just for superstar-influencers with a global footprint. We know that specific brands gain more value from partnering with highly targeted micro-influencers, covering niches that are specifically relevant to targeted interests. Whoever you want to work with, we’ll help you find them.

The wrong relationship can be highly damaging to your brand, so it’s essential to thoroughly vet potential influencer partners to be sure they’re right for what you're trying to achieve. Our algorithms give you a complete picture of the influencers you're thinking of partnering with.

With this level of in-depth understanding, you'll be able to recruit a comprehensive network of brand advocates who can share your message with their networks. This will enable you to reach an even wider audience to increase brand recognition and, engagement on your social channels and, ultimately, make a positive impact on the bottom line.

Illustration von Menschen, die aus einem Smartphone laufen mit Megafon. Influencer Marketing Trend.

Social Listening For Agencies

Every day, billions of conversations take place on social media: in tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and more.

Whatever business you’re in, a portion of those discussions are directly related to your offering. The internet is full of people talking about your brand, competitors, the industry you work in, the problems you could help them with, and many other topics that could provide valuable insights for your organisation. And, if they are speaking about your brand specifically, they're still taking part in conversations that have do do with your industry, representing potential.

But how do you find and make sense of those insights, when they’re buried under a rapidly growing mountain of social media data?

This is what social listening tools are for. They search social media for you and sift through those huge volumes of social data to extract what's relevant to you by filtering specific words and phrases, such as your brand name or related topics.

This produces a smaller, more manageable dataset, which can then be analysed to provide useful insights.

And this relevance goes beyond social media marketing. Any company can benefit from a social listening strategy, as it will help you to better understand your potential customers and create data-driven marketing campaigns that align with your business goals.

If you’re not paying attention, you’re missing opportunities.

Whenever somebody mentions your brand on social media, or talks about a topic that’s important to your business, you should know about it. Meltwater offers the industry’s most comprehensive social listening platform, so you can be sure you never miss a relevant mention. Our tool scours data feeds from:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Reddit
  • Twitch
  • Pinterest
  • Blogs
  • Discussion Forums
  • Podcasts
  • Online News
  • Consumer Reviews Sites

Meltwater gives you unlimited keyword search capability with no cap on result volumes. What does this mean? You can search for as many different keywords, brand names or hashtags as you like and you won’t be billed extra - no matter how many results those searches produce.

This is great news for agencies who want to grow their client-base without growing their costs, and for in-house teams that need to carry out a number of social media research tasks, and try out different ideas, while keeping the budget under control. Our social media monitoring platform gives digital marketing professionals everything they need to effectively protect and grow their brands.

But it’s not just about what’s happening right now. To get a truly meaningful understanding of any topic, you can use Meltwater to search a 15-month archive of social data, including the full Twitter Firehose. This allows you to analyse historical patterns and perform year-on-year comparisons of key metrics.

  • Spot new consumer trends in real-time
  • Uncover untapped opportunities
  • Build campaigns on solid data
  • Benchmark previous campaigns

With such a significant source of social data at your fingertips, there’s absolutely nothing you can’t learn. Build your query with our powerful Boolean search tool, and then dive into the data using the industry’s best analytics tools, to discover the hidden insights that will power your next marketing campaign, or inspire your next agency proposal.

Social listening dashboard with data in a pie chart and line graph

Competitive Intelligence for Agencies

In the digital world, data can help you generate new leads, gain brand credibility and reach new audiences - giving you the competitive edge. Our clients use Meltwater to stay ahead of the competition with insider insight into the strategies and performance of brands on their watch-list. 

The best way to generate new leads is to understand if your competitors are outsmarting you and where your brand is shining. Make sure you identify threats before they become a crisis and make the most of new opportunities.

By monitoring conversations about competitor brands, you can understand what their audience’s key pain points are and identify opportunities where you could step in and help. It also gives you a wholistic view of the marketplace and where you stand in terms of share of voice.

If you don’t have a standardised system for reporting on competitive research, it can be difficult to evaluate and report your findings. Meltwater’s benchmark reports allow you to create customisable dashboards to start understanding the competitive landscape in detail. Find overlapping content and audiences, view relevant conversations and understand how much clout you truly have. In the platform you can:

  • Create dashboards and benchmark against competitors
  • Plan strategic experiments, based on current data
  • Translate results into reports - in seconds
  • Find out which brands in your industry are your biggest competition.

Consumer Research for Agencies

Getting into the hearts and minds of your consumers is no easy feat - unless you have the right tools for the job. With Meltwater, you can identify user wants, needs and behaviours, and create exciting strategies and reports to inspire new campaigns for your clients. 

When looking at consumers, as marketers, we tend to gravitate towards creating personas often with a lot of guess-work on their age, interests and demographics. However, by monitoring social conversations you get rich insights into the different segments and communities across social media.

A key aspect of audience ‘feeling’ is sentiment. Sentiment is a metric, which was designed to provide helpful insights into how audiences feel about and perceive a brand (brand perception), particularly on social media platforms and in editorial news media. This marketing metric is used to help brands manage and protect their reputation, while staying abreast of their performance in the online environment:

  • Monitor unlimited keywords across all channels
  • Use Audience Analytics to make informed decisions about new campaigns
  • Research and listen to more than 200 billion social conversations.

The sheer volume of data available to agencies online can be a hinderance when it comes to truly understanding your market. With Meltwater, we help you distil that data into relevant and manageable bites that add real value to your research.

  • Draw refined insights from large data samples
  • Merge qualitative and quantitative insights for a holistic overview
  • Get unlimited ad-hoc searches to help you continuously refine your findings. 

We recently published an article dedicated to using Meltwater as a research tool for agencies, check it out.

Laptop open on a blue background with many profiles displayed above

Reporting for Agencies

A key element of the Meltwater platform is the reporting function. Many marketing, PR and communications teams have little resource to dedicate to the in-depth reporting that some client accounts need. Reporting is often comprised of many excel docs and pivot tables and causes a massive headache for those trying to demonstrate campaign success and coverage. The beauty of the reporting tool is that we've done the hard work for you. You can choose which metrics you want to analyse and the reports provide you with real-time insights that can be shared instantly.

Whatever your requirements, our suite of reporting tools will showcase the value and impact of your work. We have a wide range of reporting capabilities: 

Not forgetting internal stakeholders who need communications around coverage and campaign success. You can tailor reports for internal communication and share information:

  • Share company media mentions
  • Showcase positive brand exposure to investors, customers, employees, and executives
  • Stream customer testimonials from social media
  • Provide commentary on key stories to executives
  • Compile market and competitor debriefs

Press Release Distribution for Agencies

Struggling to create awareness around important announcements? You're not alone. Creating engaging content is one thing but getting it in front of audiences that care is another.

Once a press release is written, here comes the hard part, actually getting the right people to read and publish it. This is where a press release distribution service comes in handy.

The Meltwater Newswire Distribution tool is a press release distribution service integrated into Meltwater's media intelligence platform, giving PR teams the luxury of broadly distributing press releases to websites and media outlets whenever they'd like, whether it's in real-time or scheduled.

This type of distribution takes a press release and puts it 'on the wire', an electronically transmitted service providing up-to-the-minute media content to news desks and journalists. With over 100 newslines to choose from, this tool helps you gain targeted, guaranteed PR coverage.

The tool does the heavy lifting for you and helps you spread your message to as wide an audience as you wish, whether that means targeting local, national or global audiences. This particular form of press release distribution includes print and broadcast outlets, online sites, databases and your choice of industry trade publications.

Tip: Take a look at the most popular US magazines, the largest US newspapers, and the state of print media in South Africa.

One of the key problems with getting your press release read is that it can often end up the recipients spam folder or a generalised mailbox (e.g. hello@newspaper.com) this tool helps eliminate the problem by allowing you to personalise outreach and get in front of targeted journalists, social media users with a large reach, bloggers, and online audiences across social media who have expressed a clear interest in the subject of your release.

For example, this press release distribution service lets you search for PR contacts based on filters such as beat, role, or keywords in their recent articles. You can also build lists of PR contacts based on their interests, locations or tier, to make outreach easier in the future.

Not only do clients use the press release distribution service for outreach they also utilise it to analyse key press release metrics such as open and click through rates, reading time and new articles that are published as a result of your efforts.

Meltwater for Agencies

French marketing agency Brut discussing how they use Meltwater.

Case study Brut x Meltwater

If you want to find out how Meltwater can support your agency and clients, fill out the form below and our team will be happy to discuss your needs, as well as potential solutions.

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