How Agencies Leverage Readership (vs In-house Comms Teams)

Memo is used to help brands measure impact, inform media strategy, and make decisions in a crisis through readership (unique visitors to articles). Agencies can play a big role when it comes to the media strategy piece. In fact, 80% of large agency comms pros either help develop and/or execute a media strategy in a crisis for the brands they represent.

With traditional media monitoring services used for tracking coverage and media list building, it can sometimes stop people in their tracks when we say that agencies aren’t our typical customer. I get asked all the time, “What’s the difference between agency and in-house Memo use cases?” There’s two major distinctions. I’ll lay them out here.

Readership can measure impact through several dimensions, most unrelated to agency performance.

While readership-driven media strategies help in-house comms teams and agencies alike, sometimes campaigns start well before press are considered. Measuring how many read coverage about a brand and comparing it to others in its industry is just one piece of the pie.

We see our customers frequently tagging and analyzing coverage in ways that are unique to their internal team:

1. Tagging coverage by team name to measure team output and performance
2. Comparing brand readership to industry benchmarks to inform paid media strategies
3. Examining industry messaging and coverage of special projects (like ESG efforts)
4. Looking at readership during product development to prioritize features and consider leaking updates to press

…to name a few.

Readership is an advisor to leadership, frequently spotlighting when a crisis is no crisis at all.

In times of crisis, sometimes the biggest debates are internal–whether something is a crisis or not, whether the brand should respond or not, how the brand should respond, etc. Most agency comms pros get looped into a crisis when their in-house counterpart knows they need to develop a plan. There are so many conversations that happen before that point, and that’s where readership comes into play.

Here are the most common ways our customers lean on readership early in crisis situations:

1. When they know a hit piece is coming, they can estimate readership for similar coverage in the same publication, compare that to their own typical readership, and start setting expectations internally
2. When leadership wants to respond to negative coverage, our customers frequently look at readership and use data to back up their gut. If no one is actually reading the negative coverage, you can do more harm to the brand by drawing attention to it. Much of the time, the best course of action is to do nothing.
3. On the flip side, readership can also signal a crisis. It’s a more reliable indicator of a crisis than social media. If people are reading about negative news, it becomes pretty clear, quickly, when a brand needs to respond. Just listening to social media can leave brands consumed by the sound of one hand clapping and cause brands to overlook crises like product recalls that attract tremendous readership and very little social chatter.

TL;DR

Readership is incredibly powerful when it comes to creating data-driven media strategies across agency and in-house comms teams. But, that’s a small fraction of the insights our customers leverage to make decisions before getting on the phone with their agency. While Memo doesn’t sell an agency-specific product, we do work with data-driven agencies that share their dashboard with their client (we offer unlimited seats!) and see customers grant access to their agency partners.