Succeeding in digital monitoring in 2021

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Author : ROMAN3D,

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MARKETING

Digital monitoring is a major element of any strategy. We deemed it essential to present its multiple benefits to you.

Digital monitoring is a major element of any online business strategy. In 2021, it is absolutely essential to use it. When a company decides to go digital, it usually starts by creating a website or establishing a presence on social networks related to its activity. Once these steps are taken, only 60% of companies that have made the digital transition regularly update the platforms they have created. And among them, only a tiny minority (less than 5% of the total) organizes digital monitoring. Faced with such a discrepancy, we deemed it essential to present to you the multiple benefits of this online surveillance.

What is Digital Monitoring ?

Have you never heard of digital monitoring ? As mentioned in the introduction, you are far from being the only one. We will therefore explain in detail what it is by first discussing the principle of this operation, and then the applications related to it.

Principle of digital monitoring

Digital monitoring consists of the action of monitoring web content that concerns a specific subject. This is the basic definition. However, depending on the situations, digital monitoring can be expanded. For example, the same monitoring can cover several subjects. As a company, for instance, it is quite natural that you monitor digital innovations concerning your competitors. But it is also interesting to be aware of everything that affects your online reputation (this is called e-reputation). Your digital monitoring will therefore cover two different themes, yet very related.

On the other hand, if you are a shareholder in two companies and you monitor the news concerning them, these are indeed two completely different monitoring activities as they are focused on diametrically opposed subjects.

Multiple applications of digital monitoring

We have begun to see in the previous paragraph that digital surveillance could take several forms and often concerned multiple subjects. Let’s look concretely at what types of monitoring exist.

Competitive intelligence

Competitive monitoring is the most classic, it’s the one that concerns companies in the same market as you. You look at what your professional adversaries are doing online. In our globalized era, competitive digital monitoring is particularly practical. Because, before the digital age, we were not able to take an in-depth and continuous interest in our competitors located on the other side of the planet. This is one of the major importances of competitive monitoring: you can easily observe what is practiced in your sector in all countries of the world. It’s an opportunity to draw inspiration from your adversaries. Digital monitoring has allowed for increased dissemination of innovations on a global scale. Previously, it was impossible to obtain information through traditional media about the news of an American SME that was not particularly well-known. Only certain local (American) media, very difficult to obtain in Europe, mentioned these innovations. Now, you just need to connect to its website to get information about this company that is nothing extraordinary for the whole world, but which interests you because you operate in the same niche.

Technological intelligence

Digital technology monitoring consists of tracking all information that appears online about a specific concept. If you are an innovative company distributing Japanese-designed automatic watches, it’s interesting for you to follow news about Japanese watchmaking. It’s even essential in the long term for the survival of your business. Before the digital era, there were specialized magazines that talked about watches, for example. And in these publications, one could occasionally read news concerning automatic watches from the Land of the Rising Sun. However, this was not exhaustive, and the cost of this information was not negligible. Today, information is much more financially accessible. Why? Because with digital technology, information is also more easily disseminated, and much more widely than before. The competition for technological improvement is therefore increased since many people have access to the latest advancements. This means that the need for digital monitoring is more important today than classical information monitoring from before the digital era.

e-reputation monitoring

After monitoring your competitors and the technologies that interest you, all that’s left is to monitor yourself. This is the third cardinal digital monitoring: your online reputation, a concept known as e-reputation.

Digital monitoring allows you to track everything that is said about you on websites, social networks, and all types of web pages. Thus, you can monitor your professional environment at 360 degrees. Without digital monitoring, in the time of paper information, it was possible to miss a press clipping that mentioned your company. With digital technology, the number of media outlets has exploded. Therefore, mathematically, the probability that an article appears concerning your company is multiplied. E-reputation digital monitoring today thus represents a key challenge for your company. Especially since, thanks to monitoring, you will be quickly informed. It will therefore also be much easier to respond and react to this information that mentions you.

Other types of monitoring

We have presented to you the three types of essential digital monitoring : the one that concerns you, the one that concerns your competitors, and the one that touches your expertise. Nevertheless, there are other types of monitoring that we won’t expand on but which may be of interest in the context of your activities :

Sector monitoring : it consists of monitoring an entire segment of the economy. In a way, it can be considered as an extended technological monitoring.
Legal monitoring : you monitor, thanks to the online publication of new laws, court decisions, and legal doctrine, if new elements are changing the legislation in your sector.
Real estate monitoring : you monitor online if premises that correspond to what you’re looking for your company become available. This is a very specific monitoring, which is not useful every day but can really help you out. If you have already found a property through non-digital means, digital technology can help you verify if the price per square meter offered is consistent with the geographical area and type of property.
Employer monitoring or HR monitoring: this is monitoring that focuses on certain websites specialized in job offers and applications, as well as on professional social networks. You can know if profiles that interest you are available, for example.

There are still other types of digital monitoring, but we prefer to focus on the essentials. After presenting the subject, let’s now address the critical importance of digital monitoring nowadays.

Why is Digital Monitoring Crucial ?

The web has made the ordinary visible on a global scale. Previously, a person living in country X could only know the extraordinary information from country Y, that which, theoretically, interested the greatest number of people.

For a person in country X, under certain conditions and through certain transmission channels (word of mouth, for example), it was possible to obtain ordinary information of interest to us concerning the same country X. The only opportunities to learn non-mediatized information from one country to another were international trade shows and conferences, which occurred at most once a year per profession.

The zero marginal cost of digital information

The web has significantly reduced the cost of information. Previously, printing a newspaper was only profitable in runs of several thousand copies. An audience was needed, which wasn’t always guaranteed. Producing information was therefore a financial risk. The internet allows for the production and dissemination of information with zero marginal cost: you pay for website hosting, and at most, you pay someone to create the content. But you don’t pay based on the number of visits. Whether our website is read by one person or two million, the cost will be the same (whereas each printed newspaper cost money to produce).

Limitations of digital monitoring

Nevertheless, digital monitoring doesn’t do everything. There are still sources of information in the twenty-first century that are not digital. They are physical (in paper format) or human (information transmitted orally only, in a business intelligence logic) in most cases. We therefore recommend integrating your digital monitoring into a more comprehensive surveillance process that covers all your marketing actions, simply called marketing monitoring.

To learn more about” marketing monitoring”, we invite you to read our article :

Marketing intelligence : an essential process !

acceleration of digitalization processes

Initially embryonic, digitalization accelerated throughout the 1990s and 2000s. More and more companies decided to create their website to present their services and history, called a “showcase site“. As the number of websites increases, the importance of digital monitoring grows. The more information the Internet contains, the more you will need digital monitoring.

The 2010s brought new developments concerning the Internet, which increased the importance of targeted digital surveillance.

Web 2.0 and the multiplication of media

Interactive Web : the Internet user becomes the judge

The 2010s were the decade of the birth and exponential development of Web 2.0. So, what is it ? Since then, the internet user is no longer just a reader who will be content with reading a showcase site. They are also an actor. They can give their opinion thanks to the very principle of social networks. But they can also promote themselves in search engines, or write on sites that willingly give space to internet users. This is the case, for example, with “Tripadvisor“, which highlights individual experiences in tourist destinations rather than expert opinions.

From now on, the internet user becomes a judge with enormous power. They will be able to cause significant damage to your company with a negative comment about you. Thus, in a context where the weight of each individual becomes exponential, digital monitoring is essential. It will allow you to quickly identify such comments and limit their importance by treating them appropriately.

If you opt for a laissez-faire strategy (consciously or unconsciously), and don’t take the time to respond individually to each public comment, your brand will lose credibility. In an era where e-commerce is booming, looking for a review on the Internet has become a standard practice before starting a purchasing process. By allowing streams of pejorative expressions about you to appear, you’re abandoning a significant part of your turnover.

Technical and pricing democratization of digital technology

Moreover, the costs associated with hosting and domain name purchases have become completely democratized. Until the end of the 2000s, creating your own website was reserved for specialists and digital agencies. Today, all-in-one sites allow novices to create their site in just a few clicks, with domain name purchase, hosting, and database creation via a CMS. To understand the rise of websites, it’s important to know what a CMS is: it’s software that facilitates the technical design of Internet pages. Before the existence of these tools (WordPress and Wix for example, to name just the market leaders), project owners had to create their website with lines of code, incomprehensible to those who are not web developers.

Thus, digital technology has become accessible to everyone. Every French company, including micro-enterprises, has the technical and financial means to have a digital presence. Either with their own website or on social media. Each site and each social media account can be considered as a medium in its own right. Therefore, faced with the multiplication of existing media, content has necessarily increased in quantity. Digital monitoring becomes really necessary in such a context because your company will inevitably be mentioned somewhere.

Digital monitoring and digital strategy

In this last part, we explain how to technically carry out digital monitoring. We will then see how to integrate digital monitoring into a broader strategic approach.

Technically carrying out monitoring in 2021

Nevertheless, the principle of search engines, and Google primarily, allows for automated digital monitoring. So, how do you do it ? First, every day, Google indexes thousands of new web pages that have been created in the preceding days. So, if you set up an alert (via Google Alerts for example) for the keywords that interest you, you will receive an email as soon as a web page including the keyword you’re interested in is found, with a link to the page in question. However, be careful with the semantics you use: Google understands differently : “web page” and web page. In the first case, you will receive an alert for all new results containing the expression “web page”. On the other hand, if you set an alert for web page, you will receive too many alerts. Since you will be sent all links to results including the word “page”, or the word “web”.

To conclude, no strategy without monitoring and no monitoring without action

So, we have presented what digital monitoring is, the usefulness of such an action. But we haven’t explained how to incorporate it into your business processes. Therefore, thanks to our solid experience, we are able to advise you on how to use the results of your monitoring in your business strategy (in terms of marketing, sales, research and development). On the other hand, your entrepreneurial strategy is constantly adjusted based on the results of your digital monitoring : it is enriched by this approach. And, it’s the practice of “Test & Learn“, widely used in startups and which allows for rapid progress in your business project.