As it stands today, most of your customers and competitors are online. So, a bulk of competitor analysis can be done through competitive media monitoring. 

This is especially true given the ongoing changes we’re witnessing in:

• Customer behaviors: According to a McKinsey study, the COVID-19 pandemic changed customer lifestyles and how they research and buy products or consume content. By tracking competitors, we can see what audiences care about and how their habits have shifted.
• Technology and tools: Companies use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools to produce consumer-facing content such as images, blog posts, and videos. Seeing how competitors leverage these solutions helps us understand what works and where we might fall behind. 
• Market landscape: More tools are now available for different use cases than ever before, making it easier to track each competitor’s activity across various platforms. 

All of this makes competitive media monitoring more critical than ever. If you’re not paying attention, you might miss the trends, tools, and tactics quietly reshaping the market.

So, in this blog, we’re uncovering why competitive media monitoring matters, how to create a media monitoring strategy, best practices to apply, and some case studies to get inspired.

Why Competitive Media Monitoring Matters

Simply put: Competitive media monitoring helps you stand apart from the competition. And the reason why it matters today more than ever is because:

• Most branded media communication happens online. Researching competitors helps you understand how your target audience responds to message A vs message B. 
• Real-time insights and advanced tools help you track and respond to every competitor activity. 
• Aside from gathering information on competitors and helping you make strategic decisions, it also assists in creating a unique brand presence and increasing your share of voice. 
• All the big brands are doing it (and your competitors are probably doing it, too). – More on this later.  

Competitive intelligence helps you understand your target audience, elevate your marketing strategy, and provide valuable insights into customer sentiments and industry trends. This helps you improve your customer experience.

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Increasing Volume and Fragmentation of Media Channels 

In the past few years, we’ve noticed that media channels (be it social platforms, online news outlets, podcasts, blogs, or newsletters) are continually growing at an unprecedented pace. What this means is it’s getting more difficult to keep track of brand mentions and competitor activities. 

This is where competitive media monitoring tools can help, unifying your unfragmented data. For example, Agility’s PR tool can help you track competitor mentions, get an overview of their customer sentiment analysis, and receive real-time insights on their recent surges and coverage.

The Role of AI in Staying Ahead

GenAI solutions and advanced analytics help you leverage data more efficiently. They can also speed up the monitoring process and sort/categorize data more efficiently.

Most media monitoring tools have AI assistance built in, giving you actionable insights into your competitors’ activities, social media performance, audience sentiments, etc.

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Core Components of a Successful Competitive Media Monitoring Strategy

In this section, we’re looking at the four steps you need to have to create a successful media monitoring strategy — starting from goat-setting and ending with creating a consistent schedule. Using this blueprint, you can tailor a strategy for your organization accordingly.

1) Setting Clear Objectives and KPIs

First things first — for any media monitoring strategy to succeed, you’ll need to lay down certain objectives and goals for why you’re undertaking this strategy. 

For example, your goal could be to:

• Track competitor sentiment
• Understand how they manage their public crisis
• Identify emerging trends 
• Measure their share of voice (and compare it against your own)

The more you’re specific about your goals, the better you’ll be able to guide your strategy. In most instances, media monitoring solutions will ask you to create a search within certain parameters (e.g., keywords, data sources, location, etc.), and you’ll need to have a definitive goal in mind to provide them with the right answers. 

Here’s an example when creating a “New Search” using Agility and you’re asked to enter keywords:

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2) Selecting the Right Tools and Platforms

Next up, you’ll need to identify the online media monitoring tools to undertake your strategy. For reference, we’d recommend using a monitoring solution that has the following capabilities:

• Automated alerts 
• AI-driven summaries and reports
• Integration with PR workflows
• Understanding of user sentiments, context, and defined criteria 
• Reports with competitive insights to help you make informed decisions

With Agility, you get an all-in-one platform that offers all these features. For example, the tool can:

• Send you coverage alerts: You receive automated news alerts that meet your pre-defined criteria. You also get notified when there’s a sudden change in how people talk about your story – This allows you to react quickly and address issues immediately.
• Generate AI-driven summaries and reports: Leverage advanced AI to distil vast media coverage into concise, actionable insights (and recommendations), saving you time while ensuring you never miss key trends.
• Integrate with your PR workflows: Agility’s tool can integrate with other tools, such as Jira so that you can address different aspects of your PR campaign. This allows for structured workflow management. 
• Analyze user sentiment: Go beyond surface-level metrics to understand the emotions and context behind the coverage so you know what’s being said and why it matters.

Here’s what Agility’s analytics dashboard looks like:

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Integrating Advanced AI Capabilities

While most communication professionals might not think of AI-driven features to be an absolute necessity when it comes to shortlisting competitor monitoring tools, we’d highly recommend you look for such features because:

• They can enhance data accuracy by sifting through millions of data points and sources and help act faster.
• They’ll make your life easier — imagine using AI for summary reports when you have multiple clients or to provide predictive analytics by keeping historical data insights in mind. 

3) Identifying and Prioritizing Key Competitors

You can often shortlist your key competition based on:

• Whether they’re direct competitors or others (indirect, emerging, aspirational, etc.)
• The kind of industry and target audience they cater to
• What their business size and operations look like

In other instances, your audience might just point out the competition to you by stating that they either buy from your brand or competitor A or competitor B. (This is another reason why media monitoring is essential to your business: It helps you uncover social conversations like these happening online.)

As for how to prioritize competitors, you can keep the following considerations in mind:

• Their market share and growth rate
• Your audience overlap and their perception of them
• The kind of image they have in the industry (traditional vs. innovators)

4) Maintaining a Consistent Monitoring Schedule 

Last but not least, to ensure no critical coverage is missed and you reach your goals effectively, you’ll need to check in with your media monitoring tools consistently (e.g., real-time insights or periodic updates (daily/weekly) work). 

Aside from investing in proactive monitoring, we’d also recommend you set time aside from periodic deep dives — this will help you look at your data from a 360 angle and a zoomed-out, macro perspective. We recommend monthly or quarterly dives to understand all your competitors truly well. 

Side Note: To get more accurate results on your media monitoring strategy, another trick you can apply is increasing your Instagram followers count (as well as the follower count of other social media channels) through organic means. 

We say this because a larger audience provides more data for monitoring your competitors’ content strategies and audience interactions. This competitive edge allows you to adapt more effectively, refine your approach, and stay ahead in the ever-evolving social media landscape.

Using Data Insights to Inform PR Strategy in 2025

A lot goes into turning your reports into actionable insights such that you can either shape or alter your marketing strategy. In this section, we’ll discuss how to transform raw monitoring data into strategic actions that improve brand reputation, audience targeting, and overall PR outcomes.

Sentiment Analysis for Shaping Brand Messaging

Ever wondered what people really think when they hear your brand’s name? Sentiment analysis can tell you. 

AI-driven media monitoring tools analyze online conversations to detect whether the buzz is positive, negative, or neutral — this applies to finding how your target audience perceives your brand and your competitors.

For example, Samsung often leverages monitoring tools to find audience perceptions of their product and product launches. For data sources, it uses online reviews, media channels, surveys, etc. All of this helps Samsung improve product innovation, beat the competition, and get to the root of (product) issues quickly. 

For reference, you can use tools like Agility, which offers AI-powered insights and uses social conversations to understand your audience’s sentiments. 

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Once you have insights like these at your fingertips, refining your PR communication strategy and overall brand messaging becomes much easier. 

Spotting Emerging Trends Early

Media monitoring tools can often track emerging trends early because they have access to historical data and multiple data sources. This allows them to present predictive insights that can help you keep track of market shifts and consumer preferences ahead of time. 

For example, many fashion brands now use WGSN’s predictive analytics. These help users understand which colors, materials, and designs to focus on in the next few months.  

However, media monitoring tools might do the trick for PR and marketing companies. These can provide insights into changing trends and dive deep into social data to understand how your audience reacts to certain news and your brand’s public perception. 

For example, brands like Agility PR Solutions have custom reporting features that help you get answers quickly based on your desired parameters. 

Case Studies: Success through Competitive Media Monitoring

Before we quickly dive into further sections, let’s first take a look at the companies that have used competitive media monitoring to stay ahead in the brand-building game. 

Slack Refining Product Positioning

Slack didn’t just wake up one day and decide, “Let’s add huddles.” Nope. They paid attention to what:

• Competitors were doing
• Users complained about on social media
• Tech reviewers were raving about elsewhere.

It turns out that people didn’t want more apps or endless email threads. They wanted faster, easier ways to connect. So, Slack rolled out “Huddles” for quick, casual conversations and added workflow automation to handle the repetitive stuff.

According to many experts, before launching into the market, Slack also analyzed competitor messaging, realized a gap in the market, and positioned its offering in a “fun” way, so it could easily relate to its audience.

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Starbucks Adapting to Shifting Audience Sentiments

Starbucks also lives in a competitive coffee market where customer preferences are shifting daily. 

To stay on top of their customers’ minds, Starbucks leverages internal data as well as competitor data to monitor trends, like seasonal flavor preferences and sustainability efforts their customers support.

Due to this, Starbucks has identified a growing consumer interest in eco-friendly packages and plant-based menu items. This is also why you’ll see Starbucks investing in a plant-based menu and replacing plastic straws with paper ones. 

To promote its initiatives, Starbucks quickly updated its marketing strategy and created new ads. 

Best Practices for Refining Your Approach

Before we wrap up this piece, let’s identify the key best practices you should consider to refine your approach and strategy.

Auditing and Adjusting Regularly

We discussed this previously, but just to reiterate — try to periodically monitor your data, and adjust/audit your result to get accurate information. 

For example, adding new competitor names or adjusting keywords can help you keep track of the current market trends instead of the trends from yesteryear. You can also review and alter your metrics, goals, and data sources at this stage. 

Combining Automation with Human Expertise

Relying on AI-driven analytics is excellent, but true success lies in combining that information with human expertise, as only veteran PR/communication professionals know what works in the long run. 

They can consider human emotions, context, and nuance more accurately than any AI tool can. This is also why training your internal communications team on how to run these tools will get you the most efficient and reliable results. 

As an additional tip, many businesses struggle with scattered or missed media alerts, often due to using personal or generic emails. A domain email (e.g., yourname@yourcompany.com) ensures you receive critical competitor insights directly in your inbox without spam filters blocking key updates.

Final Thoughts

Competitive media monitoring isn’t just about watching competitors — it’s about staying ahead. With AI-driven tools, you can track market trends, analyze audience sentiment, and adapt your PR strategy in real-time. 

And as more media channels and influencers pop up online, combining AI with human expertise will become critical in the next few years. 

To futureproof your clients from any disasters (or to help them improve their brand-building game), PR professionals must start investing their time and energy to understand:

• How media monitoring tools work;
• How to get AI-backed insights from them; and
• How to turn the data it presents into a strategy. 

To get started, you can use resources from Agility PR Solutions — we have guides, templates, webinars, blogs, and much more to educate our readers.

Guillaume Deschamps

Guillaume is a digital marketer focused on handling the outreach strategy at uSERP and content management at Wordable. Outside of work, he enjoys his expat life in sunny Mexico, reading books, wandering around and catching the latest shows on TV.