Brands spend millions of dollars every year on marketing and advertising campaigns. But for many, the impact is hard to truly quantify.

Standard metrics – the number of mentions, impressions, and followers – are often as far as most go in terms of measurement. They are a good starting place but they’re not the metrics that generate truly actionable insights.

Companies need more, particularly at a time when brand reputation has never been more critical to the enterprise. Here are three ways to measure your brand’s media data for richer, more useful insights.

Prominence

In real  estate, it’s location, location, location. The same holds true for brand mentions within articles. It’s not just what the article says about you – it’s also where your brand is mentioned. The title is best, signifying your company is the piece’s focal point. Unsurprisingly, a mention in the last paragraph isn’t particularly strong as it lowers the potential that the audience will actually remember your brand’s name.

Tip: When measuring for prominence, give more weight to mentions that appear in the beginning and middle of a piece, not toward the end.

Reach

It’s not just where a mention appears in a piece – the outlet itself is even more valuable. A top-tier outlet like The New York Times is more valuable than an industry trade is more valuable than a Twitter account with a few followers.

Tip: Determine which publications or industry-specific outlets that will matter most to your brand and accord more weight to mentions in these publications than other mid- or bottom-tier publications.

Redistribution

Shouting loudly isn’t – for the most part – the most effective way to get your point across. The same can be said for social media. Just because a person tweets about a topic one hundred times doesn’t mean their message resonates with their audience.

Tip: Evaluate the number of times a message that centers on your brand is shared across social media. These messages have much more importance than those that have little or no traction with others.

Consider combining media impact metrics like prominence, reach and redistribution scores for a far better perspective on how your campaigns are resonating than the vanity measurements of old. You may find that although a campaign didn’t generate a high number of mentions across the board, it did receive influential coverage in your industry’s top publications, for example, perhaps indicating the investment was worthwhile.

In short

Brands have access to one of the richest, most informative and dynamic datasets for brand measurement that has ever existed. But the traditional metrics for brand reputation haven’t kept pace with the evolution.

You can deepen your understanding and facility with new ways to evaluate brand health in real time.

Learn more about these modern media metrics by downloading our white paper: The Modern Media Metrics That (Should) Matter To Businesses And Brands.