Monitor online mentions of your brand in real-time

Mediatoolkit is a media monitoring tool that tracks relevant mentions of your brand across the web and social media in real time. You can use it to get notified immediately when you are mentioned anywhere online and to discover meaningful insights behind every mention.

Kevin William David interviewed Tomislav Grubišić, CEO of Mediatoolkit to know more.

Hi Tomislav, Can you tell us about Mediatoolkit?

Sure, Mediatoolkit helps marketers and PR professionals know what the media and customers are saying about their company on the internet. Companies use it to find and react to any mention that might have an impact on their reputation, regardless of whether it’s published on websites, social media, forums or comments.

This can range from finding a social media crisis on Twitter to getting an alert that your product was mentioned on Mashable. The tool also also makes it easy to analyze data in order to get actionable marketing insight.

Tell me more about why are you building this?

Mediatoolkit was originally a product that tracked topics that were going viral on the internet, and it became quite popular. However, when we tried to find all the tweets and blogs about the product, the existing solutions either didn’t deliver good results or were too expensive, so we decided to build our own.

The tool has been four years in the making, and our mission has since grown from finding brand mentions to finding any type of useful information that’s publicly available.

How is Mediatoolkit different from what already exists in the market?

Our goal is to make media monitoring simple and affordable for everyone, and not just big companies. That’s why we’ve built a product for small and medium-sized businesses that has all the quality of an enterprise tools such as, for example, Brandwatch Brandwatch or Talkwalker. The tool is intuitive and collaborative, which means that data is no longer siloed to just one department in the company. On the lower end, there are also competitors like Google Alerts, but they provide significantly fewer results and do not cover social media like Instagram or Twitter. A lot of our users upgrade from Alerts to Mediatoolkit, as it is simple and affordable.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Mediatoolkit?

We currently have 35 thousand users from 50 countries around the world, with most them being PR and marketing experts working for SMBs. Communications professionals are most likely to recognise the benefits, as they already have to monitor the media, as well as create reports for the management. It grows within the organization when other departments start asking the press officer how come they found out about something so quickly, and then they want in.

How are your customers using Mediatoolkit? Could you share a few different use cases?

All of our customers track mentions of their company on news websites, forums and social media, but this is just the start. CEO’s use it to track news about competitors, marketers use it to analyze the success of their latest social media campaign, and the sales department uses it to find new customers. For example, one team tracks phrases like “what to buy my girlfriend for her birthday” and offers their products when fit. Marketers also use it to find micro-influencers. They track particular sources in order to find rising talent. For instance, by tracking “makeup” on YouTube, they find niche vloggers that may have just a couple of thousands of fans, but a loyal audience.

Have there been unique use cases for Mediatoolkit that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Absolutely, and they are what keeps things interesting. One of our clients uses Mediatoolkit to keep an archive of all mentions of their brand for legal affairs. Another tracks unauthorised resellers or fakes. The third tracks every discount competitors offer on social media, and then his company adjusts their prices as well. I’m sure there are plenty of uses yet to be discovered. In essence, we provide a tool, but what you build is completely up to you.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We have seen a lot of success with the perhaps most boring, but most efficient hack in the book: devotion to customer service. This has roots in when we were still a very small company: we would send a question to a SaaS provider, or an online payment service, and nobody would respond for days because they didn’t see us as important. We do it the other way: our free users and paying customers get full attention from our team, and we respond to everything in a matter of hours. People pay thousands of dollars for media monitoring tools, and they often don’t get the level of service they get from us for free. So it’s natural that our customers are satisfied and willing to refer us to others. Almost half of our clients convert via referrals and word-of-mouth, and this keeps growing on a monthly basis.

That’s awesome!

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Our biggest challenge was actually technical in nature. Building a crawler to track every website and social media profile on the internet is basically building a search engine from scratch. The complexity of the task explains why there aren’t that many companies competing in this industry, and the majority rely on buying data instead of building their own structure. The main advantage of this process is that we keep everything in-house, and are in control of the quality of the data that gets delivered to our users. Luckily, our development team really is world-class, so we were able to build a premium product.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

Slack — sends mentions directly to a team channel, so that you don’t have to receive emails. It is an important integration because it is in line with the immediate nature of today’s work.

Zapier— connects Mediatoolkit with a lot of other apps. This integration was particularly important from the aspect of data export and analysis. A lot of our clients have their own internal solutions where they have to report on data in a specific way, and this was made easy with the Zapier integration.

Since our workflow relies on plenty of integrations like Pipedrive to Slack, one of the first things we did was to enable API access. We also do white label solutions for partners in the media monitoring industry.

Before we finish, what are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Slack— In-team communications with a couple of added integrations like Asana, Mediatoolkit and Pipedrive to keep everyone informed of everything going on around departments.

Asana — Mostly used by our products team to keep track of their daily tasks, with the rest of the team writing up product wishes and requests.

Pipedrive — Great CRM our sales team depends on.

Intercom — Our primary means of communications with our users.

Hotjar — Source of insights about our web visitors.

Mixmax — Great email client with email tracking mostly used by our sales team for prospecting.

Google Analytics — Product and marketing can’t live without it.

Wootric — NPS scoring

Mixpanel — Analytical insights

Mediatoolkit — for mentions, but also to keep tabs on what everyone else in the industry is doing.

Originally published at siftery.com.