Context
LaunchSquad is an independent public relations, story development, and creative agency known for creating programs for an innovative and fast-growing technology, consumer lifestyle, and media companies like Uber, Netflix, Twitch, Poshmark, and startups of all types.
Over the past five years, we developed Outwing as a proprietary analytics and reporting platform optimized for the unique needs of both our team and our clients. It has been used by hundreds of LaunchSquad clients, as well as several independent PR consultants, agencies, and corporate communications teams looking for better ways to track, measure, report, understand, and analyze their programs.
Our clients and customers value the insights that Outwing offers, including custom analytics directly aligned with:
- business objectives
- market intelligence data
- validation of the true impact of their communications programs
A crucial metric in curating these insights is share of voice (SOV), or how a company’s presence and brand in the media stacks up compared to its competitors. It’s a strong datapoint for demonstrating the impact of PR programs, and it requires NewsCatcher’s News API to pull in competitor coverage that we can analyze with the earned media that our teams secure for their clients.
Problem Statement
In order to provide this heightened level of measurement, we needed access to real-time coverage tracking that Outwing can use to generate data and visualizations related to SOV, such as total volume of coverage, breakdowns by publication tier, number of shares across social media, and other qualitative metrics.
Because we offer competitor tracking as a feature to all Outwing users, which includes companies across a wide variety of industries, we needed a solution that could be easily customized to run many News API queries per day for several different brands.
Lastly, we’ve found that similar News API providers are often difficult to work with and offer very expensive plans for the scalability that we were looking for, so we wanted a collaborative partner who understood our needs and was willing to work with us to figure out the best solution for our team and our clients.
Solution
We integrated NewsCatcher's News API into our stack in the fall of 2020. We currently use it to query each day for all articles that mention the competing brands of our clients that use this feature in Outwing. We pull the coverage directly into the platform and display it in a queue that teams can use to easily filter out false mentions or submit the data to enable SOV analysis in Outwing.
The NewsCatcher News API is the right fit for Outwing because it allows us to run a large number of unique requests per day for all of these companies, and Artem and the rest of the NewsCatcher team have been incredibly helpful in collaborating with us to optimize the queries in order to produce the most accurate results possible.
This News API provides our teams with a real-time coverage feed, and we’re able to directly use the news data to run analysis and create visualizations that arm them with important metrics to show the true value of their work to our clients.
Business Results
Using NewsCatcher's News API, the Outwing team is:
- developing a much smoother and simpler process for competitor tracking
- actively pulling real-time coverage for over 60 different competing brands
- retrieving an average of over 50 total new articles per day
- integrating over 6,600 articles from results of NewsCatcher queries into Outwing
- analyzing over 200,000 news articles/month
Contact us for more details.