Zignal Labs Financial Times enables Zignal Labs to attract business, retain customers and remain competitive

Zignal is a modern media intelligence platform, providing real-time predictive analytics to 250 customers worldwide.

Its core audiences are communications and marketing professionals. Zignal scans the entire media spectrum, surfacing the issues and insights that matter to a particular brand and strengthening the context of social media data. The aim is to help customers build and protect their brand, assess its reputation in the market, keep up with digital transformation and take well-informed decisions.

Whereas most companies operate in either social listening or in media marketing, Zignal spans both worlds. “What sets us apart is our different mindset,” says Randy Brasche, VP of Marketing. “We don’t just provide data: we provide better interpretation.”

Today’s communications and PR departments must be fully alert to the social media world and always-on news cycle.

Any business can be affected by an unforeseen event, from a health and safety issue to a disappointing earnings release. For communications professionals, it’s vital to hear about these critical events as they happen, and to be able to monitor them as they unfold. Using news and social data, they can track the impact on their brand’s reputation and social standing.

However, they need to be sure they’re seeing the full global picture, working with reliable facts and getting balanced, insightful coverage. That’s why many of Zignal’s customers had been asking for the FT.

“Our customers can’t afford to miss anything,” explains Brasche. “They know how critical the FT is to making business decisions. In fact, it’s their specific demand for Financial Times content that has brought about this FT partnership.”

The Financial Times is globally recognised as a source of independent, authoritative intelligence on world affairs, business, finance and politics. With a global network of almost 600 journalists based in more than 50 countries, it combines outstanding local expertise with a uniquely global perspective. What’s more, it provides in-depth news and analysis on a huge range of industries and sectors.

Over 60 leading news aggregators, media monitoring agencies and software developers integrate FT content into their solutions, in order to serve their clients better and build long-term relationships. By partnering with the Financial Times and using their Datamining Licence, Zignal can provide the news and analysis that its customers demand. It can also mine FT articles for the relevant and timely insights that will help them to interpret media coverage accurately and act on it effectively.

With an FT Datamining Licence, Zignal can:

• display an FT headline, teaser text and the link to the original article on FT.com
• retrieve and host FT articles in its platform server, to allow deeper datamining of the content
• integrate full-text FT articles with its other datasets, to give customers a more comprehensive analysis
• run its own search algorithims to discover relevant and timely insights, helping customers make good decisions

“The fact that we can mine the entire article is very useful,” confirms Brasche. “Brands want to understand context of the coverage. For example, a mention in the 5th paragraph is important compared to social posts and we show that to customers in our analytics, data and dashboards.”

Armed with the intelligence Zignal provides, customers can see what’s being said, get a big-picture overview and uncover the deeper insights that will help them make smarter decisions.

FT content helps Zignal’s customers regardless of role, whether it’s C-Suite, Marketing or Investor Relations. For example, they look out for earnings release announcements which can have an impact on their reputation and show their competitive standing. This coverage can reverberate through all social channels, and they need to track it.

“Earnings day is a pivotal milestone for every major company, but it’s changed,” says Brasche. “With so many online news and social channels, there’s often a digital tsunami of talk that can muddle and reshape the story. With solid foundational data from the FT, our customers can pinpoint what’s relevant and act to drive the best outcome.”

Even before the rise in fake news, the FT’s global reputation for authority, accuracy and integrity made it a top choice for communication professionals. Today, it’s more important than ever for them to be able to separate fact from fiction - and the FT allows Zignal to showcase and elevate stories they know they can trust. “In a data-driven world, people really want and need reliability,” says Brasche. “It’s 100% important to them that we’re backed by the FT logo.

Brasche continues, “The FT is the nucleus of everything by having solid foundational data. Customers can make strategic decisions from this, get a better understanding of how they fare in the market and what they need to do. They can also share these insights with their key stakeholders and their own customers.“

With access to this intelligence, they can identify strategic opportunities, make faster decisions with confidence and achieve better outcomes.

“The Financial Times remains one of the top business and news publications relied upon by Global 2000 enterprises and other large organizations,” says Brasche. “Our ability to access and analyze full-text Financial Times articles enables Zignal to remain competitive within this strategic client segment.”