The best Newsjacking strategies, Marketing technique that allows you to take advantage of the latest news and trends to gain visibility
The Newsjacking is a particular technique of marketing that allows a brand to gain visibility by exploiting the news and trends of the moment. This is a very common practice nowadays, in this era dominated by the obsessive race to Real Time Marketing on social networks.
In order for Newsjacking Marketing to be effective, however, you need to know how to make the most of all the advantages it offers and, at the same time, how to avoid missteps.
What is Newsjacking
As we have already mentioned, Newsjacking is in some ways associated with Real Time Marketing but has some peculiar characteristics that need to be analyzed in detail.
A very common definition of “Newsjacking Marketing”, signed by David Meerman Scott , refers to the act of “injecting” your own ideas on fresh news in order to attract vast media coverage.
In more practical terms, those who make Newsjacking Marketing use the news, the hot topics and the current trends to introduce themselves into conversational flows on the Internet. How? By providing credible and interesting inputs that can emerge in the sea of information, attract strong media coverage and in this way, consequently, guarantee visibility for the Brand .
The initial assumption is keeping up to date in a continuous manner on the news r and lative to its own sector and to ask whether and in what way it is possible to connect their brand to a specific event that is holding the bench in the media circle.
Read Also: Generation Z: Marketing Strategies to win their attention
Why do Newsjacking
The information ecosystem, with the explosion of social networks, has changed radically in recent years. Digital content, nowadays, is available to everyone, from newspapers to “simple” users, passing through companies and professionals. The information, however, is consumed very quickly and, for this reason, it is increasingly difficult to find an interesting story and capture attention.
Knowing how to pack news and propose it to journalists just when they need it most is essential. When a breaking news emerges in the communication flow, basic information (attributable to the traditional ” 5 W ” of classic journalism) immediately becomes known . To differentiate itself from the competition and make its editorial content more attractive, however, a journalist needs to find other interesting details. Right now a company that wants to do Newsjacking must intervene, offering new details and other ideas that satisfy the journalist’s need to offer a richer editorial content and the “thirst” for information from readers intrigued by the news.
The timing , never as in this case, is crucial: as already mentioned, in this era information is consumed in the twinkling of an eye and, for this reason, pick up delayed a hot topic affect the possibilities of entering into the communication flow.
Read Also: Effective Landing Page: 5 Features to Keep in Mind
Advice on how to do Newsjacking
There are two main ways that lead to the identification of the hot topic of the moment through which, then, to be inserted in the communication flow.
The first method is to monitor the keywords related to your reference sector and track their progress and the research peaks. In this regard, a good advice is to set an alert for the keywords considered relevant and draw up a calendar of future events already planned, in order to “predict” the facts that could become viral.
The second way suggests, instead, not to preclude anything and not to discard any history a priori . Even the facts that, at first glance, appear to be the most distant from what the company proposes, in fact, could hide a useful starting point.
Having said that responsiveness is an indispensable element for Newsjacking Marketing strategies, this must not be at the expense of content care.
Specifically, first of all, it is important to create simple, immediate and captivating content (the greater impact guaranteed by the video format should not be underestimated). Secondly, the content must be optimized at SEO level, in order to intercept the searches of journalists and communicators. Another practice that can be useful, but to be handled with care to avoid falling into spam and being too “harassing”, is to directly contact journalists and communicators using Twitter .
Advice on how NOT to do Newsjacking
It is equally important to understand how not to do Newsjacking Marketing. In this sense, it is fundamental to accurately evaluate the nature of the news : using particularly delicate subjects in fact risks proving to be a boomerang and creating negative advertising for the company.
There are far too many examples of Newsjacking that have turned out to be wrong in the recent history of digital Marketing and listing them would be useless. What is important to keep in mind is that the imperative that must trace the modus operandi is one and only one: Newsjacking must not be done at all costs .
Read Also: Why Digital Marketing is important for Companies at the time of Covid-19
