Did you ever hype on breaking news to benefit a website or business?

Congrats, you are a newsjacker!

It’s a terrific strategy to promote your brand, fuel your SEO strategy, and engage the audience so they would talk of you.

But what’s newsjacking exactly? Why use it as a part of your content marketing strategy? And, after all, what are the benefits of this tactic for your business?

Source

Wake the hell up! 

Here goes the “why should I care” flash for you to reveal all the secrets behind successful newsjacking and (finally!) give it a try.

The Theory of Newsjacking

Newsjacking, or news piracy, is a marketing tactic of drawing attention to a brand or a product with the help of breaking news stories. Long story short: if you ride a hype wave, related to a big deal in your industry or the world in general, you may get an explosive traffic growth.

The evergreen case in point is a well-established tweet from Oreo.

For those unaware:

In 2013, the temporary power outage happened at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, which interrupted play for 34 minutes.

 

Source

Oreo marketers shot back quick as thought: they tweeted something like “well, not a big deal, you can eat our cookies in the dark too.” Users reaction was the same quick as lighting: the message had got about 15 thousand retweets, let alone the traffic and media attention to the brand.

Source

By the way, as representatives of Oreo later confessed, this case was hardly “an overnight success.”

“The Super Bowl tweet made our social media outreach seem like an overnight success, but it took a year-and-half of practice to prepare for that moment,” said Lisa Mann, former SVP at Global Gum Category, Mondelēz International.

The Oreo case is just one among many, proving that newsjacking works.

News happens every day. Some relate to your niche directly, others hit related industries, and the rest are like the fifth wheel to your business. But all they can serve the good marketing turn.

If you know how to use newsjacking right.

1. Catch Up in the Moment

It’s not that challenging to refer a piece of news to your business. A lot more complicated is to incorporate all the main factors influencing the success of your publication: timeliness, informativeness, accessibility of presentation, a writer’s expertness, and the authority of your website.

Father of newsjacking, David Meerman Scott explains the concept like this:

“News gathering happens in real time, and it can encompass anyone who steps forward quickly with credible input. If you are clever enough to react to breaking news very quickly, providing credible second-paragraph content in a blog post, tweet, or media alert that features the keyword of the moment, you may be rewarded with a bonanza of media attention.”

The key words here are “very quickly.”

Life of a news story is negligibly short today because of information shock, which makes most news stay relevant for a few days or even hours. Sometimes — Holy Macaroni! — the news lives a few weeks. Therefore, you need to catch an information wave as early as possible to make the most out of it.

That’s what a news life cycle looks:

Source

As you see from the graph, newsjacking has no point if you start working with a news hook on the peak of its popularity.

David recommends marketers to do that immediately after corresponding messages started to appear online. It will allow you to ride the wave of that news popularity growth before top media and big dogs in your niche jump all over it.

2. Be Creative and Find Connections

As was mentioned above, you can use newsjacking even when your business has no direct relation to it. And please, don’t say you are poor with generating creative ideas: follow the example of the London Fire Brigade that gained the character of stellar newsjackers, embracing the drumbeat of Kate Winslet’s brave deed.

The Oscar-winner saved Richard Branson’s mother from a fire when guested at their place in summer 2011. Three years later, Eve Branson confessed that Kate didn’t do that… But who cares, right?

 

Source

The point is that LFB (London Fire Brigade) invited Winslet to visit their center and take part in their crew’s training. They’ve published the invitation at their website just a few hours after the first messages about that fire in the Bransons’ house appeared.

Result?

Visits of the LFB website increased drastically. They’ve got thousands of backlinks and mentions from referring domains.

3. Make a List of Your Top Information Channels

Watch your niche and related news right along to find occasions for newsjacking. It stands to reason, you can’t sit and monitor media all day long; so add your top sources to RSS, subscribe to newsletters from corresponding blogs, and follow the RSS-feed of one or two general publications.

Also, don’t ignore social media. Follow relevant communities and read the brand news to keep up with hot topics.

The last but not least, make Google Trends your friend. Analyze top search queries and use its data to do a keyword research and write your stories.

Related topics and queries will come in handy for your newsjacking, too:

 

4. Go an Extra Mile with Research

Above we talked about the need to publish material quickly when using newsjacking. On the other hand, we all know that haste makes waste.

What to do?

Carefully examine the primary source of information before using it for your content.

Also, check what credible resources in your niche write about that news. Corresponding sales tools and software will assist you here. First, it will help to craft informative and valuable content. And second, you’ll avoid repetitions, knowing what competitors have covered already.

A palmary example comes from HubSpot.

Back in 2012, Google announced the launch of Knowledge Graph — an instrument enhancing its search engine results. That’s what it looks:

 

HubSpot marketers responded to the news without delay:

1. They published a note about the new instrument at the HubSpot blog a few hours after the corresponding official blog post appeared on Google.
2. That note hit the top of SERP by the “Google Knowledge Graph” keyword and got dozens of external links. It happened thanks to the reaction rate of HubSpot employees, as Google gives traffic to sites that quickly publish relevant information.
3. Thousands of visitors came to the HubSpot website from the SERP. More than that, users shared that news on social media, which influenced traffic even more.
4. As far as HubSpot marketers are gurus of including stellar CTAs in the content, that traffic boost brought them new visits of the sales pages. In result, some readers who were looking for the informative content on Knowledge Graph became the customers of HubSpot.
5. Besides traffic and leads, successful newsjacking helped HubSpot increase their brand loyalty and trust: they proved they could timely give useful information to readers.

So, make haste slowly — examine the source and top media in your niche before creating your own content. And take a moment to think on how to visualize your research so users would choose it of others.

Pro Tip:

Many authors rewrite articles several times, sifting through dozens of visuals in search of the perfect illustration; they experiment with the content structure, replacing bullets with numbers and vice versa…

Perfectionism is a friend of content marketers, but forget it when doing newsjacking.

Sure thing, numerous errors and meaningful blunders can bring to naught your attempts to become a newsjacker.

To avoid them, ask a colleague to proofread your content piece. If no substantial comments received, publish it immediately. After all, you can change bullets to numbers later.

5. Put Your Business in the News Context

Newsjacking is all about using breaking news for your business promotion. However, you shouldn’t chase hot topics just to be the first who’ll tell the audience about them. Look for a way to integrate your brand or product into the context of that news.

Example:

You want to use Knowledge Graph as a news hook for promoting your marketing product. Tell your target audience how this tool can help them increase sales, how to use it for growing their websites rankings in search engine results, etc.

Source

Yes, s**t happens sometimes. Some of your competitors might outride you and be the first one who published the corresponding content. But it doesn’t mean you can’t create yours.

Just make your guide on Knowledge Graph for marketers more complete and actionable by contrast to similar publications. So the audience will read your content, not the articles of competitors.

You Know That, But Still…

The final step to successful newsjacking is the marketing your marketing. (Sorry, a tautology.)

Once the content asset goes live, tell the audience about it: try guest blogging, repurpose and share on social media, build backlinks to it, consider email outreach, syndicate it, and work on this content promotion as it gets to increase the effectiveness of your newsjacking strategy.

What’s In There For Content Marketers?

Often, marketers spend tons of time and money on searching “creative” content ideas, delving into details, or relying on guesswork. That’s all fine but ends with zero results sometimes.

Newsjacking allows us to act by the well-known principle of Nike: just do it. While other experts are thinking what tactic to use, you already get the results.

The benefits of newsjacking for content marketers are many:

• Increased search engine rankings.
• Increased brand awareness.
• Targeted search traffic growth.
• Increased traffic on social media.
• Increased number of external links and referrals from third-party resources.
• Increased conversion rates.

And the last but not least, newsjacking gives immediate results for relatively low costs.

Over to You

Newsjacking allows you to increase targeted traffic and get leads at a low cost. Also, it expands the audience of the brand and builds loyalty.

Your success in newsjacking depends on how fast you can think and act. So, catch the wind with all your marketing sails!

But remember:

In chase of hype, do not forget about the quality of your content. Newsjacking in content marketing is about relevance and value, not clickbait.

***
By Lesley Vos, a content strategist at Bid4Papers.com and a regular contributor to blogs on web writing, business, and self-growth.