Have you ever wondered how brands or companies turn current events, trends, or breaking news into a strategic and successful marketing strategy? Together, let’s enter the subject of newsjacking, and how it can transform the ways of marketing and search engine optimization.
What is Newsjacking?
Newsjacking is injecting your ideas and angles into breaking news in real time in order to generate media coverage for yourself and your business. An example of this is when Oreo utilized the Superbowl power outage to make an advertisement that stated “You can still dunk in the dark.”
Often times, newsjacking capitalizes off of trending topics, and uses wit and attention grabbing marketing techniques to capitalize on those topics to become successful. According to Semrush blog, David Meerman Scott, a marketing and sales expert, was the first to ever use this technique.
This process can be used not only in social media, but blogging, web content, videos, podcasts, and in other ways to achieve success.
Why Newsjack?
According to Semrush blog, there are 5 benefits to newsjacking.
- Increased Visibility: When you use newsjacking, you are appealing to a wider audience that will most likely see your advertisement because of capitalizing on a trending topic. This can spread brand awareness and increase your contents influence and name.
- Established Authority: By getting your name out there, people will start to associate your industry and company with those trending events. This can position your brand as a knowledgable leader in your field.
- Enhanced Engagement: Along with increased visibility, by more people viewing and becoming aware of your brand, it also increases the likliehood that poeple will engage, purchase, or spread the word of your brand.
- SEO Benefits: Such visibility can lead to backlinks, a higher pagerank, and become more reputable in the eyes of other websites.
- Return on Investment: Ultimately, it is a cost effective way to obtain a wider audience and reach because it requires less investment than typical marketing advertisements.
How to Effectively Newsjack?
LinkedIn says that the secret to effective newsjacking is knowing your audience. So it is important to know who you are targeting with your content, and make sure that you spin it to make it relate to your venture.
Keeping an “eager eye on the news” so that your content stays on topic and stays relavent. Also, researching keywords that will build up the identity and reputation of your brand instead of negatively affect it. Stray away from negative keywords, as people will correlate your brand with a negative message. Basically, the key is to stay simple and on brand.
4 Responses
I really like the imformative post type that this is. Newsjacking confused me when we first learned about them. I also really liked the “Why Newsjack” section it helps me in my website and blog posts.
This is very informative and helpful! Thanks for your insights!
This is a great explanation of newsjacking, especially where you mention why it can lead to higher page rank and back links. I’m curious to know how smaller businesses would use newsjacking for their companies.
Good use of what we’ve learned in class, especially with the reference to the “You can still dunk in the dark” post by Oreo. Nice organization and section titles as well. The only thing I would change is possibly adding a picture of an Oreo, or a picture of the post or related video link. On the side, is there any particular reason you didn’t capitalize words in the header?