Wanting to incorporate content marketing and tools like news release distribution into your online marketing mix is a great first step to maximizing your reach and driving visitors to your website.
But one of the most common questions remains: “what do we write about?”
Companies may have an idea for the first release or two, but what about news release #15, 32 or 46?
Perhaps you’ve gone through the traditional sources of product announcements, new hires, special events and grand openings. What can you do to provide content that viewers will look for eagerly?
Follow these 3 suggestions on how to leverage news to create newsworthy content:
1.Be Aware of Industry & World Headlines
Keeping up-to-date on what’s happening is a great way to inspire new ideas and/or find connections between top stories and your company’s offerings.
Perhaps a trend piece relevant to your industry is published and receiving a lot of online play. Extract one or two of the statistics (and cite it of course) and build off of the data as it relates to your offering.
To help you keep up-to-date on the amount of content created by news outlets, leverage a tool like Google Alerts to notify you as things happen or once a day.
Dependent on upon your settings, you can get various types of content delivered right to your inbox. You can choose to receive:
NewsBlogsReal-time UpdatesVideo Discussions
2.Research
Perhaps it goes without saying but we’re saying it anyway. If you haven’t done exhaustive research of your industry, trends, analyst insights and/or the competitors, you are selling yourself short in regards to having a holistic and well thought out content plan.
Subscribe to industry and competitor blogs to stay current with the types of content being created. Check out for example, this list of Top 12 Small Business Marketing Blogs.
Next is following “thought leaders”. These folks specialize in reporting on your industry. They spend the hours each day you can’t afford to researching, discussing and sharing the latest developments related to your industry.
Follow those who know your industry best on Twitter. Not only will you know what the influencers in your space are saying and therefore what your target audience is listening to, but you can also keep up-to-date with what they see as important by following their links.
3.Comment Marketing
Today’s news stories don’t end where the journalist stopped writing. Rather, the story continues in the comment section and/or on the publisher’s Facebook page.
It’s within the comments that you can see how people are responding, what questions they have and/or what types of insight they are adding to the topic.
Not only is this a great place to do some commenting of your own and get on the radar of the journalist, but very often you can find new content ideas. One way to do this is by compiling the questions posed (and citing who posed them) and writing a blog post to help provide additional insight. Once you get into the habit of paying attention to the news and finding ways to extract ideas for your own content, you will be well on your way to a holistic and strategic content plan.
Check out other PRWeb articles for additional ways to generate press release ideas.
Want to read even more on creating news releases? Download this free whitepaper, “Your Expert Guide to Writing Great Online News Releases”.
How to Write a Press Release
