Every brand has a story they want people to hear, and with publications increasingly eager to start national conversations a new synergy has emerged that is making news generation one of the most talked about marketing and PR strategies on the market.
News generation has conversation starters at its very core. It has long been a PR tool called upon to infiltrate the media landscape, providing comms teams with access to an armory of publications that satisfies their requirement to reach both broad and specific audiences. But with an increasingly hectic media landscape and more marketing techniques unearthing themselves every day it can be easy to forget the simple effectiveness of crafting campaigns tailored to your story in order to achieve vast media coverage.
Creative Brand Awareness
News generation is a creative way to keep your brand name in the forefront of consumer’s minds, and should be an integral part of any marketing mix. If done properly and effectively, it can provide the bare-bones to a strategy for fast-fame and fortune for brands who are craving national and regional exposure. News generation projects are not bound to any particular platform, meaning that you are able to traverse a number of key channels with one core creative idea. Research has shown adding news generation to your campaign boosts ROI by three times on average and makes other media in your campaign work harder.
At The Marketing Show North, 72Point hosted the first ever News Generation Keynote Theatre, celebrating the technique by inviting key industry-specialists from across the country to attend the talks and share why they deem it to be of importance to today’s PR market.
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The Sun’s Deputy Northern News Editor Richard Moriarty (right) joined us in the session, discussing how he believes that journalists are on a ‘’three line whip’’ to include videos with news stories, and that it still breaks his heart that people would rather stare into their phones than pick up a copy of the Metro during their commute. The simple fact is that videos make news stories more engaging to the consumer’s eye, increasing dwell-time on particular pages, thus making the pay-off for publishers vast.
SEO Benefits
Among other topics of discussion, the SEO benefits of news generation strategies was mentioned, with publishers having more reason to embed a follow link if it links to a page featuring further content and information based on the news story. The trick to securing follow-links is to get your client to build a bespoke page on their website featuring results of, for example, a survey that forms the basis of the news story, giving readers and publishers an incentive to click through.
It also helps get you cut-through with the press. News generation is the art of approaching the media intelligently, and arming yourself with the relevant ammunition to secure widespread coverage, which is the key to keeping your clients happy (find out how we secured over 21,100 hits in 2018 alone here).
In today’s day and age, it’s impossible to forecast what marketing technique is going to step into the forefront of comms professionals’ minds, but one thing is for certain, news generation will remain central to the majority of marketing plans for 2019, providing the flesh and bones of the impact PR campaigns can have, with the key development being more visual assets getting produced to enhance the engagement of news stories.
For assistance and information on the news generation services we provide, contact us here.