News Jacking - Cut-Through Marketing for Battlefield Operators
Today's customers are bombarded with the 24-hour news cycle, and instant communications and are offered more choice than ever before.
How can battlefield operators embrace newsjacking and cut through the media fog?
Tapping into what's top of mind for your customers means you are more likely to grab their attention. This is even more important in 2020 than ever before. Why? Because the media cycle is cluttered. And newsjacking offers you a way to cut through.
Using what's topical right now, juxtaposed with what's important to your customers via social media channels is a way to create fresh and effective battlefield advertising.
Rapid-fire tactics are useful weapons in your marketing arsenal.
Topical advertising campaigns have been a mainstay of battlefield operators' marketing for many a year.
With operators set key promotions to coincide with certain calendar dates, such as spring break or the Fourth of July.
What is new is "newsjacking". Newsjacking was first coined by Jon Burkhart from Iris, a London PR company.
"What is new is the exponential increase in the power of the technology we now have at our fingertips. Brands must understand how tech is changing the way people are living their lives. People are used to having search delivered in real-time, video on demand, news to the second it happened, instant updates on their friends' status, and their shopping delivered to their door overnight," said Jon Burkhart.
Everything is "now".
There is a frenetic new pace. The news feed has been turbocharged, and is with you, always.
Almost 60% of Google searches are now done on mobile devices such as smartphones.
Facebook and Twitter posts have a short half-life. According to VentureBeat the useful life of the average tweet can be measured in minutes. Most posts on Facebook exist in users' streams for perhaps a few hours.
Successful newsjacking is not hijacking the story, rather it is catching the news wave and riding it.
- What news is important to your customers?
- What resonates with them?
A great example of news-jacking is the success of Oreo's rapid response to the power outage at the 2013 Super Bowl. They tweeted "Power out? NO PROBLEM." with the tagline "You can still dunk in the dark."
This is the next generation of guerrilla marketing, it is turbocharging viral marketing.
This is a way your local battlefield brand can tap into your gamers' mindset and their cultural conversations.
It is a leverage tool for your marketing message.
A good example of newsjacking for Battlefield Operators is in the lead-up to Halloween. Operators can highlight zombie games in the horror season, just like Knotts Scary Farm did. They posted a 1-minute video clip that got more than 780,000 views and 17,000 shares.
Now that's newsjacking.
