Back in the day, you needed nothing more than a news depo to get your newspaper spread among customers. In the digital era of today, you have to track metrics, drive user engagement and perform all these marketing twists to build a strong brand for your online newsroom or media agency. Nowadays, white paper and black ink are barely enough to create compelling content and reach your audience effectively.
Follow these tips to avoid most dangerous pitfalls and build an online newsroom that rocks.
1. Run Push Notifications Campaign
Push notifications are great if you want to communicate with your audience instantly and in a user-friendly way. But be careful, sending push notifications is not a cakewalk, especially if we are talking about news alerts. The ultimate goal of all push campaigns is to deliver value to your customers. And here comes the main thing to keep in mind: those users who enable push notifications in your app or website are the most precious customers. That’s why you should do your best to reward them with a really valuable content.
How Do I Make Subscribers Love My News Alerts?
Personalization
The greatest power of push notifications and the worst disaster as well. If done right, it can significantly increase user engagement and drive more audience and traffic. Poorly done, it can annoy your subscribers and force them to unsubscribe or even delete your app.
Remember, a personal push notification is the best one. Try to customize alerts to users’ individual preferences, e.g. reading history. If someone is interested in politics and machine learning, he or she will hardly appreciate a push alert about Kardashians, and so on. Also, consider the language you speak to your audience. Despite the international status of English, people respond better to push messages written in their preferred language. There is indeed never too much personalization nowadays. Give your customers what they want – and they will be grateful.
Timing
Sense of urgency. That’s what you should have to manage a push campaign. As a delivery speed is one of the push messages’ strong points, you’d better be handy to use it well. Therefore, time zone push notifications are a good help. Dig deep into the user data and find out what time of the day brings better open rate for different audiences.
Regardless of push messaging is about timing, not all notifications are time-critical. The best way to handle it is to give users an option to turn off push notifications for their night hours.
Breaking News
The golden rule says that in breaking news, “news” still prevails. It means there is nothing worse than becoming too pushy sending buzz words with a “breaking news” title. Don’t forget to be personal even when you are sending alerts because not all news is breaking for everyone. For example, allow users to receive only those news alerts, which are related to their physical location. Try geo-targeted push notifications – that’s how you make news truly breaking.
2. Go Viral
Viral content brings more traction and readership, which makes it perfect for online newsroom promotion. The dark side of virality is a content quality, so don’t forget you are here to deliver real value to your audience! Still, there are lots of great tools for content discovery and distribution to help you promote your media brand.
One of them, Almighty.Press, goes beyond measuring basic metrics like share counts. The platform provides a real-time news feed of content from around the globe. The content virality is measured by Almighty Force algorithm and you can see results in a simple to navigate interface. This allows you to track trending content before it gets outdated and publish it to your audience hours, if not days, before your competitors.
3. Create Mobile App to Reach Broader Audience
One of the main challenges for a company nowadays is to make its branded sources the first place to receive information. A mobile application makes it much easier for users to get updates and news directly from your team, not 3rd parties. This makes a mobile app a must-have for every brand. Thanks to a diversity of available tools you can choose what works best for your business, but we suggest that you look at this one.
AppYourself is a one-stop shop that helps you create a mobile app from scratch. This platform has its own design and submission services, which means they can guide you through the entire app lifecycle, from prototyping to store release. The app builder offered by the platform primarily serves the needs and demands of small to medium sized businesses. AppYourself makes it possible for online media to reach a broader audience in an effective way while connecting them to the brand. SMB apps aimed at interacting with repeat customers are the company’s landmark.
4. Use Social Networks
Social Media is reportedly the main channel to get news these days. According to Digital News Report by Reuters Institute, Twitter is the favorite source for news lovers, who tend to check their feed for what’s new or click to view a professional news story. Facebook users are more about discussing or commenting on stories. One more proof that Twitter generates tons of referral traffic is 2016 Election day when 75 million people tweeted within an hour.
Numbers don’t lie, social networks are a good choice for online newsroom promotion and building your brand identity.
5. Don’t Forget About Grammar!
Online media is about written content mostly, no matter what it is, an article, newsletter or push notification. And you just can’t afford to have an unreadable text with grammar mistakes in it. Since working with printed dictionary nowadays is a bit odd, look at this awesome service.
Grammarly is your daily dose of pure grammar, a service that simply makes you a better writer by eliminating errors and boosting text clarity. Whether you are a newsroom contributor or blogger, Grammarly helps you avoid any possible mistakes. Write and check blog posts, whitepapers or news articles the way you want – the platform works on desktops, web and mobile as well. By polishing your writing, Grammarly can easily become a final flourish for your content.
Summing Up
Regardless of content you distribute, be useful to your audience. There is no other way to build long-term and trust-based relationships with users. Don’t lose your genuine value chasing momentary gains.
Please, leave your feedback on Twitter and Facebook. We are excited to know what techniques work for your online newsroom. If you are not a seasoned push notifications user yet, we’ll be happy to guide you through!
