News and trends can disrupt any marketer’s editorial calendar.
A world leader is assassinated. A major hurricane strikes. A national recall of tomatoes happens.
“Brat summer" gets replaced by “dilly-dallying.” #NoughtiesNostalgia unexpectedly breathes new life into early 2000s pop culture.
Even if your brand doesn’t feel the impact of the bad news or have a direct connection to the online trend, your audience may be affected.
That’s why you need to critically evaluate — and consider adjusting — your perfected content marketing calendar when a major news event or emerging online trend pops up.
Is it time to stand down, maintain the status quo, or change things quickly? Answer these two questions to guide your response.
Question 1: On a scale of 0 to 10, how much does this news or trend relate to our company?
Take the tomato recall example. If your company sells red peppers, a possible alternative product, the issue would rate nine or 10. But if your company sells tire valves to auto manufacturers, the issue would rate zero.
Consider the #NoughtiesNostalgia trend. If your B2C company targets a younger audience, the trend’s relevance would be a seven. However, if your company sells consulting services to an executive audience, the relevance would be one.
Score 0 to 6
No need to change your content. Proceed to the next question.
Score 7 to 10
Change your regularly scheduled content programming.
How? Quickly pull together your content team and other key stakeholders. Schedule a brainstorming session or have a virtual conversation:
Detail all ways your brand is or could be connected to the headline or trend.
Look in the archives to see if you’ve already published content that would help in this scenario.
Develop a list of new content ideas. Group them in three buckets: (1) common but necessary, (2) out of the box, and (3) interesting but not a fit for our brand.
Identify the resources available to repurpose the old content and create new content.
Republish old but still useful content as soon as possible. (The old content serves as a bridge until you develop fresher angles.)
Prioritize your new ideas. Execute the first one or two.
Publish the new content.
Join online conversations with helpful (not promotional) content.
TIP: Maintain your brand voice and tone. Don’t sensationalize your content to take advantage of the situation. Provide factual information, address safety concerns, and share solutions.
Question 2: On a scale of 0 to 10, how much does this news or trend affect our target audience?
Even when the headlines or trends don’t directly affect or relate to your brand, you may still feel the effect. Your audience’s attention may be elsewhere, prompting a need to change your publishing schedule.
It’s time to go back to your audience personas and other data. Use what you know about your audience to see how they are affected by this news or interested in the trend.
It’s OK if you don’t have enough information to assess this. After all, personas don’t cover every characteristic of your audience. They’re intended to communicate the qualities and behavior that relate to why the person would interact with your industry, brand, products, etc. And yet, you know, these people have lives outside of that environment and could be affected.
If you don’t have enough data to assess the potential effects, use a neutral rating of five for now.
Score 0 to 3
No need to change your publishing schedule. Your audience isn’t likely to change its content consumption habits.
Score 4 to 6
Your existing data isn’t sufficient. Do more research.
Reach out to a handful of your audience members to ask their opinions. Look at your social feeds to see if industry influencers are talking about the topic or if other brands are hopping on the trend. Check community forums to see if members are straying from the designated topic to talk about the news. After that, give yourself a new score, which should fall into one of the other two groups.
Score 7 to 10
Reassess your publishing schedule.
When your audience is affected by the news, they look for information related to it. Your content will go unnoticed because their content priorities have shifted. Stop or decrease your content promotion.
In the case of bad news, if doing business as usual could seem insensitive or worse, suspend your publishing altogether. But don’t just disappear — let your readers know why you aren’t going to be populating their social feeds, inboxes, etc. Work with the team to craft a notice that is direct, not preachy or self-righteous, such as:
“Your priorities are understandably focused elsewhere at this time. We don’t want to be an unnecessary distraction. So based on input from our audiences and internal teams, we are suspending our regular publishing schedule. However, we’re still hard at work — so if we can answer any questions for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us.”
In the case of a trend, make accommodations in your publishing schedule so you can capitalize on that interest.
TIP: If you stop or minimize your content promotion, adjust your calendar to avoid publishing any high-profile, pillar, or other substantial content until your normal promotion process resumes.
When reacting to the news, reassess every day (or several times a day, depending on what’s making the headlines) to identify the appropriate time frame to resume publishing and/or promoting. Ask:
Has the chatter diminished sufficiently in news feeds so our content would be noticed again?
Is the target audience talking about non-headline news topics?
What do analytics tell you? If metrics dropped during the news event, are they increasing now?
This timeline created by David Meerman Scott around newsjacking works well for bad and good news:
Be prepared
Being proactive means monitoring triggers. You likely already perform social listening to identify online trends. But you and your team should also regularly consume news beyond your industry. Identify and monitor a list of tangential topics that could activate your company’s content reaction. Know your geography and weather phenomena.
Think about it — a tornado may not merit more than a blip in national news, but the impact on locals could be extensive. And if that’s your audience, you’ll want to know about the impact, so you can adjust your content marketing accordingly.
Don’t wait to prepare. Customize the process I’ve suggested to fit your brand, content marketing team, and audience. It’s much easier to react to the news and trends (and the perpetual internal question “what do you think we should do?”) when you have an approved assessment process.
Updated from a February 2023 article.
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