Newsjacking & Reactive PR

Newsjacking and reactive PR are all about following the press and identifing opportunities to contribute to the conversation. The goal is the placement of commentary or campaigns into relevant media publications – building links for your brand and profiles for your people.

If you’re looking for a team of experts capable of following the media and placing you in the places and amongst the stories that are of most interest to your audience, look no further! Get in touch today.

What is newsjacking?

Newsjacking is a tactic used by digital PR specialists to earn coverage and links by following the news and identifying opportunities for brands to contribute to stories through comment or thought leadership.

Newsjacking is most successful when we work closely with you to understand the spokespeople within your business and the topics they’re willing to speak on. Any experts within your business can be spokespeople – we’ll help you take your raw expertise and craft it into something that is usable by the press and which positions your people and your brand in a positive light.

Usually, newsjacking is done ‘in the moment’ and requires a quick response. If something breaks in the news, the faster we can jump on it, the better our chance of successful placement.

With that said, a savvy PR team will also be prepared for the topics likely to come up based on what’s happening in the news at the moment and common themes that come up through the year, too. By spotting these trends, we can prepare statements in advance and send them out to the press ready for when the story lands.

A layered approach to reactive PR

Our approach to reactive PR means that we layer it into our wider strategies to compliment larger scale, pre-planned campaigns.

For the majority of our clients, we find that this approach is not only the most effective way to communicate relevance and quality to Google, it also ensures you are putting out a good breadth of content to appeal regularly to your target audience.

How we do reactive PR

Research the News
Allocated time to newsjacking, sharing stories within the team, the weekly reactive update.

Find a story which works for your client
Come up with an idea, run it past the team/client, check resource.

Draft content
Draft the comment, gather the data or write up the press release. Get client sign-off.

Outreach
Outreach to relevant journalists using existing and new media lists for those sectors.

Track coverage
Track any results you have, report to the client and rejig the campaign if it hasn’t get gained results.

Revisit
Just because a campaign is reactive doesn’t mean it cannot be done again. Revisit in a few months to see if you can reuse this content.