Audiences have never had more news to choose from than they do today. With the rise of digital and social media as major news platforms, and the ability for content to cross regional and national borders, media users navigate a high-choice news environment where they must decide every day which informative or entertaining stories are worth their attention.
Ultimately, relevance is the paramount driver of news consumption. People like to read stories that affect their personal lives, the place where they work, their leisure activities, and their community. The same news story can be read by different people as a ‘national’ story, a ‘technology’ story, a ‘financial’ story, or a ‘social’ story. So how can you address this information overload to ensure you stay relevant to your target audience?
Don’t be Everything to Everybody.
You don’t have to be everything to everybody. In fact all the tools exist to help define the key audience that is relevant to your business and brand. It is also important to constantly review your audience profile when formulating your content strategy. Understand where your target audience lives, so you don’t spend all your time and resources on communicating via the wrong channels. The more specific you can be in defining your audience, the better results your PR campaign will have.
Unique Content
If there’s anything the last few years have taught us, it’s that more and more communicators are making the switch to long-form content. Common types of long-form content include e-books, whitepapers, industry reports, and other kinds of in-depth guides and resources. To stay relevant in the face of content shock, PR practitioners will need to learn how to create content that is both comprehensive and easy to understand. More importantly, they need to know how to create content that is inherently unique. Truly unique content offers information that is well-researched, highly valuable to readers and relatively inaccessible elsewhere. Considering the overwhelming amount of information that’s available to users online, this is no small task.
Meet the Demand for Specialist Knowledge
The increased demand for quality content will likely come with an increased demand for writers with more specialized skillsets. It will be increasingly beneficial to have expert knowledge in a particular field, such as technology, education, automotive or food. In addition, it may be helpful to specialize in specific types of content, such as infographics, images, webinars or videos. Ultimately the objective is to provide thought leadership and provide evidence that your brand and company are leaders in their field.
Storytelling
While you do not have to create an epic novel for people to remember your brand, you can nonetheless write content that will pack a punch to your audience. One way of doing this is to craft a compelling story. By applying different techniques and tactics to tell your brand story, you can grab the attention of your audience and never let go.
Explore Partnerships
Working with aligned thought leaders, influencers, government organizations, community partners, and respected companies and brands will expand your audience reach and add resources to your content efforts. That will likely lead to stronger content, more social sharing and engagement with your target audience.
Work Hard
Put simply, be willing to grind it out. Your competitor might not be willing to put 100 hours into a content piece. The willingness to roll your sleeves up and do the stuff that the competition does not is often the defining reason why some businesses succeed with their PR efforts. Dig in and do the hard work that others don’t, and this opens a lot of doors.
Ultimately it is about supply and demand: Content shock reflects a change in consumer demand. To an extent, readers have become spoiled by the amount of quality material available to them. Effective communicators provide information that is useful and engaging, but the fact remains that they will need to build their content strategy to avoid oversaturation.
