Newsjacking and your Super Bowl commercial

The Super Bowl is a week away, and commercials will be discussed as much as the final score.

Most businesses can’t afford Super Bowl ad spots that cost millions of dollars, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the fun and web hits.

Let’s talk about how you can still ride the Super Bowl buzz or leverage an approach called “newsjacking” any time.

Mike

Generate free impressions for your biz with newsjacking

I first heard about newsjacking years ago on social media from David Meerman Scott, who wrote the book on it.

As his book description on Amazon explains, newsjacking is “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.”

That coverage can come in many forms, the easiest to generate being social media impressions. By aligning your brand with a trending topic, people will come across your content as they search and scroll.

Your content will also interest current customers who already have the day's news on their minds. Let’s look at an example.

The ad you didn’t see during the game last year 🏈

The Super Bowl dominates American media every year, and everyone chats about which commercials they like best.

Last January, I created a fake Super Bowl commercial for my employer, Thorn Technologies. I made it in Canva around the idea that we keep our cloud file transfer software prices lower than AWS and Microsoft Azure.

We shared the commercial in our company newsletter, and it received a few hundred views on Twitter and YouTube, along with over 3,000 on LinkedIn, where we gave it a slight paid boost.

It was fun, and the messaging aligned with other marketing, where we often showcased how our product is simpler, has more features, and is more affordable than some alternatives.

This commercial is just one example of what you can do to focus on popular topics when you create your marketing.

If video editing isn’t something you’re comfortable with, you can write a blog post, create social media graphics, or come up with a creative promotion.

But Mike, how do we know this stuff works?

I enjoy spotting a successful no budget marketing campaign in the wild, and here’s a good one from a company that generated around one million free impressions for their product in 48 hours.

It took a lot of planning, but they didn’t spend a dime on it.

Check out this blog post to see how they took over LinkedIn.

Check out a brand new newsletter I just launched. If you’re a bootstrapped startup, send me your news. Each Tuesday, I’ll highlight startups making things happen without venture funding. Click the link to subscribe.

A final thought

Thanks for reading! See you next week.