Drive Business Success with Situational Marketing

Today we will tell you how we at the agency use news feeds for marketing activities, how to find them and adapt them to your business.

Situational or, as it is also called, situational marketing is the ability to use events and circumstances to achieve your business goals: increasing revenue, increasing awareness, improving reputation, attracting a new audience segment, and others.

If the brand is not constrained by strict boundaries, then flirting with the audience within the framework of news feeds will be the spice of your marketing and will set you apart from your competitors.

The informational message at the heart of the advertising message must be important and relevant to the target audience. Then he will be noticed, and the company will achieve its goals. The news feed can be an already existing event or one invented by the company itself. To make full use of the news feed, it is associated with a product or service through creativity and adaptation of trends.

In order not to miss significant news, it is important to “stay in touch” and monitor resources that are interesting to the target audience. Various sources are suitable for this.

Both services allow you to track what users are searching for at the moment, a month ago and year after year, and how the popularity of keywords or phrases changes over time.

Created specifically for marketers across businesses of all sizes looking to strengthen their online presence across major platforms and generate compelling content for their audiences.

As an example, in Google Trends we decided to check the popularity of the search query “books” in the UAE.
The service provided us with useful information such as popularity dynamics (numbers indicate the level of interest in a topic relative to the highest indicator in the table for a certain region and time period), popularity by subregion, and the most trending queries.
We can also clarify whether we are interested in searching by images, products, news or YouTube.

Follow what is being discussed on popular platforms: Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. To do this, subscribe to opinion leaders in your niche. You can find these using special services: for Telegram there is TGstat, and for X, formerly Twitter, there is a trends section, which will be different for each country.

Depending on your tasks, you can use services to search for popular posts on social networks. The most famous are Mentionlytics, Social Searcher, Tagbox, eClincher, Buzzsumo.

Subscribe to 4-5 sources that cover your industry and area of ​​activity. This will allow you to comprehensively monitor changing events and not miss important changes. And to follow certain headings, you can use news aggregators, for example, Google.News, or subscribe to a topic in a search engine.

This is a document that contains various holidays, memorable dates, premieres and other important events. The calendar will be an excellent assistant for planning marketing activities.

Research what interests your current and former clients. To do this, regularly conduct custdev to keep your finger on the pulse and have an up-to-date portrait of the target audience.

Let's consider how to use the information leads found.

The news feed itself is not beneficial for business. It needs to be adapted to the company’s objectives and synchronized with the interests of the audience.

• Define business goals and objectives

The implementation formats and metrics for assessing effectiveness will depend on whether it is a performance or an image campaign.

• See what competitors and other companies have already done

You can use their cases as a ready-made solution or a source of inspiration. You'll likely come up with your own creative ideas along the way, so the first option is less recommended.

• State the main idea

There should be a clear connection between the news feed and the products and services of your brand, and the main message should be understandable to the target audience.

• Determine distribution formats and channels

This could be online activities in podcasts, media, or your own channels. Or offline events: outdoor advertising, merch, performances. It all depends on the idea and the budget required to implement it.

• Define KPIs

For performance campaigns, the most important thing is the share of advertising costs. An indicator reflecting the ratio of advertising expenses to income from this advertising. For media campaigns – coverage and growth of brand awareness.

Why do companies need news feeds? Globally, to remind customers about the brand or interest a new audience. Abuse and thoughtless use of information channels can lead to various negative consequences. Let's look at some of them.

• Loss of uniqueness.

Your content will seem insincere, especially if the news item is not directly related to your business or product. As a result, you will spend resources on creating content and distributing it, but will not get the expected effect.

• Decreased engagement.

When you use popular news channels non-stop, you will inevitably face a lot of competition from other brands and companies. If your content does not contain anything new or original, the audience will pass by or even highlight the advantages of competitors who have done more creative work.

• Dependence on external factors

Using information feeds on an ongoing basis makes your business dependent on external circumstances and events. This approach neutralizes the effect of situational marketing, since the audience will treat each news item as ordinary content.

• Forming a false reputation

If a healthy food company holds a promotion on beer day, this will cause misunderstanding among the target audience, and may even turn away some loyal customers. It is important that the news feed corresponds to the values ​​and principles of the company.