in: PR (Public Relations)
by: Sabina Hitchen
It's always strategic to create press angles, social media posts, stories and pitches inspired by hot topics and current events and the weather is no exception. Here are some simple yet effective ways to integrate that strategy into your own buzz building campaigns!
Create a One Day Only Flash Sale: Blizzards, rainy days, the first snow, falling leaves - even perfect weather days - you name it! The weather always provides great excuses to create a sale inspired by the meteorological events. They also give you a fun theme to play with for copywriting, images and social media posts based on your sale. If you decide to go this route, be sure you send out a newsletter about your sale that morning, and again continue to play with the weather-based theme!
Offer Your Weather Inspired Tips to the (Short Lead) Press: When any weather "event" happens, the press will want to talk about it in different ways until the cows come home. That means they'll need to keep repurposing and reposting different variations on the same theme. Make yourself useful to them by sending over tips, actives and other weather-related story ideas to them. This strategy works with short lead press only (web, TV, radio, newspaper) and has a quick turnaround so you have to act fast. That said, it allows you to make yourself valuable and of service to the press, and that helps you to begin creating a relationship that you can build on in the future - and turn into future press stories! One more tip - when you pitch the press these weather-inspired tips be sure it's clear what you're sending them from the subject of your email to the first few sentences - this will help them realize your value more quickly and easily!
Be Hashtag Savvy:
The blizzard that hit New York City was trending with the hashtag #Juno on Twitter and Instagram before the first drop of snow fell. Others turned to keywords including #blizzard, #BlizzardOf2015, #Snowmaggedon2015 and #Snowpocalypse. If you're going to join in the image/tweet posting fun (and why shouldn't you) be sure that you're now going rogue and simply creating hashtags of your own. That's all fine and dandy but up your posts chances of being found by throwing in a few trending hashtags as well - a quick check of your social feeds will help you confirm which are the most popular and perhaps give you a few ideas you would have skipped over had you not done a little bit of research!
