Every cloud has a silver lining!

Whenever there's a major headline grabbing story, it's generally around stories of gloom and despondency. Why not look on it as a fresh angle and a great opportunity for you to grab headlines and promote your business. It's an opportunity that most businesses miss.

When a story is ‘hot’ and holds the headlines for any length of time, editors are always looking for new angles. When it runs several days, they are desperate for something else to say. That’s where you can help them by finding an angle that makes your business or industry relevant, offering it to the editor and giving airtime to you.

It’s one of the biggest gripes of editors, that so many businesses just don’t take the opportunity to make their story topical, so by ‘piggy backing’ your story to the headline news, your chances of publication increase dramatically.

And it’s not just newspapers and magazines that can benefit from topicality. What about direct marketing? If a headline story raises issues that allows you to dovetail in and highlight the benefits of your company, it’s more likely to be received positively.

Here’s an example from one of our clients. They are the only UK manufacturer of specialist equipment, and are facing stiff competition from Italy and the Far East. When all aircraft were grounded following the Iceland volcano eruption, they quickly realised that they had a real USP.

If their competitor’s machines broke down, service engineers would have to travel across Europe or even half way round the world to repair them. In a busy production unit, down time can cost fortunes in lost production, so getting production back on stream is critical. Our client’s engineers are local so are merely hours from the domestic market. This means they are able to get their clients back to full production in the minimum time, saving literally thousands of pounds in lost production.

So we generated a direct sales letter which included the following extracts ….

The current air transport crisis has highlighted a major problem that has a critical effect on production when buying equipment from overseas manufacturers.

If your equipment breaks down, engineers have to be flown into the UK. With no planes flying, your machine will be standing idle. This downtime will not only completely eliminate any apparent cost savings, but loss of production could put a valuable contract at risk.

This is the real cost to your business….

… We are local, so why go overseas? Buy British and reduce the risk to your core production in the event of machinery breakdown.

Because we don’t need a plane to get to you.

By talking about benefits, and making it topical, it gives you an opportunity to really get the message home, and just might persuade potential customers to buy from you rather than your competitors.

So next time a disaster hits the headlines, just stop for a moment, grab it with both hands and see if you can turn a negative news story into a positive benefit for your business, and then use it to your advantage

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