Creating content around current events is actually a challenge that a lot of businesses face.

The bigger the business is, the more difficult this can be. The reason why businesses have a difficult time creating content around current events is that a lot of them have to go through an entire compliance and approval process internally before even a single piece of content is published to their website. 

That approval process can take up to several weeks. Under these assumptions, traditional methods of content marketing can feel impossible for a lot of bigger companies.

There is, however, a way to solve this. We’ve had experience with many of our with our larger clients especially in highly regulated industries such as health care, financial services, and insurance.

Creating content ahead of time

There are certain things that happen in the world or within an industry that, while they are unique, they do happen with some sort of regularity. A good example is a financial services client that covers the stock market, trading, etc. It’s guaranteed that at some point in the future, the stock market is going to go up significantly, or it’s going to go down significantly. Companies can proactively write content around those two events in advance.

Continuing with this financial services example, write a commentary like “The market went up X percent today.” This typically leads to things such as improved GDP or other reasons. You can put your point of view and what message you’re trying to convey as a business or financial services entity.

Then go and get the content pre-approved in advance so that the moment that when the stock market goes up 3 percent or conversely goes down, you’re ready with content that you can put out, which has already been pre-approved to comply with your internal processes.

Another example is in the insurance space. Within this space, there are unfortunate events that do happen with regularity. Examples are security breaches or cybersecurity breaches. These can also be natural events such as hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, tragic snowfall with blizzards, earthquakes, and volcano eruption. It’s not difficult to write content around those events and communicate your point of view so that when such an event happens, you’ll at least be prepared with a message.

That’s one way a lot of larger corporations are being able to stay on top of the current events that happen while still keeping in place the compliance and regulatory requirements that are associated with their industry.

Creating content using templates

Now if you’re in an industry that doesn’t have all that overhead or you are at a company that can make decisions faster, there are other tactics that you can use.

Many clients take advantage of our ability to follow specific keywords or trends associated within their industry. So whenever a large event happens that is associated with an industry brand leader, we can quickly summarize the event or create an article about what happened. We can also provide a standardized point of view based on a Voice Profile.

The summary of the article is something that’s very easy to get approved internally. If your company already has worked with us to develop talking points that you want to be conveyed, then it is easy to turn an article around in a couple days. Within that event happening, you can be one of the first companies to talk to it.

This concept of what I’m discussing is called a news commentary, and it is a readily available content option within all customers interfaces. Customers can easily order such content on a timely basis, by selecting the News Commentary option.

News commentaries can utilize template sharing because once a format is locked in, they are easy to develop. For example, a news commentary format typically includes an overview of what the major event was, what the impact was, and then provide a direct link to whatever the major news source was that covered the event.

From there, the key talking points and additional insights are linked together in a homogeneous fashion by the customer’s writing team.