The Fractional Newsroom - A Content Strategy That 99% Of Companies Are Sleeping On

99% of brands are missing a simple opportunity to get in front of their target audience on a daily basis. How? By hiring a Fractional Newsroom.

Fractions are so hot right now. Companies have learned that they don’t necessarily need to hire a full time employee to bring in expertise. Need some finance leadership but don’t want to stump up hundreds of thousands for a CFO? Get a fractional CFO for a couple of hours a week.

Need some marketing guidance but don’t have the budget for a full timer? Enter the Fractional CMO. 

HR? Same. Sales? Same. CTO? Same.

The model is frankly, pretty awesome. It allows smaller companies to access the knowledge and expertise of a large one, while keeping the costs sustainable, giving smaller and newer businesses the opportunity to better compete with bigger ones.

On a broader scale, we’re seeing companies utilize freelancers and contractors much more widely than ever before, giving them more flexibility as they scale. Especially right now, as companies are wary of committing too much cash with a less certain future.

When it comes to content, there’s a huge opportunity that uses this same model, to get your brand in front of your ideal target clients on a daily basis.

The Fractional Newsroom. 

Let me explain exactly what this opportunity is, because just about every business out there is ignoring it.

The opportunity

There’s an insatiable appetite for news content. People want to know what's happening in the world, they want to know how it might impact them and they also simply want to be entertained.

If you want to know about Kim Kardashian’s latest vacation, the President’s visit to China, analysis of the day's NASDAQ movements or who’s been nominated for a Grammy, there’s almost unlimited options for readers to find information about these things.

But what about if you’re a fintech CEO who wants the latest news on open banking legislation? Or you’re an ecommerce CFO who wants to stay up to date on changing European VAT regulations?

You’re not going to find articles about that on Forbes or the BBC. 

There is industry specific news happening every day that does not have a proper online source (or at least not many), outside random LinkedIn posts, tweets and industry publications which operate on schedules that number weeks, if not months.

So for a brand targeting a specific niche, there is a huge opportunity here to become the leading source of up to date, current information and news for your target clients. It’s the chance for your name to become synonymous with an industry, and to become part of the barbecue conversation.

This obviously helps from an ‘shareable content’ perspective, but it has the potential to be a huge advantage from a technical search point of view as well. Having Google recognize your news feed in their news carousel, means the opportunity to appear at the top of Page 1, without needing to organically outrank big name websites.

The practicalities

The way you go about doing this is really pretty simple. All you need to do is create a news section on your company website and publish consistent content on at least a weekly, but preferably daily, basis. 

Once that’s up and running, you can submit your site to Google news, but there are a wide range of other news aggregators you can submit to or optimize for, including Apple News, Bing News, Yahoo News, Flipboard, News360 and Feedly.

The key to this type of content is the timeliness of it. You are aiming to be the first source for news for your target audience, and so you need to have posts up and live within 24-48 hours of the news breaking. The quicker you can get something up, the better, and it’s ok to go live with the basics and then add more detail as it comes to light.

Because you’re going for speed here, you can dial back the depth of the article. No one expects (or wants) a 3,000 word deep dive on every piece of news on a daily basis. Short, 500 - 600 word overviews are enough. 

How often? Well to stay as part of Google News, you need to be publishing on a ‘regular’ basis. You should be shooting for a few posts a week. If you can do it daily, even better.

The Fractional Newsroom

So that all sounds great, but let’s be honest, it’s a pretty big commitment. It’s unlikely that you’ve got the capacity within your company to put out daily posts, even if they are on the short side.

Not only do you need someone with the time to actually write them, you’ve got to be monitoring various random sources of information to actually find out the news you’re going to write about!

It’s a full time job. And yes, you could hire somebody to do it, but that person is still going to have to be managed and you’ve got all the normal pros and cons of hiring another staff member.

An alternative is to engage with a content agency to create a Fractional Newsroom. This allows you to have the service of a full team of writers, editors and managers to ensure you’re staying on top of the latest news, and putting out high quality content that covers it.

It’s one of the services we offer at Hedge, and it’s working incredibly well for a number of our clients.

The downsides

So I’ve been selling you on the benefits of a Fractional Newsroom, but it can’t all be gravy can it? Well, no. Like with any marketing strategy, there are definitely downsides and specific circumstances where it probably won’t work.

Cost

There’s no getting around it, this strategy requires a lot of content, and that comes at a cost. You can’t easily use AI like ChatGPT for this either, because by definition it is news and information that has only just come out, which AI programs aren’t going to have knowledge of.

Time

This one is really the same as with any content marketing strategy. It’s going to take time to work. This is a brand building exercise, which is going to increase your authority over time. When the ball gets rolling, it can be super powerful. But that could take a year.

Distribution

The news content strategy relies on there being limited news coverage for your target audience. So if you’re a company with a broad market demographic, like an investing app targeting millennials, the news you’re going to want to cover is likely going to be well served by much bigger publications. You aren’t going to be able to compete with that unless you’ve got access to a contributor page of some sort on a major publication.

It’s going to work best for B2B companies targeting niche executives or managers. Think payroll and benefits software for HR managers or cash management for fintech CFOs.

The Takeaway

Sound like a lot? It is. It’s a big commitment. But you know what? The easy stuff isn’t going to work anymore. The low hanging fruit of standard evergreen SEO content is not long for this world. 

Content marketing is still a hugely powerful and valuable way to gain new clients and generate more revenue, but you need to think outside the box and find new ways to provide value.

The fractional newsroom is a big opportunity to do that, and right now, it's a blue ocean for most companies. It probably won’t stay that way forever.