A digital newsroom can help you discover what users are saying about your brand and industry as well as any gaps in your site’s content, providing an opportunity to reach users using their questions and insights.
Especially in times of crisis, it’s imperative to help your consumers and users as quickly as possible.
One of the easiest ways to help keep your consumers informed is to answer their questions by monitoring your brand, mining chat logs, and discovering themes to create content while all using free tools.
While some of the examples are COVID-19 impact related, you can apply these examples to your brand in any climate.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker has a free alert monitoring feature that allows you to use advanced search operators to make your alerts very specific.
You can choose how often you would like to receive alerts in your inbox. You can choose “As it happens” to keep an eye on Twitter in near real-time. Talkwalker also divides alerts into Blogs, Forums, websites and social to help you easily prioritize based on your strategy.
Talkwalker Alert examples:
- “Brand name” OR “variation of brand name”
- “Industry” AND “COVID-19” OR “coronavirus”
- “Brand name” AND “COVID-19” OR “cornoavirus”
- “Industry” AND “non-essential”
- “Industry” AND “essential”
HARO
Help-A-Reporter-Out (HARO) is usually used for link building. However, noting the Industry topics displayed in HARO can help with content ideation and give you a cursory look at what the news is going to cover.
If you have a service or product that can help solve a problem within the realm of those topics, you have a unique opportunity to give expertise on and be an authority in the space.
For example, a law firm or legal expert could provide their lens on future legislature due to COVID-19.
Google Analytics Site Search
Using Google Analytics Site Search you can discover new terms users are searching on your site that you may not have content satisfying their needs or questions. In times of change, this is your first line of defense to better understand how you can provide new solutions to your audience’s shifting needs from you.
If you do have content related to new site searches, consider moving that piece of content further up in your site architecture or use CTA’s to help users find the available information. This is especially important if new information is being released daily as we’ve seen with COVID-19.
Pro tip 
: You can save the report and name it to quickly navigate and see any week-over-week new or emerging terms:
Google Search Console Queries
Similarly to Google Analytics Search Terms report, Google Search Console can show new or emerging trends associated with your site using the Queries report.
Comparing the number of Clicks and Impressions using comparing date ranges, week-over-week or month-over-month can help unearth rising and declining content onsite.
Pro tip : Export the data and filter the older date range to 0 to explore net new trends:
Chat Logs + N-grams
Chat logs can reveal information users are seeking in real or close to real-time. But, depending on the number of chats your site experiences, it can be overwhelming to sift through the text and gain any insights. That’s where N-grams come in.
Using a free N-gram online tool you can quickly see the frequency a term and string of terms are used.
Use the frequency of terms to help you quickly dig further into actual requests to get more context around the user’s inquiry. Depending on the context, you may want to revise or create content to help your users and cut down on your chat bloat. You may also use this data to create a timely FAQ section.
No matter the climate, creating a digital newsroom can be used to help users get answers to their questions more quickly and build trust with your site.
