4 pieces of Spring content your newsroom can tie to revenue growth

Spring is an amazing season for reader engagement and traffic growth thanks to all of the seasonal events happening like Easter, Mother’s Day and graduation.

Timeliness is a great tool to use when approaching potential advertisers, whether it’s having them sponsor a big spring events guide or working with them on specific branded content and giveaways centered around the season.

There’s a lot of content that can be created during Spring that can be repurposed throughout the season, and even can be refreshed for next year. Because those stories remain applicable throughout the season, newsrooms are developing content that can be reshared, which is also a selling point for the advertiser to sponsor that content.

Moving forward, it then becomes a call to renew the sponsor instead of a cold call to find a sponsor.

Here are a few pieces of content your newsroom can create this Spring that can be tied to revenue opportunities:

Things To Do guides and resources

As the weather warms, your audience will be itching to get back outdoors. Consider creating lists and resource guides for activities and events that can be used throughout the season. This can include anything from lists of restaurants with patio seating or guides pointing out the best local or regional hiking and biking trails.

Revenue ideas: Offer visitor centers, cities and local businesses the chance to sponsor these guides or create sponsored content for them that helps promote what’s important to these organizations this time of year. These sponsorship opportunities even work for small businesses, like a bike shop looking to sponsor the area’s top bike trails or be featured in a sponsored content story showcasing their expertise on what trails to hit.

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day

Families are always looking for resources around these holidays, whether it’s presents for Mom or places to take Dad for his day. Your newsroom can create lists of Mother’s Day deals at shops or restaurants, special programs for Father’s Day and more.

Revenue ideas: Tons of businesses hold special events and promotions for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day that you could approach to sponsor this content or you could approach a Main Street organization who may want to promote all of their businesses. In addition, contests are a no brainer for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Here are some great contest ideas from Upland.

Holy Week Services

Holy Week is one that even the most sporadic of church goers will be looking for services to attend. Work with area and regional churches to create a directory of services that includes church locations, Holy Week and regular service hours and more.

Revenue ideas: There are several businesses that have ties to its local community through churches that could be interested in having their name tied to this community resource as a sponsor. You could also approach one of the churches featured in the listing to be a presenting sponsor or even create sponsored content for them as a way to drive visibility to their church during an important time of year for churches.

Graduation

There are fewer times a year where you can generate as much web traffic as you can with graduation day submissions and photo galleries. Family, friends and even the graduates themselves will spend hours flipping through photos. In addition, there are some wonderful reader engagement efforts you can put into place that can drive revenue.

Revenue ideas: Create a chance for your audience to recognize their graduates with a Salute to Graduates photo uploader where proud families can share images of their graduates. There will be a lot of traffic around this, so connecting a sponsor to this kind of idea is smart. In addition, you could also ask readers to submit their graduates and promise to mention them on air, like this radio station did. This also could work well for a local TV station or even a newspaper who could do this on their Facebook page. This could be a free or paid service.

David Arkin Consulting would love to help your news organization create content like this and monetize it. Contact us today at david@davidarkinconsulting.com or visit www.davidarkinconsulting.com.