• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 9, 2019

Performance-based marketing is the focus for a new service, Earned Media Advantage Guided Tour, recently launched by Newswire. 

The news wire service historically focused on software and technology for media-release distribution, monitoring and analytics. Now the company has moved into a managed service aimed at turning news into earned media to increase awareness for brands, according to Charlie Terenzio, Newswire’s new director of earned media strategy.

Terenzio joined Newswire in August 2019 to oversee the new program.

Newswire does have some competition in the space. Cision Communications jumped into this space in July 2019 after integrating the acquisitions of TrendKite and Falcon.io. While Cision’s introduction of the service was largely focused around software, Newswire’s service focuses on services and manpower. 

Today, a handful of Newswire employees analyze the client's business goals and objectives to create a year-long plan, which supports public relations strategies, pay-per-click, and digital marketing.

Each client participating in the program is assigned a dedicated strategist to work on the account. The services range from list building to research, setting up and distributing releases, and reporting and analytics. There's no template for a strategy, he said. Each company gets a custom plan.

The Newswire strategist working with the company sits down with the client to map the plan back to the business’s key performance indicators, such as those related to speed and sales.

In the first two weeks of the program, about 25 companies became clients, Terenzio said.

The program officially launched in August, when Terenzio came on board as director.

“One-off press releases without a strategy behind it is kind of a wasted effort,” he said. “It’s really about building a long-range plan.”

The service does include reports such as tracking brand mentions, number of impressions, and website traffic increases or decreases, as well as sales, leads, and return on investment.

The software also shows “ad equivalency” in terms of the earned media, meaning that data on the value of mentions compared with purchased ad space.

A monthly report and quarterly “score card” show the company’s progress.