We have recently began subscribing to a service that writes news articles to be hosted on our website, relevant to our industry.

The company have given us the option of them building us an RSS feed for these news articles.

I was just wondering people's thoughts on RSS as a marketing tool?

I've read a lot of (unconvincing) articles saying that it's a good communication device.

My main focus at the moment is to improve our SERPs - would having an RSS feed have any baring on this at all?

My main focus at the moment is to improve our SERPs - would having an RSS feed have any baring on this at all?

Nope.

IF you are republishing the feed as pages on your site then it may help with getting visitors, not forgetting that if you are getting the feed, then quite probably so is the "competition"

Ok, thanks for letting me know.

What's the optimum way to use an RSS feed as a marketing tool then? Will submitting to feed aggregation sites have much impact on traffic?

Probably not by a significant amount.

The only people who seem to subscribe to RSS feeds are marketers and webmasters thinking there is something in it for them.
If that's your target audience then fine, it will probably bring traffic.

But for selling "stuff", XML feeds are probably best used for uploading to Google Product Search (Froogle), Kelkoo or Amazon etc.
Ask yourself a question (and your friends). Have you ever subscribed (or read) a RSS feed before you bought anything "online"?

No, you're right I haven't subscribed to any before buying anything. However, the feed we are having is news specific to our indsutry, not specific to product launches / driving buying.

We are aiming for general industry wide news that will be of interest to a number of people.