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To Separate Yourself from the Pack, Write and Publish Articles!
By Ken Lizotte CMC
Until the economy began slowing down following the dot.com collapse a few years ago, most any kind of marketing/selling strategy worked pretty well for producing new business. Such traditional business development techniques as advertising, brochures, a competent website, were the norm, and to do any more seemed unnecessary, if not distracting. For many companies, in fact, “marketing” came to mean picking up the phone! Research expert Michael Norris, Norris Research (Rindge NH) as stated that answering the phone seemed to be “many so-called high fliers’ entire marketing strategy.” For such reasons, he believes, smart companies are now latching onto a little-used technique for separating themselves from their competitors: writing and publishing articles.
Why this strategy in particular? One reason may be its expense, which is minimal, a significant consideration when re-evaluating the cost side of the ledger. Writing articles and getting them published runs up far smaller bills, for example, than waging even the most modest ad campaign.
Second, perhaps more importantly, writing/publishing campaigns perform a double duty by both promoting a firm’s products while at the same time educating its target market overall. This approach tends to pre-sell non-customers by giving them a chance to evaluate a product or service before engaging in the actual buying process. By publishing articles examining customer problems and potential solutions, a firm’s core value can be displayed indirectly—no hard sell!—yet at the same time clearly and persuasively, thus paving the way for the company’s sales force to more easily convert prospect/readers. Even without actually reading such an article, in fact, prospects ascribe credibility to it out of simple respect for its mere existence, transferring similar credibility to the article’s author, his/her company and its products and services.
So how does one get started employing this profitable technique? It may surprise some to know that actually writing an article is usually NOT the first step. Instead, pitching your idea to an editor comes first. And to make sure your end-result is effective, decide before you pitch what precise business objectives you want your article(s) to promote.
For example, suppose you’re most interested in promoting a specialized line of software your firm produces, one that will help them efficiently organize their offices? If so, propose an article titled “Ten Mistakes that Slow Office Workers Down.” Though you won’t be writing directly about your company's software, no matter how swell a job it does alleviating or preventing these mistakes (we call that “advertising,” and it’s something you’ve got to pay big bucks for), you can nonetheless discuss these mistakes in your article and suggest broad solutions that exist to handle them. Most or all of these solutions, of course, might be specific features of your own software line.
After determining the right articles ideas to propose, the next step is identifying publications that are read by the people that hire you or buy your firm’s products, i.e., your target customers. Who actually makes a decision to spend money on you? CEOs? CIOs? VPs of Sales? Front-line managers?
A client of mine, a manufacturer of data storage systems, for example, wanted its insurance firm prospects to see how easy-to-use a state-of-the-art system (like theirs) could be. Most insurers instead had been sticking with traditional systems, usually out of plain ignorance that alternatives were available.
So its VP of Sales penned an article called “Storage Must be Flexible” for a major insurance journal. The result was a flurry of inquiries from readers of these journals, 80% of whom were high-level decisions-makers at large insurance companies, the very target audience the data storage company wanted to reach.
What further steps must one take to actually make it happen? First is to cold-call a target editor just as one would cold-call a prospect, pitching your article idea courteously and succinctly (within 15-20 seconds), then clamming up and gauging the editor’s response. As with prospects, patience and listening are guiding lights here, probing for such details as word length and deadline if the editor likes the idea, standing ready with a back-up if the idea “isn’t right,” for whatever reason. No matter what happens, always thank this editor, leaving the door open for the beginnings of a productive, long-term relationship.
Should you secure an editor’s go-ahead, however, you may find yourself, like many would-be authors, suddenly stopped in your tracks. Such “writer’s fright” occurs when the whole process of writing so overwhelms a writer that even the most basic first step, i.e., sitting down at the keyboard, cannot be undertaken.
Accomplished writers have acquired a trick or two to beat writer’s fright, the most popular one being to try viewing the full project as a series of little steps. These might include: (1) outlining beforehand what you want your article to say; (2) dumping every shred of information in your head relevant to the article onto your computer screen (affording you a “rough draft”); (3) defining in your first paragraph your article’s core message; (4) explaining all key points in the body of your article, including concrete examples wherever possible; and (5) ending with recommendations to your reader and/or a call to action.
Seeing
your article as a work-in-progress broken down into separate steps, you’ll
subdue much anxiety and get your project off the ground and eventually
published. After that, you’ll
begin encountering prospects who already know who you are, eager to hear
more about your wonderful products.
To learn how we can help you publish articles on a regular basis, Contact Us today.