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They’re everywhere! In my in-box. In my mail-box. At trade show booths and in the marketing collateral I get. They’re content marketing newsletters, and it would appear that the good people of the mortgage and real estate industry have picked up on their value.
Therein lies the problem.
I know. I’ve talked about this before. But without scrolling a long time, or using the magical hyperlink I’ve provided, you probably won’t see it. The fact of the matter is, a newsletter or e-newsletter, done well, is a marvelous tool. It puts you or your brand into the coveted position of trusted advisor. It delivers credibility. It indicates you listen to and care about your customers. It can be very inexpensive to produce. And, of course, it keeps you or your brand top-of-mind.
Of course, that’s if it’s done well. Many, unfortunately, are not. And it’s the ones that aren’t done well that decrease the effectiveness of the good ones. Much like general e-mail marketing, we the general public are beginning to cloud over at the sight of most newsletters. Many aren’t interesting, don’t have a point, and come way too often. So we never bother to give the first one a chance. Did I mention many aren’t interesting? Maybe more important, many don’t have useful content. (How many promotional newsletters do you eagerly await each day? Week? Decade?)
And yet, they keep on coming. One after another. Not usually from the same source (how many marketing newsletters have you been getting from the same publisher for over a year? Two years?) Nonetheless, they keep coming. If/when we take the time to read ‘em, we learn about the latest janitor to be appointed; a major ground-breaking ceremony in a suburb far, far away and—look at this!—the latest revolutionary product release. And can you believe it? They all involve the same company! There’s three minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
With that in mind, here are the thoughts of one guy on ways to ensure your newsletter isn’t immediately redirected to the trash bin (electronic or otherwise).
Make it short and sweet: This isn’t just about keeping the reader’s already short attention span. We have too much to do, and too little time to do it. When’s the last time you really read something for work, as opposed to scanning it (and lawyers…I don’t want to know your answers)? So when a six-page novella arrives from a company you may or may not have thought about lately, is that the time you’ll put it all off to just read and savor over a cup of green tea? Doubtful. This is also about sustainability. I have yet to discover a firm that has an executive with time to pore over 5,000 words of copy and content on a weekly or even monthly basis. That’s what the marketing person is for, right? True. But if the newsletter is done for branding, it’s going to require that some decision-maker has some say in it. It needs to reflect the essence of your brand. And it needs to be received and read on multiple occasions. The most important content marketing newsletter you send will be the second one. Or maybe the 12th. They don’t work as stand- alone pieces. Do yourself a favor to make the effort required to produce the first one worthwhile. Use a short, quick-hitter format so that you don’t dread (and eventually, forego) editing or producing that newsletter each time.
It’s still not about you!: In spite of all that I preach, there is a time and place for self-promotion. Really. Marketing collateral, especially your website. Sales presentations. Some types of advertising. But the theory behind content marketing (using valuable and useful information to position one’s brand as a trusted advisor) is not direct self-promotion. It’s about providing relevant and useful information. As much as you may think so, and as much as it may even be true, your newsletter about you and only you (and your brand) probably won’t get beyond the extensive mental filters professionals use every day to sort the wheat from the chaff in the great information harvest. If they want to hear about All Things XYZ Inc., they’ll go to XYZinc.com. Just as in sales, marketing is now, more than ever, about the recipient.
Don’t just make your content useful. Make it interesting. Where is it written that B2B materials must always be boring? As I’ve written before, the “Bs” in “B2B” are still people. That’s why storytelling is still an important art, especially in a B2B environment. (Even if the story told is about system architecture; notice and comment periods or defalcations.) The beauty of the Internet is that almost any schmo can quickly research and locate useful, accurate information. If you’re going to send someone something he or she didn’t ask for, at least provide him/her some incentive to open it.
Don’t just make your content interesting. Make it useful. Yep. Typical marketing guy, hedging my bets. But it’s true. The point of content marketing is to position your brand by using relevant information to deliver value. Your content shouldn’t be abjectly self-promotional. But it should at least allow the reader to connect the dots. There needs to be some segue from the question you have your readers asking and the problem your solution solves. So while suggestive photos, dirty jokes or restaurant reviews, in and of themselves, may bring about very high click-through rates, they probably won’t do much to help your brand if they don’t have a logical tie-in to what you’re selling.
Measure. This applies more to e-newsletters, but there’s a reason most marketing e-mail software gauges your opens, click-throughs and unsubscribes. Use them! If your newsletter isn’t getting opened or, worse, is drawing unsubscribes and complaints, it’s a fair bet that it’s not achieving the objective you had in mind when you started…