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How to plan your next article

The reason to send out a press release, post a blog entry or publish a newsletter is to convey useful, interesting information and drive readers to your website to learn more. The ultimate reward is new customers or more sales, class registrations, event attendance or other engagement with your organization.

Find topic Ideas

To give your article focus, determine what problems or challenges our clients face. Think about questions that you get asked frequently. These may be good topic ideas.

In thinking about a subject for your article or blog post, research what is trending in the national news. You might offer an industry specific or local perspective.

Locate internal experts

Next, identify experts within your company who can be quoted. They may be able to describe how your product or service has been used by customers to overcome a challenge. Share the impact on the customer by describing benefits such as gaining a competitive advantage, making money or saving time.

Match images to the subject

As you plan, think about where you can get images to help tell your story.

  • Do you have photos from past events?
  • Is an activity coming up that you could send a photographer to in order to get images?
  • What is the best way to show customers benefiting from your solution?

In addition to photos, video is another powerful way to tell your story and intrigue your audience.

Build a distribution list

You can research journalists, bloggers and publications that may be interested in your company’s perspective. Start building the distribution list ahead of time.

Last steps

After you write the article, be sure to leave time for internal review before it is sent out or posted. Look for multiple ways to use portions of the content with links in eblasts, blog posts and social media. Use google analytics to identify which efforts generated website traffic.

 

Tips to Start a Business Services Newsletter

If you are thinking about starting a newsletter to promote your business services, consider these tips to take marketing action:

  1. Plan on producing a quarterly newsletter. This gives you some flexibility in the dates for distribution.
  2. Focus on how your clients are using your services and benefiting.
  3. Keep it short – one or two pages.
  4. Include photos and remember to take your camera to events and client meetings.
  5. Ask your clients for testimonials to include in the articles.
  6. Use a professional designer to make it eye catching.
  7. Keep a running list of story ideas.
  8. Post your newsletter on your web site.

To see an example of a business services newsletter, look at the College of the Sequoias Training and Development Summer 2012 newsletter. This California community college produced the newsletter to promote customized employer training and business services to manufacturers through the Center for Applied Competitive Technologies.