As the year comes to a close, many companies I know are in the final stages of developing their 2018 strategies. Some have decided to redesign their website to be more SEO friendly, while others are going “old school” by hiring telemarketers to generate warm leads for their sales reps.
And then there are other companies about to take the newsletter plunge. To these companies I applaud you, because a newsletter is a terrific initiative to take on in the year ahead.
Think about it this way:
A newsletter provides an excellent platform to showcase your subject matter expertise and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. You may be the leading authority on something; a well-written newsletter is the perfect way to demonstrate this.
Staying on the grid and maintaining visibility among your suspects, prospects, clients, dormant accounts, and networking referral sources is incredibly important if you want to get your maximum ROT (Return on Time) and ROI (Return on Investment). Although you may have many other touch points for the various segments in your database, a newsletter provides a medium in which you can touch all of them cost efficiently and effectively.
You can customize your content for each client category so that individual segments will receive information relevant to their needs. A well-conceived newsletter allows you to distill and disseminate your articles and opinions to the appropriate audience.
Newsletter and email marketing services such as Constant Contact and MailChimp provide data-driven reports that will quantify your best performing categories, titles, and topics. You can even see the open rate among your potential readers. This information can be invaluable as you use a newsletter to identify the best prospects to follow-up with.
And while content development may not be in your wheelhouse, it can be readily outsourced to a professional resource. Certain service providers will work with you in various capacities and in all cases remain behind the scenes so that you are identified as the writer. The relationship can function many ways:
They can develop topics, draft articles, and submit for your final approval
You can provide the topics and they will write the articles on your terms
They can interview you, transcribe the notes, and write the article
Companies resist having a newsletter for any number of reasons. For example:
They have no one to write the content
They are pressed for time
They are uncertain what to write about
They are concerned about “bothering” their customers
While these may be valid issues from a staffing standpoint, they shouldn’t prevent you from outsourcing this important touch point to an expert newsletter service provider.
Soon it will be January and the start of another year. How do you plan to improve? What will be different in your 2018? Use a newsletter to stay on the grid and create more robust relationships with your clients, prospects, and referral sources. Begin to develop your content now or bring on an outsourced content development resource to do it for you.