Call me old-fashioned, but I love the company newsletter.
Purpose Driven…
Call me a sneaky. If I tell salespeople, PM’s and principals, “I need photos and job stories!” I get a little here a little there. When I tell PM’s and principals I need their job story on “X” – with photos for the “Summer newsletter,” I get stories on “X” with photos.
This strategy, as you’ll read below under ‘Amplify and Reach,’ is devious and calculated. Heh. Heh. Heh.
I should feel guilty – I don’t.
It gets results.
Communicate Brand.
As the publisher, you can decide every spec of content in a newsletter. Communicating your brand to the industry must be done using multiple vehicles. However, to convey the personality of a company, a newsletter has excellent versatility and power. From the mixture of sales and product information, features and benefits, industry news to personal interest stories, there are tremendous communications possibilities in a newsletter. The combined bits and pieces of a newsletter’s content can convey who you are as a company. In the end, as you entertain, inform, introduce – you show customers who you are.
Scale
Another element of flexibility with a newsletter is the scalability. A simple 4-page newsletter might be right for your estimated content of the cycle. Go for it. If you need to accommodate more content, you can go 8, 12, even 16 pages. You can adjust publishing frequency. Every company will be different and tolerate different demands for the work that goes into such a project.
Ultimate Collateral
Catalogs are essential. A general brochure a must-have, and it is useful product info to hand out over the exhibit table or leave on the desk at the end of a meeting. People may give them a glance, but they know they’ll be able to access that information by going to www.yourwebsite.com when they need you. If you’ve made the impression that they need you. A newsletter is an opportunity to communicate with information of value, personality, and humor to convey your brand and connect readers with your company story. No catalog can do that.
Ask yourself, “When I’m at a Tradeshow, or traveling to or from a Tradeshow/conference, what am I going to read?” Catalogs?
Amplify and Reach.
Now that you motivated and coerced contributors to contribute fantastic, diverse content to the newsletter, and it has done its duty as a printed handout through the mail and at the quarter’s tradeshow and exhibitions, it is time to double your mileage. Publish, if you haven’t already, that old fashioned paper as a digital newsletter on ISSUU or some similar online publishing platform. Share like crazy through social media and get your associates to like and share the heck out of it. When that’s finished, carve it up and publish the individual stories, photos, and pieces, over time, through social media channels. You just significantly increased the ROI on all that lovely “Newsletter” content.
Finally, plan an e-mail broadcast. Augmented with some fresh content, build an HTML newsletter blast, and send via MailChimp, Constant Contact, or one of the many other e-mail platforms. You’ll enjoy an expanded reach and get even more eyes to the content that has already done its job and is now working overtime.
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