Newsletters Can Get Your Foot in the Door

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In the B2B marketplace, marketing yourself can be difficult, since your intended audience may be more than a little inured to advertising. However, it is not impossible, especially if you can blur the line between promotion and information. One of the very best ways to do is through a newsletter.

Whether emailed or on paper, an informative newsletter is quite highly prized. Business leaders are always eager to remain on top of the market, and a snappy, concise summary of industry events is far less likely to be thrown out than is a purely commercial flyer. So if you can advertise yourself in the newsletter, you will have created an ad that people will actually want to hold on to - and even reread!

Note, however, that your newsletter must at least appear to be objective - since biased articles won’t win you any readers. You can probably get away with mentioning your company in a few of the articles - particularly if something that you have done is truly newsworthy - but there are other, more subtle, ways of marketing yourself.

One of these is simply through branding. If a widely read newsletter has your name at its head, then your corporate brand will become increasingly familiar in the marketplace. Moreover, because your readers will associate you with informative, useful news stories, they will assume that you are on top of the industry - that you are up-to-date, competitive, and trustworthy. And if you can include a few links to your web site (in a unobvious fashion), your article may allow you to increase the traffic to your site.

As well, consider collaborating with other companies on your newsletter. Many businesses specialize in preparing effective, appealing circulars, and you may even find an agency that will supply you with articles. While you may not have any experience preparing a newsletter yourself, one of these businesses will probably do a bang-up job. Remember: your newsletter represents you to potential clients - so if it is sloppy, irregular, or unhelpful, this will certainly impact readers’ impressions of your company.