Attention Small Business Marketers! Demand That Media Companies Teach You To Become Publishers!
You may be surprised at how willing they are to help you.
Despite the troubles many media companies are experiencing, their best publications can still put your advertising message in front of your buyers. For many small business marketers, traditional advertising should still play a role in an overall content marketing strategy. But, like many of your peers,you will be devoting more and more financial resources to content marketing in the months and years to come.
To succeed as a content marketer, you will need to learn fundamental publishing skills in order to communicate effectively with your customers.
Who better to teach you those publishing skills than publishing companies?
This may seem like a crazy idea. That is until you realize that many media companies have successful custom publishing divisions. Those divisions help their clients to create print and online publications which communicate directly with their customers’ customers.
It’s also a fact that your smartest competitors have already become publishers. They are creating high quality content online and in print over which they have complete control. They are bypassing traditional media companies which is exacerbating the significant drop in advertising revenues in the media world.
What can media companies teach you?
Your company certainly has an important body of knowledge that will benefit your customers if it is presented to them as a publisher would–inside the pages of a magazine or on a world-class website. Here’s where publishers’ skills come to play. They can teach you the secrets of becoming a successful information provider, who is valued by the customers you must reach and influence. Here the basics of creating a successful publication:
- Define an important segment of buyers.
- Develop a deep understanding of what is most important of those buyers.
- Capture and maintain a sophisticated circulation database with lots of customer information.
- Create information products that are relevant and valuable to those buyers.
You may well ask: why doesn’t this magic formula seem to work anymore for so many media companies? The primary reason this time-tested approach is faltering is that buyers are going directly to the Internet for the information they use to find in their favorite magazines and newspapers. And, as we have said, smart marketers in companies of all sizes are delivering great content just as though they were a traditional publishing company. The money they are spending on that content is being diverted from virtually every media company large and small.
How to persuade a publishing company to help you become a publisher
It’s pretty simple, really. Go to the highest level you can reach inside the publishing organization that wants you as a customer. Explain that you are going to be developing your own print or online information products. Tell them that you would like their help in creating total content marketing solution–and that you’re willing to make an investment in order to get their help.
Publishing companies know how to create great publications. You can bet that as soon as they understand that you will be creating your own publications–with them or without them–you will start to get exactly the kind of enthusiastic support you need to succeed with your brand-new content marketing strategy.
The bottom line is that business organizations are becoming publishers. There is nothing that publishing companies can do to stop it. Their only long-term hope is to partner with their customers so that everyone succeeds.
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Comments [2]
Hi Newt - I’ll be interested to see if some small business owners agree, but I’ve noticed that you can set up a company with a good Content Management System, but often it goes neglected. Why? Well, sometimes people are too busy, or lack the discipline, or just don’t value it. But I think you’re onto another big reason — they lack publishing skills including writing, editing, SEO copy techniques, etc. Becoming a “publisher” means learning ground level skills in graphics, journalism, advertising, and a smattering of web skills including basic HTML. The question then is… should the company learn those skills, or would that split their focus from key functions? If so, then they would need a professional web content publishing service to make their site a winner. - Scott
Newt - I agree with you and the comment by Scott F. Different size companies in different industries need different skill sets and capabilities. My B2B custom publishing company (Bolen) develops online and offline content for other companies, but we use outside graphic designers, printers, videographers and web content publishers to help us deliver successfully. As a matter of fact, we’ve used Scott’s company (WebFadds) in the past to great advantage. The major custom publishers often have all these functions in house, but the majors, even today, may not be willing to work with smaller companies. I think a major benefit to small companies who approach providers like Scott’s and mine, and yours, Newt, are that we can package and deliver all the services they need. When they come to you or Scott or myself, they get a single point of contact who manages the complexities of publishing for them.