Avoiding Common Mistakes:
Marketing Your Corporate Publications
Ways To Ensure Your Corporate Publications Are More Than Newsletters

Producing corporate publication used to be a far simpler proposition.

Now there are countless challenges like transitioning from a print to digital model, integrating social media and rising branding standards.

That being said there are just as many new opportunities to make your corporate publications even more effective, helping to establish your firm as a thought leader. We’ve outlined some of the most common mistakes and oversights that cause too many publications to lose their effectiveness.

Drawing from our own experiences working with leading professional services firms, we’ve developed suggestions that cover everything from increasing readership to optimizing your publications to improve SEO, all so you can avoid these mistakes and even turn potential issues into advantages.

The suggestions below are by no means comprehensive and every recommendation isn’t always going to relevant to your specific business case. Instead our goal was to offer some basic tactics that can be implemented with relative ease. Collectively, employing these techniques and other like-minded tactics will help ensure that you’re doing everything possible to leverage the publications that your company produces.

Don’t: Design each of your publications separately Instead: Take a systemic approach

If your firm produces more than one newsletter, you can streamline production time and costs by developing a unified design template for all of your publications.

Having one design template with a flexible grid structure enables you to minimize the design and production time of individual issues.  Meanwhile each publication can still retain its own unique visual identity.

Design elements like copyrights, company logos, etc.  can be defined just one time in the template, not just for each issue, but for every publication. This uniformity adds cohesion between your publications, while also reducing layout and production time.

Another advantage of this approach is that your corporate branding will be consistent across all of your publications.

Additionally, publications that are presented in a consistent brand voice and persona evoke a sense of a professionalism and stature. If you’re a smaller firm this can help your brand presence outstrip your actual size.

Don’t: Distribute your publication through just one channel Instead: Distribute through as many relevant channels as possible

When you’re producing corporate publications, you’re also generating content.  Content that can be distributed in print, as a PDF, through a microsite and through numerous other channels.

Each channel offers its own unique advantages. It’s important not to limit the potential outreach of your publication, so distribute them through as many channels that are relevant to your target audience.

Simply put, the more formats you produce for the more likely you are to increase readership.

It’s important to adapt your publication for the medium you’re disturbing it in, such as having a print friendly layout for your PDFs. However, once you develop a system, the amount of time it takes to adapt each issue can be greatly reduced.

Increasingly people aren’t reading or even finding publications on corporate websites; instead they’re finding them through social networks.  The more formats you make your content available in the easier it is for readers to share your content and drive traffic to it.

Don’t: Lose opportunities to LinkedIn Instead: Setup author biographies on your website

Having author biographies on your website is the best way to ensure that you don’t lose readers to other sites like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is great, but it can also cause users to be disassociated from your content.

If after reading an article, a user goes on Google to look up its author and all they find is the author’s personal LinkedIn page you’ve lost an opportunity.

There are numerous reasons to setup biography pages for authors of your publications, whether they’re your employees or not.

By linking author names to your own corporate web pages users who want to find out more about a particular author are directed to your site.

Furthermore, even when users search an author they will see results for your company’s website along with theirs.
Biography pages present an opportunity to link back to articles by that author. That can increase traffic directly to your company’s publication, especially if the author is well known in his or her industry.

Don’t: Let your publication look like a newsletter Instead: Develop a functional design that accurately reflects your brand

Even if you’re publishing a newsletter it shouldn’t look like one. The typical design of company newsletters has become too dated and more importantly it’s weighted down with connotations that are not favorable.

So if your newsletter looks like a newsletter it’s time for a change.

Instead you should look to develop a design that accurately reflects your brand. Outline your objectives in order of their importance and then develop a design that achieves them accordingly.

A one-size fits all approach doesn’t work when you want to differentiate yourself.

Don’t: Leave it to your readers to copy and paste Instead: Embed PDF Links directly into

Embedding PDF hyperlinks is a great, yet often overlooked, way to truly take advantage of the capabilities of the PDF format, including its interactivity.

You can easily link to websites that you cite in your articles and certainly use them as promotional tool to setup links to your website.

Establishing these links becomes even more important considering that PDFs are often distributed outside of their original channels.  Embedding PDF links is ensures there is a connection back to your website.

Don’t: Produce A One-Size-Fits-All Publication Instead: Offer Multiple Publications That Are Smaller And Targeted

If your firm caters to different lines of businesses, so should your publications.

So if you’re producing one newsletter for multiple audiences you may want to consider segmenting them into smaller individual publications that are more focused.

The more targeted a publication is, the easier it is to market.  General corporate newsletters tend to be too broad – making them difficult to market in a compelling manner. A niche approach will allow you to tailor your marketing materials individually and collectively you can still achieve the same reach.

Just by increasing the number of publications that your company produces, you have an opportunity to add to the stature of your brand, with more opportunities for a more targeted dialog with your clientele.

Don’t: Promote your publications with e-mails that are nothing more than table of contents Instead: Create multi-faceted marketing e-mails to increase relevance

A frequent issue with marketing e-mails from services firms is that they are too narrowly focused – missing out on opportunities to engage subscribers.

The more opportunities for engagement you provide users with the more effective your emails will be. Creating engagement opportunities doesn’t have to require significant effort. In fact you start by highlighting the things that your company is already doing.

For instance, highlighting relevant events can serves multiple functions. It’s another way to attract users’ attention and even drive traffic to event registration. Ultimately, it’s just one more way to drive conversions.