A powerful approach to relationship marketing is to consistently publish valuable insight that appeals to your clearly defined community of prospective clients. This strategic content should attract, engage and retain the interest of your target client audience. Like all relationship marketing approaches, it is a long-term strategy with the hope that it will ultimately drive profitable client action. In this blog I’d like to suggest three ways that you can publish valuable insight to help with relationship marketing.
Firstly, blogging has become a highly popular approach to publishing valuable insight and building a relationship with a dedicated community of followers. Anyone, whether an individual or an organisation, can host a blog to develop engagement with their client audience. Whether you have your own blog or not, guest blogging on someone else’s website is a great way of extending your community. The key to blogging is to put yourself in the shoes of the people you want to read it, an d relate to them as you write practical advice.
Secondly, self-publishing and distribution, normally electronically, can be a great way to publish and disseminate valuable insight. This could be as a ‘white paper’, presenting authoritative perspectives about a complex issue, as well as providing your own opinion. Alternatively an eBook providing practical advice on a particular subject. It is a real luxury to read a traditional book from cover to cover, but an eBook is much more accessible. Either option can be delivered as a free gift to people who sign up for a newsletter or blog, and who you can then build a relationship with.
Finally, public relations are another way that can be used to publish valuable insight to aid relationship marketing. It is in contrast to paid advertising in aiming to secure free editorial coverage. This could be a news story, interview or feature in response to a news release, or it could be a commission to write an article, column or opinion piece. Gaining editorial coverage in a national paper can be a challenge, but when achieved, has huge credibility, adding benefits. Slightly softer targets, but not necessarily easy targets, are specialist trade press, which have the advantage of having a more targeted audience. PR opportunities come about as the result of having something compelling to say and building long-term relationships with journalists.
Compared to a book, these options offer a much lower barrier to entry into the world of being published and improving your traction in relationship marketing.
