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Tip: Outsource the production of newsletters, bookalogs, ad copy, sales letters and other promotional content. Alternatively, you can delegate these tasks to a separate, independent department in your company, usually within the Public Relations, Marketing or Corporate Communications.Strategic Benefit: You save time and money, inject efficiency and objectivity in the process, and benefit from the experience and skill set of an outside group. You still retain control over the content and editorial proclivity of the final content, because in-house teams will still review it and fix inaccuracies and incompleteness before ultimate publication.
Tip: Involve your IT people early on in the content production process, so that they can explore everything from platform compatibility to content embedding.Strategic Benefit: You get insights in the post-creation phase of the content, especially when it comes to designing it; testing its compatibility with various content-publication formats; ensuring responsive publication ; and embedding things like audio content, videos, graphs and charts in the final branded material.
Remember that in a YouTube era, your content can exist in video format and produce additional good press for your company or yourself over a long period. Based on Bit.ly research, corporate content’s half-life depends on the platform on which it is shared, varying from Twitter (2.8 hours) and Facebook (3.2 hours) to email/IM clients (3.4 hours) and YouTube (7.4 hours).
Tip: Be visual. Add photos to your newsletters and other branded content, and place the pictures strategically.Strategic Benefit: You augment your content’s popularity exponentially. According to Track Social, Facebook posts featuring pictures get 120% more engagement than text updates. And the rise of social networks like Instagram, Pinterest and Vine is pushing content sharing to another level—the visual level.
You also generate more buzz around your content by strategically placing images in your e-newsletters, sales letters, e-books and magalogs. Effective image placement is very friendly to search engines, which reward marketers who position images at the top of the page and as close to the headline as possible.
Tip: Make your audience laugh.Strategic Benefit: Your newsletter is most likely to be shared—and go viral—if you attune it to human emotion. Humor injects life into your branded material and strongly helps you engage with your target publics. Popular ways to add humor to your content include memes, comics and videos.
Tip: Think proactively about the mobile market.Strategic Benefit: Depending on your readers, consumers and other target publics, you may not feel the need to publish your newsletters and other branded content on handheld devices. However, doing so may be disadvantageous given the growing number of users who view content online and share it via mobile platforms
Tip: Produce well-rounded, compelling branded contentand make sure the narrative not only promotes your product or service perfectly, but that it also paints a rosy yet objective picture of your personal or company’s future.Strategic Benefit: Your branded content will certainly be read, viewed and heard by consumers and other interested publics who may have substantial stakes in your personal or company’s future. But you also want to expand the readership, using the newsletter, ad copy or sales letter as an extra publicity medium. Produce content that is engaging and relevant for readers to pass it on and on and on.
Tip: Reformat your newsletter and other promotional content for social-media “standards,” using a killer title and eye-catching tidbits to attract users and promote the content’s sharing power and virality .Strategic Benefit: The more your branded material is shared, the more PR rewards you reap. Remember, you choose the newsletter’s content, so whatever is shared can only benefit you and your company. Draw readers to your newsletters, bookalogs and magalogs with incisive summaries, links and sharing options across platforms as diverse as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and emails.
A joint study by ShareThis, Starcom MediaVest and Rubinson Partners found that the clickthrough rates were as follows: Facebook (38%), email (17%), Twitter (10%) and other link types (34%).
Tip: Explore low-cost yet efficient archiving and retrieval options.Strategic Benefit: By opting for a secure, reliable and cost-effective storage solution, you take efficient steps to comply with relevant legislation and industry edicts. You also can tap into prior-year data when developing future branded content, as well as use previous information to feed content to other platforms, including your website and blogs.
Tip: Link all your newsletters, sales copy and other branded content to your website or other online tools.Strategic Benefit: You save time, resources and money by automatically updating data across multiple platforms. This is an important aspect of data curation.
Tip: Post your newsletters and other material on social media. Then track what readers of your branded content are talking about, and why they are talking about it.Strategic Benefit: You get valuable insight about keywords or phrases generating buzz around your corporate or personal brand, and can use the feedback to improve future communication. You can use internally developed tracking tools—such as traffic, clickthrough rates or number of downloads—or features provided by third parties like Facebook.
For example, the giant social network has recently unveiled two tools—Public Feed API and Keywords Insights API—that will help users display real-time feeds of public posts featuring certain words, as well as anonymous results by location, age and gender. (See the below snapshot for NFL data extracted from Facebook, showing insights from around the world on September 10, 2013.)
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