Web and Email Publishing
Best Practices

setting the goals, strategy and leverage of a best practices web and email publishing program

With the internet’s increasingly ubiquitous presence in the world and the proliferation of “social media” technologies such as YouTube and MySpace®, it has become vitally important that companies utilize the web to fully communicate the depth and breadth of their company’s expertise.

Central to this effort is the development and deployment of a sound web and email publishing program; one that is designed to cover the full scope of customers and services, including all markets and lines of business, and is strategically designed to appeal to a number of key target audiences: clients, prospects, partners, media and other stakeholders.

This article summarizes the goals, strategy and leverage of a best practices web and email publishing program.

Goals

The goals of your web and email publishing program might include:

• Delivering more value to and deepening relationships with existing customers while educating them on the breadth and depth of a company’s full set of capabilities and services

• Enhancing business development efforts with new prospects and supporting a range of other marketing and reputation building activities

• Reinforcing and enhancing the company’s position as an expert and thought leader in each of its markets and lines of business

• Leveraging the power and efficiency of the web and email to maximize the value and return on investment of the publishing program.  

Strategy

In our experience, it is best to start this kind of program in a relatively simple way, and then add sophistication and complexity over time. This way you will generate short term benefits for the program, get organizational buy-in, and build on lessons learned with a “continuous improvement” mindset. 

To define the initial program strategy, follow these important steps:

1. Understand your business and the goals of the program.
   Your web and email publishing program must reflect and communicate your product market strategy, positioning and thought leadership. Defining the goals of the program typically requires input from several key people within the company to collaboratively develop and review the program plan.
   
   
2. Evaluate your competitors’ web and email publishing programs
   for lessons learned and to identify areas where you can offer greater value. 
   
   
3. Take an internal survey to gather a range of inputs and perspectives from selected professionals within your
   organization, such as suggested topics and publication
   frequency.
   
   
4. Develop your publishing plan. Based on your goals, external competitive analysis and internal survey, develop the publishing plan to define elements such as:
   
   
   • The role the publishing program will play within the company’s marketing and business development efforts 
     
     
   • Target audiences
      
   • Content and topics, and how to handle the matrix of products and markets
     
     
   • Guidelines to the various types of content, and the length and format of each.
     
     
   • The range of Web 2.0 functionality to be employed, such as blogs, podcasts, video, wikis, RSS feeds, social networking and social media optimization.
     
     
   • Branding and visual design
     
     
   • The range of email publication to offer, and the objective, frequency, target audience, content and format of each
     
     
   • A resource section of your website, and the architecture, content and functionality available to the user
     
     
   • The range of content authors, and to what extent content will be balanced between internally- and externally-produced content 
     
     
   • Subscription policy (freely available, available free to clients, paid subscriptions, etc.)
     
     
   • How member subscription and profile updates will be handled

Leverage

The web and email publishing program can play a valuable role in supporting and enhancing a number of other marketing initiatives. These include:

• Speaking engagements – securing speaking engagements for your professionals at relevant conferences and trade shows based on the valuable content developed for the publishing program

• Seminars and webinars – developing customer events based on topics created for the publishing program

• Media coverage – repurposing content as articles and programs to secure wide range online, print and broadcast media coverage 

• Content syndication – syndicating your content across third party websites

• Search engine marketing – maximizing your visibility in the search engines

• Social media marketing – maximizing your visibility in the emerging social media. 

Insights is Blue Mine Group’s monthly thought leadership publication on marketing innovation. 

For more nformation,
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