Using Credible Articles to Improve Marketing Efforts

Credible articles are effective at driving leads for B2B and technology companies. Credible articles on your website and in popular trade and top-tier business publications can position your brand and thought leaders as industry experts, building confidence about your company, expertise and products among customers, analysts and potential employees.

Best Practices for Creating Credible Articles

Articles written in haste or that merely tout the virtues of your product do not qualify as effective, credible articles. For meaningful results, you need to approach the creation of credible articles strategically, and adhere to several best practices:

• Define Your Audience: These are the people you want to read your credible articles. Your target audience can consist of both internal and external stakeholders but it’s important to start out by defining your audience. That way, you can ensure you are tailoring your credible articles to your audience’s specific needs and interests.
• Create Targeted Messaging: What are the key messages you want to get across in your credible articles for each audience? You should have a list of key messages to reference and guide the creation of credible articles and ensure business objectives are aligned.
• Choose Topics With Your Audience in Mind: Credible articles do not just advertise your company value statement. Instead, credible articles should offer value to your readers on a topic they care about. For example, if you are an e-commerce software company, you could write credible articles on the key features and functionality a retail website should include. You can also weigh in on recent trends or studies that are being discussed in major news outlets and trade publications.
• Maintain Tone Consistency: Before jumping into writing credible articles, you need to establish your brand persona and tone. Whether you are positioning your brand as pensive and serious, or fun and sassy, you will need to decide this in advance to ensure consistency throughout your marketing collateral.
• Create a “Hit List” of Media Targets: Your target outlets should include a mix of major business publications and lead-generating trade publications. It’s most important to choose outlets that your audience is reading to place your credible articles in. This will ensure you are reaching qualified prospects and other key stakeholders.
• Pitch Relevant Reporters Your Ideas for Credible Articles: To get your credible articles published, you will need to reach out to reporters to pitch your story idea. It’s important to only pitch reporters who cover your industry and are relevant to your story topic. You should never pitch a food blogger a story idea about enterprise software. Additionally, keep your pitch emails short and concise. With shrinking newsrooms, reporters are busier than ever.
• Proofread and Quality Check: You should always create high quality credible articles and ask someone else to review your work before submitting to the editor. When you turn in high quality pieces that need few to no revisions from the editor, the publication will be more likely to accept future credible articles from your company.

Leveraging Credible Articles to Drive Sales

At Walker Sands, we specialize in helping fast-growing companies leverage credible articles to achieve critical business and sales goals. However, credible articles alone will not drive meaningful business results. They are just one component of an integrated marketing strategy.

As a key piece of the marketing mix, credible articles offer a unique opportunity to further engage your key audiences and stakeholders, while driving leads and traffic back to your website. This is where the other components of your marketing plan need to shine. When a customer comes to your site as a result of an article she read, your website content and calls to action need to be as compelling as the article itself to turn visits into action.