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Best Practices: Building Brand Integrity
and Thought Leadership with Article Marketing

Whether your organization is a tech startup, SMB or global enterprise, developing by-lined articles and placing them in digital and traditional publications is a powerful tool for distinguishing your brand and promoting products, services and new platforms. By-lined articles help raise the profile of key executives and establish thought leadership in emerging fields. Unlike paid advertisements or sales collateral, articles possess a high degree of editorial credibility.

Every organization, product and service provider has great stories to tell, and there are more media outlets for business articles than ever before. Whether your article is about a unique corporate culture, an exciting new solution or a customer success story - there are hundreds of publications, e-zines and online syndications that are eager to print good content.

Key Benefits of Article Marketing

Here are some of the organizational advantages of marketing with articles:
  • Build your brand: A well-written article positions your company and its executives as thought leaders in your industry. By publishing on international sites, your message reinforces your brand identity and boosts the perception of your company around the world.
  • Promote products and services: By including real-life scenarios and success stories, articles can be used to highlight specific products, technologies, or quality of service.
  • Educate prospects and clients: Articles introduce new prospects to your organization, inform them about new initiatives and service offerings.
  • Low cost: Once the article is written, it can be published in a number of newspapers, magazines, e-zines, and online syndications - many are free, some charge on a nominal fee.
  • Long legs: Your articles will be read for months after initial publication and can be reprinted anywhere in the world. Editors searching for relevant content may contact you asking for permission to reprint your article.
  • Back links: By including your organization's web site address in the article you increase the links to your site. Additional links to your site improves organic search engine optimization. For example, if you have five articles and submit them to 10 different sites, that's 50 extra links.

Article Marketing Best Practices

Here are best practices that you can use to improve the quality of your articles and build a robust article marketing program:

1 . Select strong, relevant topics : Build a list of article ideas that includes your organizations key messages and features tangible benefits of your solutions, including success stories and metrics.

2. Plan an article program : Once you have developed a list of relevant topics, plan to compose and distribute articles on a regular basis. A strong article marketing program should target 10 to 12 articles per year.

3. Use your best and brightest storytellers : Communicating the intrinsic value of your technology and solutions is a key to the success of any published article. It's important to use not only product and technical experts in composing an article, but include the person(s) who can offer anecdotes and scenarios that professional writers can use in composing articles.

4. Demonstrate thought leadership : Articles should display expertise in current market/industry conditions as well as express a vision for future developments. Thought leadership may also be expressed by challenging current issues and offering innovative, high level solutions.

5. Support articles with recent research : Including statistics from respected sources and quotes from industry luminaries adds credibility and elevates your articles with valuable information that is appreciated by readers.

6. Target publications for distribution : Create a list of relevant online and print publications for your articles. Industry trade organizations, technology news sites, and even top-rated blogs should be considered.

7. Schedule articles for distribution : Building a reasonable timetable that allows time for interviews, composing drafts, revisions and distribution keeps your program on track.

8. Use professional writers : Why present your expertise with a mediocre story? Seasoned writers can transform your organization's unique knowledge and vision into a compelling story that engages readers with strong headlines and high-quality writing.

If you don't have a professional writer on staff, McLellan Creative's team of seasoned technology writers is available to interview your organization's experts, compose articles for publication and assist with getting your article marketing off the ground.

Contact McLellan Creative