Collaborative Publishing Emerges as the Hottest Marketing Tool

By Scott Gerschwer, OutputLinks

“This year will see the emergence of the Attraction Economy. Driven by the fundamental shift in control from manufacturers and retailers to consumers, the future belongs to those who make emotional connections with them.”

---Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi

Forget for just one moment all the buzz about social media marketing, search optimization, affiliate and relationship marketing, multi-channel, mobile, Transpromo and all those other marketing hotties —collaborative, custom branded marketing is emerging as the hottest marketing tact in the world right now.

If the goal is to engage with consumers in a deeper, more meaningful way-- the key metric is not Return on Investment, but Return on Involvement. Getting customers more involved with your brand will lead to three outcomes:

• Greater satisfaction with the brand
• Greater likelihood to buy again
• Greater likelihood to recommend the brand to others.

How do you gain more customer involvement? What form can custom, collaborative publishing take? Print magazines, websites and web content, print newsletters, interactive digital collateral, e-newsletters, webcasts, podcasts and blogs should all be included in your multi-channel, custom-branded collaboratively published content.

So think of blogs, a very popular activity that attracts a great deal of readership. Blogs are good because they tend to be highly focused, concise and easy to read quickly, whether at the desktop or on a mobile device. In fact your average blog is probably the longest piece of content you should be sending to any person’s mobile device.

But the individual blogs can then be gathered together and re-purposed into longer, more detailed articles. Gather enough articles together and you can create an entire magazine to be sent through whatever channel to your customers. There’s no waste. The communication builds upon itself and leads to deeper, more in-depth communication.

In other words, it builds a relationship.

If you work with the right strategic, knowledgeable collaborative publisher, the impact on your brand can be tremendous.

People enjoy a good read; it deepens your relationship with your customer.

People enjoy getting to know characters—as your blogger becomes familiar to the reader a bond is formed.

People enjoy a good laugh—your blog can reflect a sense of self-deprecating humor that makes the brand seem almost human and makes it easier for the reader to emotionally bond with—always a key aspect of branding.

So imagine not having to worry about getting that blog out so you can concentrate on your core strengths. Imagine having a partner who is dedicated to helping you succeed, who is strategic and tactical and anxious to please you. Imagine going to bed each night knowing that your customers are getting a message from you and may be thinking of you just as you are thinking of them.

If this sounds good to you, if this “sounds like a plan,” consider talking to Andy Plata or myself about designing a program for you. With OutputLinks as your collaborator you’ll have a larger audience, the content creation will be less time-consuming, the collaborators well-versed in your business-- and you can count on a regular, reliable timetable for the content to be released: the eNewsletter is sent out every Tuesday.

You’ll benefit from working with a partner with substantial capabilities in terms of strategy, editorial and design resources, database marketing, production, printing, programming and analytics.

And best of all your customers will love you for it. 

Let us know what you think. E-mail: press@OutputLinks.com.