Vendor-neutral articles should be an important part of your marketing mix because they build positive recognition, position you as a thought leader, and yield highly qualified leads.
Writing vendor-neutral articles for trade journal magazines is a time-honored activity for technology companies. The field has certainly changed over the years as many publications have folded, been acquired and folded, or have gone purely online with mixed results. The good news is that since nearly every publication does have an online presence, your vendor-neutral article can have a real impact on your search rankings. You can also reprint and/or link to them for even better positive promotion.
If it’s vendor-neutral how does it work?
A vendor-neutral article is not a brochure or a press release. Best practices are to mention additional vendors as well as yourself, and even then the focus of the article will be on the technology field and not on your product.
So what good is it? It’s good because the article strongly positions the technology you are selling. Let’s say your product is called DiskEase, a software that tracks disk capacity, automatically provisions another disk at a preset capacity threshold, and then migrates data to the new disk. You won’t mention DiskEase in the article at all, let alone detail your product. What you will do is position your particular technology for capacity tracking and automatic provisioning as the answer to storage administrator nightmares without ever coming out and saying that it is your approach.
Shift scene to an engineer has been losing sleep at night because he can’t provision his disks on time, leading to network downtime and over-provisioning issues. He picks up the magazine, reads the article, and goes to your website to see if this technology will solve his problem. Of course it will, and he’ll contact you.
Leveraging High-Tech Bylined Articles
Another beauty of bylined articles is that you can leverage them. Here are some possibilities:
- Reprints
- White papers
- Booklets
- Speech outline and handouts
Reprints
Reprints are good things: they significantly increase your exposure to the market. Make sure you use the reprints anywhere you can including your website, press kits, presentation handouts and conference take-aways. Be sure to work out reprint rights with the publishing magazine, preferably beforehand. Paper reprints used to be quite expensive, but publications are usually reasonable about online rights, since posted reprints with links increases their inbound traffic.
White Papers
Don’t use the as-is published article as a white paper, articles are structured differently from white papers and you’ll run into copyright issues. Instead use the article text to form the technology section of a white paper. Edit it to highlight customer benefits since you don’t have to be vendor-neutral for your own white paper, and add white paper sections around it executive summaries, problem statements, in-depth product/technology information, etc.
Ebooks
Ebooks are common and for good reason: they explain your technology, proof, and clear customer advantages in a reader-friendly format. Use the ideas in your trade journal article to form the core of the ebook.
Speech Outlines and Handouts
Use existing articles as the basis for client speeches and presentations. Since trade journal articles are usually vendor-neutral, they’ll work for conference talks too. When the presentation is about a product you can still use the article outline for the background technology and analysis then add product details, customer case studies, and Q&As.
Want to see more? Check out a few of the articles I’ve written for clients.