A great buzz piece can make marketing much easier. A report or a white paper can turn cold calls into warm calls — just offer to send prospective customers a free report about their industry. A few weeks later, you can follow up and start discussing business. That same report can get you inbound links from blogs and news sites covering your industry. It can even help establish you as an expert — someone for the media to contact with questions.
To achieve all of that, though, your buzz piece has to be absolutely spot on. Whether it takes the form of a report, a tip list or even a workbook, you have to make it as effective as possible. These tips can help you prepare the best buzz piece you can.
- Be relevant to your customers: You may have a list of ideas that you would find incredibly interesting, but you have to make sure that your buzz pieces are interesting to your prospective clients, not just to you. If, for instance, you sell sporting goods, you might find a report on which brands sell best to be very interesting. But your customers would much rather see tips on getting their gear ready for next season. If you aren’t sure, ask a couple of your existing customers if they’d be interested in reading the buzz piece you’re putting together.
- Hire help, if you need it: You may think that putting together your buzz piece all on your own is the best route, but there is value to be had from hiring someone for at least part of the work. A designer, for instance, can make sure your buzz piece doesn’t look like it was put together in Microsoft Word. There’s a world of difference that taking a document out of Microsoft Word can provide.
- Don’t just rehash old information: A few buzz pieces are little more than compilations of statistics easily found anywhere. Even if you aren’t in the position to do original research on the topic you’re writing about, you have to add something to the buzz piece. Analyze the data you’re including, if nothing else.
- Make your buzz piece available for free: When I say free, I mean it. I’m not just talking price, although no good buzz piece comes with a price tag. It shouldn’t come with strings attached, either. The temptation may be to request contact information from anyone who wants to download it, but even something as simple as a request for a name and email address can derail many prospective readers. Instead, make it very easy for a reader to follow up with you. Include all of your contact information in your buzz piece.
- Push your piece yourself: Putting a truly amazing report online is no guarantee that anyone will actually look at it. However, if you start getting it out to people who will actually care about the contents, such as bloggers who cover your industry, you can quickly build up the buzz that was your goal in the first place.
Image by Flickr user Foreign and Commonwealth Office
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