Dec 06 2009
E-newsletters versus Blogs for new business and relationship building
We publish a monthly e-newsletter called The NMC Report that focuses on the intersection between public relations and the Web. Since my agency was founded in 1991 purely as a public relations firm, and has grown from there into a full-service Web site development, Marketing Communications and Internet Marketing agency, we use our e-newsletter to share our knowledge and expertise with our readers.
If you have been reading this blog for any period of time, you know that the Maine PR Maven blog focuses on social media, public relations and my life in general as a PR “maven” who works and lives in Maine. It’s a bit more personal and informal than our e-newsletter which is written by members of my staff as well as me personally.
What’s the difference between our e-news and my blog? I consider the e-news to be a monthly ’soft sell’ of our agency’s services and a way to build a relationship over time with a prospective client. Whereas I consider this blog to be my way of positioning myself as a PR and Marketing professional.
The e-news is a bit more proactive because it comes out regularly every month, regardless of what else is going on. I update this blog periodically but not on any set schedule. I’m not as rigid about updating the blog as I am about publishing the e-newsletter.
This is how I treat my e-newsletter and blog, and how I look at the difference between the two. If you do one of each, please chime in here and tell me what the difference is between the two for you and your business. When it comes down to it, a blog is really a “Content Management System” style of Web site that can be simply updated by a non-technical person, so it can be anything you want it to be. And an e-news is a piece of e-mail marketing that lands in peoples’ inboxes on any timetable you determine. There again, an e-news can take any form you want.
I use Wordpress for my blog and Constant Contact for my e-newsletters.
If you’d like to sign up for The NMC Report and check out the difference between this blog and our e-news, go to www.marshallpr.com and sign up for the newsletter.
Please do chime in here with your thoughts and feedback. I look forward to hearing what you think abut e-newsletters versus blogs. Do you have one, the other, both….or neither?
I actually have a blog and newsletter.
My blog is on a 5 day publishing schedule with a few regular features that people can expect: Marketing Mondays, Too Cute Tuesdays, and This Week In Business. I use the other two days to write about what I feel like writing about related to money, business, and being in Maine. I publish my blog with the MyBlog component of Joomla but if I could do it all again, I’d set the whole thing up in Wordpress.
My newsletter is published every two weeks. I use it to highlight articles I’ve posted on my business Facebook page, talk about other businesses I’ve come into contact with, and other general information not just about social media but about business online. In the newsletter, I encourage people to read the blog or otherwise interact through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. The newsletter is much more of a sell than the blog. I use MailChimp for my email services because it’s free if you have less than 500 contacts. Also since you can export your contact list out as an Excel file (and a few other formats too), I know that if I need more or different services, I am not losing anything if I need to make the change.
I’m using the blog and the newsletter to build my brand and both end up being pretty useful exercises in connecting with people. :^)