Becoming An Industry Guru – Articles

When you’ve sent out a variety of press releases, so that editors have been able to build up an image of a sound company that knows its technology and its marketplace, it will be time to think about trying to place articles with some of your key target publications.

What you are looking for are opportunities to put one of your people in front of your marketplace as an expert in his field – an industry guru – with all the prestige that this can gain for your company in the eyes of your customers.First, let’s be clear what we mean by the word ‘article’.

A surprisingly large number of people, when they first become involved with press relations, refer to press releases as articles. You mustn’t be one of them, particularly when talking to a journalist, because there’s a world of difference between the two.As we have seen in previous pages, a press release is a relatively short piece (200-250 words, perhaps) announcing a single item of news; it will be sent out to a whole raft of publications. On the other hand, an article may vary in length between about 750 and 2,000 words; it will be exclusive to one publication, and will probably take an in-depth look at, say, a particular technology or the way a market is developing. If it looks at a specific problem and the way it was solved it’s called a case study, or case history, and we’ll deal with them in the next chapter.

To get an article published there are three steps you must take. These are:

Find a specific opportunity for an article.
Persuade an editor to take it.
Write it in a way that the editor will find acceptable.

Finding Article Opportunities

Features Lists

The best way to find an opportunity for an article is by monitoring your key magazines’ features lists. You may remember reading about features monitoring in Chapter 3, and perhaps you are monitoring them already. However, if it didn’t fully register at the time, please mark this page, nip back to page 21, read it afresh, and return.

Welcome back!

Your magazines’ features lists should provide a whole cornucopia of goodies to choose from. Throughout the year a food industry magazine, for example, will plan features on almost any subject you can think of – ingredients, hygiene, meat processing, dairy products, packaging materials, conveyors, bag filling, labelling, computerised management systems, quality control procedures, refrigerated distribution, protective clothing, etc. Somewhere in your trade magazines’ annual features lists there are bound to be subjects on which your company can provide well-informed expert opinion.

Go With A Running Topic

As well as studying features lists, try to read your key magazines regularly. Apart from their planned feature subjects, one or more of them may have rabbited on over two or more issues about a particular subject which their editors obviously find interesting. Could one of your people make a useful contribution to the debate?

Meet The Deadline

Do please note what we said earlier about the need to meet deadlines. Take action in good time, remembering to allow plenty of time for the actual writing of the article. However well-informed they may be, very few busy people who are not professional writers would be able to produce 1,500 words of informative and polished copy in less than about three or four days. So if the absolute deadline is the day after tomorrow, it’s probably best to forget that one and go for something later in the year.

By the way, here’s a useful tip on deadlines. If the features list shows a copy deadline date that is very close–or if you are struggling to meet an already agreed deadline–an editor may be prepared to stretch it by a few days. Many editors have a natural inclination to give themselves a little more leeway than strictly necessary. Even so, please don’t ask for more time unless you really need it, and always ask as early as possible. Better to earn a reputation for reliability than for regular cliff-hanging!