Good Read on Custom Publishing

BtoB, a magazine on marketing, has a good article by my colleague Karen Bannan about custom publishing. It's always smart to understand what motivates clients, and this gives some good insight:

• Custom content can be cheaper than traditional advertising, particularly for b-to-b when you're considering the difference between producing a white paper and taking an ad. The former probably has a longer shelf life and the company is freer in how it distributes the content.


• Companies have greater ease in creating different versions of content for different demographics. (Wouldn't surprise me to learn that if a company actually included an ad for itself that it might test different versions, and then use what it learned for a national roll-out.)


• Digital media has become a big growth area. (If you don't have credits writing for the web, get them now - and better if you learn some HTML and other pertinent technology as well.) Clients are also treating digital largely as additional activity, not as replacement for print, particularly as they have to use regular marketing to drive people to the digital.


• Search engine optimization is becoming increasingly important, because that's how companies get people to know about the content. (Getting this right is far more complex and subtle than adding a handful of keywords, so find some references to the subject and learn about it.)

One weakness in the article was the research stating the growth of custom publishing - that 29.4 percent of business-to-business marketing budgets were being directed to the activity. The problem is that the research was from BtoB and Junta42. The latter is a company that matches custom publishers and marketers. (My bet is that the "research" use was mandated, given that the publisher was involved.) Then there is the study from the Custom Publishing Council and Publications Management saying that the "average U.S. business spends $912,532 on custom publishing or content marketing activities." That "average" must be of pretty large companies to have that amount available for custom publishing. At the same time, if that is a bias in the methodology, who cares? If that's the group paying for custom content, than those are the people you're looking at, if you're working in that market.