Using email marketing as a method of brand building is so effective that many companies refrain from investing in other methods. This could well be a mistake. Missing out on simple and cheap ways of presenting your company to a much wider catchment is a fundamental error.

I edited a magazine. You are not interested in the problems that I, along with most other editors, suffered month after month, the biggest one of which was space-filling. It’s the perennial problem of those who chase advertisers and you’d think they would be more sympathetic towards the editor, but no.

The vast majority of magazines, even in the online age, have a minimum, if not a set, number of pages that require copy before they can be presented to the readership. No email marketing templates for us, each edition is a challenge in itself.

The problem of editors is something we can exploit. They need copy, we would like somewhere to present our company’s idea, and potential. Whether it’s a buyers’ or sellers’ market is immaterial; we have something they need. We are so used to products attracting consumers that it is easy enough for us to ignore other routes that have possibilities. Further, it’s as effective for B2B as it is for B2C.

You will, no doubt, be concerned about the price of producing copy that an editor will find attractive enough to place in a magazine in a prominent position. No worries. You, no doubt, go over the copy in a marketing email three or four times before pressing the send button. To do this for 1500 – 2500 words is just too much agony to contemplate. But you don’t have to.

All editors will tell you that all they require from copy is that it hits the wordage, does not go over the deadline, although that is nothing more than a dream for many, and is in passable English. Anything else is a bonus.

If you have something useful to say to the readers of a particular magazine, be it internal for your particular business, or aimed at consumers generally, you have something the editor wants to publish. All will let you include a link to a website, one where you will have a sign-up form for subscribing to your email marketing list. You can see the point I’ making.

There are some other requirements that most editors will demand, although negotiation is often an option. They want to be the first to publish the content. That means not on your website, even if it’s on an unfrequented page, and also if you have published it in a newsletter, then it is unlikely to be considered, and certainly not as a lead article.

Magazine adverts are often ignored, even, may be especially, if they are pop-ups. Articles tend to have at least their initial paragraph read by most and if you’ve targeted it correctly, they’ll read on. Unlike adverts, articles cost you nothing other than creation fees. They are an extremely useful adjunct to email marketing.