Client interview: Chris Parke, Talking Talent
Chris Parke, founder of ubersuccessful consultancy Talking Talent, explains why newsletters are central to marketing a network-based business.
Chris, what’s the big deal about newsletters?
Talking Talent is growing fast – we are talking to new businesses and winning new accounts all the time. It’s all about who you know. The crunch for us is that there is not enough time to initiate and sustain a large number of relationships on a 1:1 basis. So our newsletter is the crucial way to grow a bank of prospects that we haven’t had the opportunity, or the time, to meet yet.
Our website is full of resources, articles and valuable content. It’s completely open access and we welcome hundreds of visitors every day for this reason. Our newsletter sign-up provides an opportunity for people to make themselves known to us. Without this, this large pool of visitors would be invisible – just statistics. Now they are real people in real companies that we can start a dialogue with.
We work hard on achieving exceptional press coverage and our newsletter is the perfect place to showcase the great things the press have written about our work.
How well are they working for Talking Talent?
They work extremely well! We write newsletters as often as we can – usually once each quarter. Our newsletter goes out to over 500 decision-makers in our specialist area and 1 in 15 recipients forwards the newsletter on to someone in their network. We also receive new subscriptions each time we send out a newsletter so the organic growth is very healthy.
Ok, you’re winning me over! Any top tips for making my newsletter as successful as yours?
The balance between showcasing ourselves and providing market insight is very important. If you’re not sure, err on the non-sales side.
Clear sections each month are a must – people respond well to a clearly signposted newsletter.
Take time to read and understand the statistics from each issue. It’s easy just to look at the overall click rate and skim over the detail. But the insight in the reports provides incredibly valuable information about how readers engage with the newsletter and also how individual contacts are responding.
Don’t get hung up on the timings – we publish whenever we can, but we don’t set a time-based expectation with recipients. In a busy consultancy that’s the only way to keep publishing. If we stuck rigidly to a time table we’d probably have given up long ago!