I ran my own IT support business for 8 years and often felt frustrated at my company’s inability to communicate regularly and effectively with clients.
We made various attempts at writing newsletters over the years. We even managed to get a few editions out to our customers. But with hindsight, I should never have attempted to produce it in-house. Looking back, it seems to me that whilst writing a company newsletter presents a serious challenge for any business, there are some particular reasons that make this task all the more difficult for IT firms.
Technical people are just not the best communicators in the world. We employed some very competent engineers, highly motivated young guys who always had one eye on emerging technologies. But they often seemed to miss a trick when trying to explain the benefits to customers.
When ADSL first came out, I remember asking one of our engineers why we should be recommending broadband to all of our customers. He spoke to me for 30 minutes about fixed IPs and network address translation (NAT) before mentioning the trifling detail that you could now make a phone call and be on the Internet at the same time. This was big news in 2000!
The other major challenge to any service-led organisation is that those pesky customers keep on hijacking your time. I would arrive at the office on a Monday morning with my head full of ideas for news articles and fully committed to writing our newsletter by the end of the week. But a couple of server crashes before Monday lunchtime always seemed to ensure my week took a different direction altogether.
An unrealistic task for most SMEs to perform in-house
These were just a few of the reasons that drove me to establishing the IT Marketing Factory when we sold our IT business in 2005. Keen writer and wannabe journalist that I was, I had come to the conclusion that news production was a full time job that needed to be outsourced.
What might appear to be a simple task is simply unrealistic for most small businesses to achieve in-house when one takes into account the time spent doing research, writing the articles, sourcing imagery, creating the email campaign and updating landing pages on your company website.
If you need help producing your own newsletter and you agree with this assessment, please get in touch on 01268 778555.
