My latest podcast guest was Rory Brown, co-founder and CEO of AgriBriefing. He’s worked in senior positions in B2B publishing since the early 90s and has learnt lots along the way about what works and what doesn’t work in the world of publishing.
Based on our chat, here are ten tips for publishing success, all courtesy of Rory:
- Be user-first, platform-second: work out what your audience needs and then how best to deliver it; not vice versa.
- Study what happens immediately before and after a user uses your service. This will enable you to fine tune and possibly extend your offering.
- Be trustworthy. Trust is king, especially in the commodity pricing market AgriBriefing now operates in.
- Stay close to your customers.
- Understand their pain points: success in B2B is usually about helping your audience do their jobs better.
- Create a culture of continual improvement: you should be getting better and better at everything you do.
- Be ruthless about what not to do. “Good strategy is as much about what you don’t do, as what you do do.”
- Try and get ahead of your customers: being able to offer them things they don't yet know they need is a powerful place to be.
- Be a must-have: a salutary way of knowing this is by posing the question: “Would our customers miss us if our service was down for an hour?”
- Be a magpie: go off and collect good ideas; learn from the success of others, network with new up and coming businesses, be open and listen … and then apply what you’ve learnt to your own business.
Master these ten things and success is guaranteed, surely…
(One more thing, our next free webinar is this coming Tuesday – ‘10 Creative Ways Your Website Can Make More Money Today’. Find out more and register here.)
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
