Do you remember this writing assignment from grade school? I sure do. The teachers wanted to ease us back into schoolwork and describing our summer experiences seemed like a good way to get us reengaged in learning. This topic was so common as the first assignment when I was growing up, you could almost count on it. I recall thinking about what I’d have to write about while squeezing the last nuggets of fun out of the last days of August. Not that I actually wrote anything down—I wasn’t that eager to get back into school mode! But I did reflect on my summer experience.
Fast forward (way forward) to the fall of ’26 and here I am writing the same darn essay.
This summer marked a turning point for my content marketing business. I devoted most of my time to creating more personal, experience-driven material for companies in the print and mail industry. This was a significant shift from the content I produced when I first launched the company. Much of this summer’s work centered on writing books for my clients and several in-depth case studies.
We still do plenty of insight, educational, or analysis pieces for clients where we discuss a topic of interest to the target audience. Those pieces have value, but the proliferation of AI has made it easy to crank out that kind of article. Because of the volume of material published on popular topics, it has become more difficult to create material that makes a company stand out among its competitors. To influence potential customers today, companies are discovering they must take a different approach to establishing a reputation for trust and thought leadership.
AI Can't Do Your Case Studies
General industry insight pieces build brand awareness and introduce a degree of authority, but when a potential customer is ready to spend money, they want proof that their print and mail partner has solutions that produce results. They want to be comfortable with the people handling critical customer communications for them. Authentic stories about actual experiences are convincing arguments that lower risk and build confidence in the eyes of a customer. An AI-generated piece won’t include the very details that your customers are seeking.
A great case study highlights measurable results for customers. In the printing and mailing business, we often express the outcomes in terms like revenue growth, cost reduction, regulatory compliance, or customer experience improvements.
To really connect, customers look for stories about organizations that resemble themselves. This is why I recommend that print and mail service providers create at least one case study aimed at each vertical market they serve. Prospects will find it easy to identify and visualize their own success when reading case studies about companies of similar scale and with the same operational challenges.
What About Books?
A book about your company or profiling your leaders offers benefits that shorter content cannot. Nobody is going to read a 150-page white paper, but they expect more detail and information in a book, and they are willing to read it to learn. A book lets you expand on ideas or provide background information that you’d have to leave out of shorter materials.
Books also deliver instant status.
When you hand your book to a prospective customer, partner, or investor, it comes with the unspoken presumption that you and your organization offer superior expertise, knowledge, and experience. Writing a book is hard work, and it takes time. Most people aren’t willing to take on such a project, so those who do stand head-and-shoulders above the rest.
I wrote my first book after working with a young intern, teaching him the ins and outs of production printing for transactional documents. After stuffing his head full of knowledge that took me decades to acquire, he asked me where he could get the book on these topics. I chuckled and told him I’d let him know when I wrote it. That was a joke, but I realized that no such resource existed. This was before Xplor International published its Guide to the Electronic Document Body of Knowledge (EDBOK). It took a few years, but I eventually wrote the book that provided the credibility that encouraged clients to hire me as a consultant.
Handing a prospective customer a copy of your book will help them be confident in selecting your company as their print and mail supplier. The sense of authority generated by the book takes the risk out of the purchase decision.
Versatile Content
Evidence-based content, such as case studies and books, can become the basis for messaging and content you can use to promote your printing and mailing business throughout your marketing strategy. Use excerpts from these pieces to populate social media posts, slide carousels, blog articles, and videos. Print selections for the document stand in your lobby or use the material as collateral at events. Send portions to prospects as sales call follow-up material, or build a series of webinars around various case studies or chapters in the book.
The initial effort it takes to create these items pays off as you repurpose the material for years to come.
Fall Back? Not for Me!
It wasn’t a magical summer for me. I didn’t go to Disneyland or spend a week at summer camp, but it was tremendously fulfilling as I helped clients break through the onslaught of AI-generated thought leadership content. Going forward, we’ll be doing more projects that can give our content marketing clients something that AI cannot—actual true accounts that help them tell their stories to their audiences. I encourage you to do the same for your business.
Mike Porter at Print/Mail Consultants and PMC Content Services creates content that helps attract and retain customers for companies in the mailing and document industry, and he assists companies as they integrate new technology. He welcomes questions from Mailing Systems Technology readers. Reach out to him at www.pmccontentservices.com. Follow @PMCmike on X or send him a connection request on LinkedIn.
