A promotional interview is a written interview conducted over a short period of time. The clear advantage of this type of interview is questions can be customized and careful reflection and consideration given prior to answering each question.

This means the interviewee is not under immediate pressure and has time to carefully think through her or his answers.

The promotional interview showcases you as an expert in your field or industry. It also gives a superb venue to promote the benefits of your products and services, promote your skills and capabilities as well as promote specific or branded products and services.

Clearly you don’t want to write, publish or distribute your own interview; interviewing yourself is tantamount to doing a self-serving commercial. For the interview to have credibility it needs to be promoted by someone other than yourself, your mate or your employee.

A good promotional interview is crafted to create a positive impression of you and your business. Because you control the content you can also use the interview to assist in upgrading your “look and feel” or image campaigns.

Think about the types of questions your prospects, customers and clients will want to know about your products and services.

While a good promotional interview can be similar to a FAQ or Frequently Asked Question, it is fundamentally different. A FAQ is often based on nuts and bolts issues about your products and services. Topics such as how to use your website are better addressed in a FAQ format.

First consider carefully the thrust of the interview and what you would like for it to accomplish. Use written questions and written answers. If you aren’t good with words, have your interviewer help you edit and refine your answers.

A sloppy, error ridden interview is worse than no interview.

The words and editing are important but what is most important are the ideas, concepts and abstractions you relay. Try to map out or write down your ideas and concepts before the interview. Try to stick to the bigger picture unless for good reasons the interview is focused on a narrow subject area.

Don’t forget to look at your online marketing keywords and even “long strings” to add to the interview. A skilled interviewer can work keywords and phrases into the interview text.

When the interview is published and distributed, these keyword and phrases will be picked up by the search engines and help you with your marketing search term domination campaigns.

Put the finished interview on your website, newsletter or blog. Put it anywhere you can and don’t forget to give the byline to the interviewer so that anyone that reads it will know you didn’t do it yourself.

Print hard copies off your website or a third party website to hand out in your office or store, mail out hard copies with invoices or include the interview in your media and public relations packet.

A good promotional interview can create mass media interest in you and your company; reporters and interviewers will not only find human interest hooks in a good interview but the interview also provides them with background detail meaning less work.

Mass media reporters are under great deadline pressures and anything you can do to help them is a plus.

As with all of your marketing collateral and materials think about the conversion or next step. Do you want your target market to phone, email, or stop by your office or store?

Remember that a good promotional interview generates interest and should give the reader a clear indication of how they can follow up with you on that interest.

Simply put, a good promotional interview can become a very powerful addition to your marketing tool chest.

jack deal conducts promotional interviews and is the owner of jd deal online marketing, santa cruz and monterey, ca. related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/marketing and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com/marketing

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