Fantasy: After a tough slog, your article has been published in HBR, a top trade journal, or a customer-facing publication that your company produces. You sit back, relieved. The hard part is over. Thousands of potential customers will now read it, and fabulous new leads will pour into your B2B company.

Reality: After a tough slog, your article has been published in HBR, a top trade journal, or a customer-facing publication that your company produces. Now the hard part begins. You must do the marketing and promotional outreach necessary to ensure that the right people actually read the article. If they don’t read it, they can’t act on it — and your company won’t see new sales inquiries, meetings, engagements, or revenue.

Skimp on the marketing and promotional outreach and your article, despite your hard work developing it, will likely slip into quiet oblivion. It happens all the time.

This is a lesson online journalists learn, some faster than others. Publishing your article guarantees nothing. It’s just a start. Use these seven marketing and promotional tactics to make sure your next published thought leadership article accomplishes more for the business:

1. Social Promotion: Think social outreach is just the marketing team’s job? That’s a mistake. (Don Draper of Mad Men fame would have had someone else do his social work for him. Don’t be Don Draper.) Social outreach works, and it requires more than the marketing team’s participation. Your company’s subject matter experts, the folks whose bylines appear on the article, have the best network of people in their area of expertise. Tap into those SME’s powerful social networks and, hopefully, their customers’ networks.

Your company’s subject matter experts should be using Twitter and LinkedIn at regular intervals for weeks after an article publishes, highlighting pieces of advice, pieces of data, and the like. These posts must convince potential customers that you understand the pain points: The full article should convince them you have unique solutions for solving those problems.

2. Speaking engagements: Published articles (especially in the likes of HBR) are credentials valued by people booking speakers for industry conferences and events. Use your article to help present your subject matter experts (or yourself, if you’re running a small firm) for the conferences that matter most to your customers. According to our research, conferences remain one of the best sources of sales leads for professional services firms.

3. Follow-on Articles: You have already separated yourself from the pack and won over an editor with your first article. Don’t waste the opportunity to pitch other article ideas to the same editor. Editors love ongoing relationships with smart contributors: These relationships save them from having to wade through reams of submissions from strangers. (We know. We’ve sat in editors’ chairs doing this job.) The care and feeding of this newly forged editorial relationship matters.

You can also use your article in publication A in a pitch email to convince the editor of publication B that you’re worthy of a shot. An editor who sees you made it through a tough editorial gauntlet will look at you in a different light. You’re no longer an amateur. In this way, you may be able to work your way up from regional or trade publications to a top-tier publication. (But make sure you’re pitching a distinctly different story; no editor wants a rehashed version of something that’s already been published elsewhere.)

4. Email outreach: Want to make sure your existing clients see the article you just got into HBR? Email your client list, with a brief description of the article, and a link to the full article on the publication’s site, soon after it publishes and ask clients to add their perspective on the problems discussed in the article in the comments. Editors love to see articles drive lots of social shares and comments. It makes their bosses happy, validates their editorial thinking, and they end up thinking more highly of the article’s author, which turns into opportunities for you to publish more articles. It’s a win-win for everybody.

5. Physical Mailing: For some clients, you may want to add a personal touch by emailing them a printed version of the piece, ideally with a personal note from you, a company leader, or a salesperson. Perhaps the article relates to a problem you’ve been speaking to company X about for months. Use the article to show them you’re not just talking through your hat. For other customers, perhaps the sales team is trying to rekindle a business relationship that’s cooled, or strengthen a budding one. Your article can help, if you put it to work.

6. Email tagline: How do you promote the article with every email that people in your company send? Add a link to your email block, noting the customer problem, and linking to the article. For example: “How should private equity firms evaluate CEOs? Read our/my HBR article.”

7. Homepage Promotion: Use the spaces on your home page, like “In The News” boxes or other available areas, to share the article. One client of ours even created a narrow banner that ran across the top of his solo consultancy’s home page touting his HBR article. Pretty nice first impression to give site visitors, isn’t it?

These seven strategies are not pie-in-the-sky theories. They’ve worked for our clients.