Before you can write an effective headline for your white paper, you need to understand the purpose of the headline. As I mentioned briefly in my last post, a white-paper headline must perform two functions: help your readers find your white paper online and entice them to open it.
Help readers find your paper online
Your title should ensure that IT buyers looking for solutions to specific problems early in their buying cycle (that you address) find your white paper on the web.
Now, it’s true that not every buyer will find your white paper on the web. In some cases, a salesperson might hand a prospect a white paper at a trade show or onsite meeting. In other cases, you might run a lead-generation or lead-nurturing campaign and use the white paper as your offer. You might even issue a press release with a link to publicize your white paper.
However, in addition to publicizing your white paper using these “push” marketing methods, you’ll also want to place your white paper on the web where people can find it. People actively look for information on the web and you need to be in a place where these potential buyers, who you’re probably not even aware of, are looking so they can find you. That means posting your white paper on your website as well as online library sites such as Knowledgestorm and TechTarget.
Your title should help your “pull” marketing efforts by ensuring your paper be found in these locations. This means you’ll need to find the keywords people are most likely to use to find your paper and include them in your title. I’ll talk about this more in a later post.
Entice people to open your paper
Once someone has the white paper in his or her hands, it’s up to the title to get them to read it. As I said last time, on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. The better your headline, the greater your odds that people will open your white paper to read the rest.
To get people to take this next step, according to Robert W. Bly in his book The Copywriter’s Handbook, headlines must perform four functions:
1. Get attention—You have five seconds to grab the reader’s attention with your title. You can get attention for a B2B audience by using words like: Improve Sales, Reduce Costs, Competitive Advantage, Results. Headlines that offer useful information are also attention getters. I’ll discuss more ways your white paper headlines can get attention later in this series.
2. Select the audience—If you want qualified leads, you want to make sure that only people interested in your product read your white paper. If you’re targeting a particular problem for a particular role or industry, make sure to make that clear in your headline:
o Nextance Solutions for the Pharmaceutical Industry: Managing Outsourced Clinical R&D Efficiently and Effectively
o Improve Customer Centricity through Collaboration Across the Extended Retail Enterprise
o Agile Policy Issuance and Administration
3. Deliver a complete message—Since 80 percent of people will only read your headline and not your body copy, you want to make sure that these readers get a complete message. When I write a white paper, I usually ask clients to tell me the one most important message they want people to come away with after reading the paper and use that in my headline.
o Enhance Your Business Performance by Following Best Practices in Contract Management
o Improve FISMA Compliance and IT Security
o Efficiently Transport High Definition Content While Maintaining its Original Quality
4. Draw the reader into the body copy—If you’re writing a white paper, it’s usually because you want to sell a complex product or service. And that means your reader needs a lot of information. The headline must compel the reader to read the rest of the white paper to get this information. To draw the reader into the body copy, you must arouse his or her curiosity. For a white paper, you can ask a question or make a provocative statement, promise news or useful information. Again, we’ll discuss this in greater detail in future posts.
o 10 Steps to Litigation Readiness
o Archiving Best Practices: 9 Steps to Successful Information Lifecycle Management
o Why Investing in Workforce Management Positions You for Growth
What Headlines Aren’t
You’ll notice that not once in this discussion have I mentioned the need to write clever or cute headlines. The purpose of headlines is not to be clever, but ultimately drive your readers to read your paper and ultimately consider your product. If you can be clever in a way that clearly communicates your message in a memorable manner, that’s great. But clever headlines that do not convey a full message will not work.
What is your opinion on the purpose of headlines?
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