High-Tech Communicator

What B2B Content Marketers Can Learn from Niche Publications

When the personal computer industry burst onto the scene, so did a raft of new trade publications. And IT buyers scoured their pages for help with their purchase decisions.

Today, many of these publications are struggling, not because IT buyers don’t see incredible value in their pages, but because they’ve failed to find ways to monetize their services in the Internet age. Yet, buyers remain as hungry for content as always. And marketers that provide valuable content —especially when they do so for free—are reaping the benefits.

According to a recent study by ITSMA, “How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2010: The New Buyer Paradox,” nearly 60% of respondents said that idea-based content plays an important or critical role in determining which providers make it into their short lists. And if providers go farther and use thought leadership to help companies clarify their business needs and suggest solutions, 30% of this group said they would consider sole-sourcing the deal.

Since marketing departments are new to content creation, they can learn valuable lessons from the pros of content creation—those niche publishers. Here are some tips from the pros:

Find out what readers are looking for.

Publications are obsessed with what their readers think.  When I was at PC Magazine in the late 80s, our mission was to help companies make purchase decisions—so we could sell ads to the companies trying to reach those decision makers. We did extensive surveys of readers to determine how they made purchase decisions, and we made sure that each page helped with that process. As a result, the editors shifted the focus of the magazine away from general interest articles about the new (at the time) technology and began doing hard-core comparative product reviews that would directly help companies make their decisions. Other publications surveyed readers on their interest level in various topics. At still others, we conducted extensive focus groups on readers’ interest in various types of articles.

Draw the reader in.

Publications understand that if a piece doesn’t immediately pique a reader’s interest, the reader simply won’t read further. Therefore, they always work to make sure each article has an enticing headline, subhead, and lead paragraph that would pull the reader in. For more information on what makes a headline enticing, see our six-part series on headlines.

Make sure your content is easy to read.

At PC Magazine, we had vast armies of writers and editors intent on making sure all the copy was conversational, easy to understand and error-free. Once a writer turned in an article, a so-called “line editor” often completely rewrote the copy to ensure it made sense and flowed logically. An executive editor then reviewed the text. Next, several “copy editors” looked at each individual line of copy for clarity, style consistency, spelling, and so on. Finally, at least two proofreaders would review each article for typos.

Write for scan ability.

Each article in publications always contain attractive elements that help the headline, subhead, and lead paragraph pull the reader in. These include interesting pull quotes, lots of charts and graphs, and captions. At PC Magazine we also created fact files about each product, which were short summaries of our reviews. These elements allowed readers to skim the article as they quickly flipped through it and still come away with the main points. If readers were intrigued by any of these elements, they would read the article to learn more.

By stealing these techniques from trade publications, marketers can better fulfill the information needs of their customers. And as research shows, by giving customers vital information, companies are more likely to land on the short list when it comes time for customers to purchase a product.

Has your company adopted publishing techniques?

Increase Your White Paper ROI

There’s no doubt about it, white papers take considerable time, effort, and money to produce. Luckily, you can get a significant return on that investment if you know how to make the most of your white papers by repurposing them.  

Here are a few ways you can use the white papers themselves or repurpose the content in them:

• Email campaigns—Many B2B companies use white papers as a valuable “offer” for email marketing campaigns. These campaigns might be designed to either generate awareness or nurture leads that are not quite ready to make a purchase. Many B2B buyers are interested in downloading these white-paper offers because they provide valuable information.
• Webinars—Organizations often either base their webinar on the content in their white paper and/or they will provide a white paper as a “Thank You,” providing attendees with a takeaway after the webinar is over.
• Newsletters—Companies often use email newsletters as a way to keep in touch with existing customers to generate add-on sales or to nurture new leads. White papers can be the source of content for newsletter articles. For example, you can condense all or part of the white paper to create a newsletter article and then provide a link to the original.
• Trade journal articles—You can also shorten thought-leadership white papers into articles that can be published in a trade magazine. While the number of these magazines (and often the space in them) is smaller than it has been in years past, trade magazines still exist and continue to provide third-party validation and credibility for your ideas.
• Sales leave-behind—White papers that contain thought leadership or educational content make good leave-behinds for the sales force.
• Website—Because potential customers see white papers as providing valuable information, they’re often willing to register for them on your website, providing you with valuable contact information. (When using this technique, however, it’s advisable to use as short a registration form as possible to avoid annoying people.) 
• Aggregation networks—Many content-aggregation networks, such as the Tech Target Network, provide white papers on specific topics from a large number of vendors. Many potential customers go to these sites during the research stage of their purchase process to gain more information about solutions to their problems. If you want to be found, it would behoove you to go where people actively look for information.
• Blog posts—Use findings from your white paper as the basis for one or more blog posts and then provide links to them.

While white papers can be a substantial investment of time, effort and money, they also pay big dividends in terms of the myriad ways their information can be used and reused.

How do you repurpose your white papers?

What to Put Into—and Leave Out Of—a White Paper

In my last post, I talked about why it takes so long to write a white paper. Specifically, I discussed the need to provide context in order to get readers interested in the white paper. In this post, I’ll talk about what you need to put on the page in order to make all this research and context compelling to a reader.

I’ll start with a story. I just finished editing a white paper about the future of business application software over the next decade. The author was an industry expert. The paper contained tons of industry background (in other words, lots of the great context I described in my last post). Every section included a wealth of background references. And yet, as I read through the draft, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the paper was trying to say. While interviews with the author indicated that he had clearly thought about what he was writing and why he was writing it, none of that knowledge made it onto the page.

(Note: I don’t mean to pick on this particular paper or author. I see this problem repeatedly when editing papers written by content experts who are not professional writers.)

This takes us to the second time-consuming aspect of writing white papers. You need to be able to assemble that contextual information in a way that makes sense for the reader and compels them to read further. Here’s what it takes to make sure your paper incorporates the context in a manner that does this:

1. Tell a coherent story. You can’t just include blobs of content. People want to read a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. Usually for thought-leadership papers that educate potential customers at the awareness phase of the sales cycle, the story will need to include the following:

• A beginning that describes a problem that our fearless reader needs to solve. In a white paper, this is usually a business condition that the customer must overcome if he or she is to succeed in meeting business goals. For example, the business challenge might be an uncertain economy that is leading the CFO to clamp down on IT budgets.  
• The middle will often describe obstacles in the way of our fearless reader solving that problem. For example, say your paper is on tape-backup consolidation. Here’s where you can talk about why current tape-backup systems contribute to inefficiency in the business.
• The end is where the reader is introduced to a solution to their problem. Here’s where you talk about all the ways tape-backup consolidation improves efficiency. 

2. Tell the reader why you’ve included each section of the paper. Not only must the paper attempt to tell a story, it must make the different parts of the story obvious. You need to include an executive summary telling readers up front what the paper will be about (so they can decide whether or not they want to read it). You need to come out and introduce each section. As I draft the rough versions of my papers, I often use subheads that state the purpose of each section—problem, obstacles, solution, benefits etc.—so I keep them clear in my own mind as I’m writing. Only when the draft is 95% complete do I change the subheads to more clearly represent the actual content of the paper. I might change a section called “The Challenge” to one called, “The Need to Improve Efficiency.” (I may employ more elegant phrasing but you get the idea).

3. Eliminate anything that does not contribute to the story. One risk of doing a lot of research is that while you’ll gather a great deal of information that’s important as background, but that won’t necessarily apply to the topic at hand. When you go to write the paper, however, you need to be ruthless about cutting anything out that doesn’t directly contribute to your story or the reader will get confused. For example, in my white paper-editing example, a key topic was the future of business intelligence. Yet, in many places, the paper wandered into a discussion of the Internet. While it’s fine in this context to talk about how the proliferation of Internet use will impact business intelligence, I cut out all references to how the Internet impacts telephony.

To summarize, the reason white papers can be time consuming to write is that you must do your homework to get the context necessary to explain the issues thoroughly and then you need to craft a single, coherent story that includes only relevant information.

How do you structure your white papers?

 

For Credibility’s Sake, Cite Your Sources

Potential customers frequently look to vendor white papers and thought-leadership pieces as they research new B2B solutions. But these buyers are smart and skeptical. Vendors who hope to influence them need to ensure that that their pieces are credible.  

One of the key ways I establish the legitimacy of an issue or trend I’m discussing in a white paper is by citing independent research. My research often takes me to competitors’ white papers, and I peruse dozens of papers each month.

I’ve observed that while most vendors like to include facts and figures from independent researchers, very few fully cite their sources. More often than not, they say something vague like: “According to a Gartner report.” Many times, the same research is cited repeatedly in different articles and white papers, all without a clear description of the original source.

This cavalier attitude towards citations undercuts the credibility of the white paper or thought-leadership piece, making it less likely to influence potential customers. As a result, vendors unwittingly reduce their return on their (often high) investment in producing their marketing material.   

So how can you maximize the credibility you achieve by citing outside sources and thereby optimize the ROI of your white paper?

Here are a few tips:

• Cite the entire source so that a reader can easily find the complete original document. For example, either include a link to the original document, or include a full description with the title, name of publisher, author, and date, as you would when you create a footnote in a term paper.
• Use recent sources. The definition of recent may vary slightly depending on the speed of change in your industry. However, it’s rarely a good idea to use sources that are more than a year or two old. For example, I concentrate on finding resources from 2011 and 2010 and sprinkle in material from 2009 on those occasions when I’m working on a niche topic with few resources available.  
• Cite independent sources. Look at who’s publishing the report. Often, vendors will sponsor research or even perform it themselves. Decide how close a competitor they are before citing any of their research—otherwise stick to independent analysts, such as IDC or Gartner.

Using independent research is a clear credibility booster for your white papers. But if you want to win over smart and skeptical B2B buyers, make sure you use recent, independent sources and cite them fully.

How do you cite your sources?  

5 Steps to Turning Your Strategic Vision into a Finished White Paper or Article

While technology vendors often have a high level idea of what they want to say in whitepapers and articles, transforming their ideas from a five bullet point outline into a fleshed out marketing piece requires a fair amount of research and analysis. Typically, a marketing piece will require research and analysis of the customers’ challenges, the benefits of solving them using a particular technology and often, why existing solutions are inadequate.

People ask me how to do this research and analysis all the time. Here are some tips.

1.    Start with the end in mind.

Before starting any project, always understand the marketing objectives for the piece, who it’s meant to address, and the key messages that need to be delivered. This step requires a company to define its goals and messages for a particular piece and work with a writer to produce a creative brief that transmits this information to the writer.

2.    Identify sources of information.

It goes almost without saying that the right information source depends on what you’re looking for. For information about customer challenges, good sources of information include interviews with customers, subject-matter experts, sales reps, and resellers. Additional background information comes from customer success stories, magazine and newspaper articles, reports from industry analysts, white papers from competitors (to see their positioning and capabilities and to find new primary sources), articles from professional and industry organizations, blogs, social media sites, and descriptions of conferences and seminars.

For information about existing technologies and their advantages and disadvantages, I often find information from specialized and technical trade publications, industry analyst reports, competitors, product managers, and technical sales support.

3.    Consolidate information and analyze themes.

After gathering the background information, sift through it carefully to identify common themes. Analyze where the content from different sources overlaps. Where is it different? Do the differences reflect the fact that the different sources provided incomplete information? (For example, white papers from competitors may leave out points that conflict with the vendor’s differentiators or value props). Do the differences simply reflect different use cases? In some cases, it may take consultation with a subject matter expert to determine the answers to these questions.

4.    Create a detailed outline

At intermediate points, it’s helpful to create a detailed outline of the existing information. Review the outline for completeness and logical flow. Do you have enough information to address all the points you set out to address at the outset? Do you have enough information to make a logical argument? Do questions remain?

5.    Wash-Rinse-Repeat

The next step is to create a draft. But the draft is hardly the last step. Creating a white paper or article is an iterative process both before it goes to the client for review as well as during and after the review process. A good writer will create outlines and drafts early on, and using their ability to look at the information from a reader’s perspective and with fresh eyes, keep asking themselves whether the outline/draft meets the client’s objectives and whether it answers all the questions that might come up for the reader.

Eventually, the client will review the outline and draft. Clients typically want to ensure that discussions of the customer challenges meet their understanding of what they see in the field and to clarify product positioning—which in some cases can be a moving target.   

At this point, the writer will take the comments from the client and review them to make sure the text continues to make sense from a reader’s perspective.

It’s this iterative process, with the writer continually reviewing the paper from the point of view of the reader and the client’s marketing objectives, that will ultimately ensure that the piece is highly readable and that it meets your company’s marketing objectives.

How do you all ensure that your copy is readable while meeting client’s objectives?

Do You Write Thought-Leadership Content from the Product Out—or from the Market In?

Many technology companies talk about writing thought-leadership content to educate IT buyers about new ways to solve their business challenges—and hopefully to help define the criteria by which they judge all other solutions. Yet, often, technology companies approach thought-leadership articles or white papers by starting with their product messages and working backward to problems they solve.

The question is whether this is really thought leadership—or is it product information in thought-leadership clothing?

It can be—but not always.  Let’s look at examples of two companies that I’ll call A and B.

 

Company A

Company A is a multi-billion dollar company with many product lines. It recently decided to create thought-leadership pieces targeting the green energy sector. The company started by looking at their products and deciding which ones would be a good fit for the space.  

Next, they searched the company for someone in sales who had sold into that space who could provide insight into the problems that that the company’s problems solved  They also tried to unearth examples of any existing customers who may have used the solution for this purpose—but since the sector was a new target for the company, they couldn’t find any.

Next, they went to conferences and spoke with analysts in the green energy space to patch together a story about the problems these customers face. Whew. Now they could weave a narrative about how their product addressed these challenges.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The process of creating the content was a tremendous effort because the project wasn’t really thought leadership at all. It was just a technology vendor talking about its products while attempting to create a veneer of thought leadership.

Company B

Now let’s look at a second company. This company also starts its thought-leadership projects with standard company messages about its products.

This time, however, the messaging has been based on extensive research into its customers typical challenges. The company had then created a messaging guidebook that detailed the types of challenges its customers face and spelled out the specific ways that the product addresses each one.

On top of this, the company had on hand specialists whose job it was to learn about and market to individual industries. Their effort included customizing individual products specifically to meet the needs of various industries where necessary.

Thus, when the content owner applied its standard messaging for use in a thought-leadership article, it was already familiar with its customer challenges and could easily come up with angles that would be interesting to customers because they were based on first hand, factual information.

If you’ve taken the time to determine customer needs and design a product to fill them, you’ll find lots of interesting angles for thought-leadership pieces and your content will flow effortlessly. If you’re having trouble creating compelling content for thought-leadership campaigns and content, ask yourself whether you’ve done your homework on your customers’ needs up front and designed a product that addresses them.  If you haven’t, you now know where to begin.  

 What have your experiences been creating thought-leadership content at your company?