High-Tech Communicator

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?

Most Valuable Content and Offers for IT Buyers

MarketingSherpa, in partnership with IDG Connect, recently published an interesting study regarding the types of content and offers that IT buyers find most valuable. The report surveyed IT buyers about the specific factors that motivate them to “opt-in, open, and engage with vendor email.” The results were surprising and revealed some disparities between what IT marketers provide and what IT buyers want to see.

For example, the study found that most marketers focused on using offer types such as educational content (92%), free research reports (85%), and peer best practices (79%). Yet IT buyers said they were most likely to click on a link that offered news and articles (84%), competitive comparisons and buying guides (73%), and promotional content (70%).

It’s not that IT buyers don’t want educational content and free reports. It’s just that they’re somewhat further down the list in terms of preference—specifically 65% of IT buyers would click on educational content; 64% on educational reports.

The study also looked at the percentage by which various offer types increase the likelihood that prospective buyers will click on a particular link. Not surprisingly, there was a disconnect here as well.

Prospective buyers said they’d be more likely to click on these offers in the following percentages: promotional content (26%), online tutorials and demonstrations, competitive comparisons and buying guides, free research, and educational content (all 25%). Marketers thought the most valuable offers were educational content (27%), free research reports (26%), and competitive comparisons and buying guides (21%).

The Impact of Buyers’ Guides

The most striking finding was how valuable buyers found buyers’ guides. This jibes with my own experience.

During the mid 80s, when I was an editor at PC Magazine, one of my first major projects was managing a special issue about investment software. The reviewers I hired all worked for major brokerage firms including Smith Barney and Shearson Lehman. Despite the fact that we paid them very little for the reviews, I had no trouble convincing any of the firms to participate.

Part of the reason they wanted to undertake the considerable effort necessary to participate in the project was undoubtedly the publicity. (At that time, PC Magazine regularly thumped onto people’s doorsteps at 500 pages every two weeks, so the publication was literally a big deal.) But the reason they stated was that they wanted to make sure they were aware of the capabilities of all the packages out there—they didn’t want to miss any options. No other publication provided that capability. By doing comprehensive product reviews, PC Magazine became a dominant player in the industry for years.

Now, however, with the decline of trade publications, buyers still need that competitive analysis. Although they’re undoubtedly aware that vendors will not provide unbiased evaluations of their competitors’ products, they find these comparisons useful because they do provide a framework for comparison and evaluation.  

What offers should you use?

The bottom line of this research is that buyers will click on the offer that matches where they are in the buying cycle. So you can’t go wrong by finding out where buyers are at and providing them the appropriate material—whether it’s an educational piece early on in the process or a buyers’ guide that helps them narrow down the field.  

What types of content and offers do you find most appealing to prospects?

Email Marketing Writing Best Practices Series: 11 Ways to Improve Your Landing Pages

Your customer or prospect has successfully run the gauntlet. Your subject line, from line, and preview pane have enticed them into clicking on your email. Now they’re intrigued enough by your email teaser copy to click on a link to download your offer.  The last thing you want to do now is fumble the ball—and lose them just as your goal of getting your offer into their hands is in sight.

That’s why your landing page copy better be good.

For a B2B email campaign, the landing page is the lead-capture page that your audience sees when they click on the links to your offer. It’s the place where your transaction occurs—where you get them to provide you with valuable personal information and they can access your valuable content. Your goal is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

So what should the landing page copy say and contain to make this information trade go as smoothly as possible?

As with anything, you’re ultimate answer will lie in testing. But here are some best practices and suggestions to try:

1.    Make sure the landing page is crafted to work in tandem with the content of your email communication. The landing page should match the look, feel, and tone of the original email.

2.    The landing page should have only one objective, which should be getting your reader to do the one thing you want them to do. Usually for a B2B email lead-generation or lead-cultivation campaign, that will be to download the offer.

3.    The headline should refer directly to the web copy that drove the click. Match your language as exactly as you can to that of the headline of your original email.

4.    Provide a clear call to action, whether you use graphic buttons, hot-linked text or both to tell your visitor what they need to do. That call to action should match that of your original email. Again, in a B2B lead-generation or cultivation-campaign the call to action will often consist of filling in a form and downloading the offer.

5.    Keep your copy on point as a logical progression from your headline and offer. Don’t digress.

6.    Keep your copy short—especially for an informational offer from a B2B campaign. If at all possible, keep all content “above the fold,” i.e. where they can see it without scrolling.

7.    Make copy scannable—Readers won’t read every word of your landing page. They will quickly scan the page. Make sure your headlines, subheadings quickly reiterate what you’re offering and how it benefits them, and make sure it clearly points out how they can easily take the desired action.

8.    Make your copy enticing. If your offer is a white paper, consider providing some valuable sample copy from your paper. This can include a compelling abstract that details the challenges prospects face and how your white paper addresses those challenges.

9.    If you ask people to fill out a form to obtain the offer as part of lead-generation campaign, keep it brief. Remember, this form may be the first step of your sales process. You don’t want to scare off prospects by asking for too much information.

10.   If you are requesting information, provide a link to your privacy policy. Be sure your privacy policy states that you do not rent, sell, or share information with other parties.

11.   Test. As with every other aspect of your email content and creative, test different copy and other elements on your landing pages to see what works best.

That’s the end of my series on best practices for email marketing content. I’ll move on to other topics in the next blog—but will continue to cover email marketing from time to time.

Share your tips for creating effective landing pages.

Email Marketing Writing Best Practices Series: Making the Most of Your From Line

In previous posts in this series, I talked about subject lines and how they’re the most important part of your email marketing message. After all, up to five times more people see your subject line as will see your message. But there’s one other critical piece of information that recipients want to see before they’ll even consider opening your email message. That’s the from line.

Because your recipients receive so much spam, they’re leery of senders they don’t know. The from line. creates recognition by communicating who you are as a sender. 

To be effective, your from line needs to be personal and reinforce the one-to-one relationship you have with your recipients.

A report by PinPointe Marketing provided the following tips to improve the effectiveness of your from lines. These include:

· Always include a valid email address

· It’s usually better to include a person’s name and company rather than just the company

For example, use:

“Cheryl Goldberg” cheryl@cjgoldbergcommunications.com

Better yet, use:

“Cheryl Goldberg, Goldberg Communications” Cheryl@cjgoldbergcommunications.com 

Never use a subject line like:

“info@company.com

“Do Not Reply”<Prospect_list@company.com>

Your from line and subject line ideally should work together. For example, some have suggested that it’s a good idea to incorporate your brand in the first part of the subject line to ensure a high level of recognition. However, you face distinct plusses and minuses to doing this.

· On the plus side, incorporating your brand into your subject line supports recognition and for some vendors, that alone will be enough to encourage people to open the email.

· On the minus side, a long company name can take room away from your message.

One way around this tradeoff is to make sure your subject line, from line, and preview pane work together. You may be able to include branding in your from line and preview pane to avoid the need to include it in the subject line.

And with that I have my segue to the topic of my next post: Preview panes.

 

What types of from lines have you used and what’s your experience?