High-Tech Communicator

New Research Describes the Most Effective Ways to Market with Content

Three major new studies have been published about content marketing over the last few weeks. Among the most interesting findings are the fact that today’s marketers fully understand that content is a critical component to their marketing efforts and that white papers remain the most influential types of content—but only if they’re well written and compelling.

Here are some interesting highlights:

Content Really is King

“B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” by MarketingProfs and Junta42 has found that content is now recognized  a critical aspect of marketing. Nine out of ten B2B marketers are using content to grow their business. And the computing/software industry has the highest rate of adoption of content marketing strategies (94%).

Content must be High-Quality, Compelling  

A survey from Vocus and Brian Solis concurred with the notion that content marketing is now a critical marketing tactic. But the content must be compelling. Fully one-half of surveyed marketing execs say creating, posting, and sharing compelling content is the single most important action people or brands can take to increase their influence online (50%). Quality of content is an important contributor to making a person or brand influential (55%) and the top reason people follow others on social sites is that content is relevant (62%).

The Most Influential Types of Content

What types of content are most effective? White papers are the most influential type of collateral. Eccolo Media’s third annual B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report found that white papers  remain moderately to extremely influential in helping customers make a purchase decision for 83% of respondents. However, the influence of white papers depends on the size of the customer. Both decision makers and influencers from enterprise and mid-market companies are more likely to pay attention to a white paper than their small business counterparts.

 The B2B Content Marketing 2010 benchmark also found white papers to be highly influential—although somewhat less so than the Eccolo study. More than half of the respondents to this study preferred white papers.  

 According to the Eccolo study, case studies are also valuable content with 67% of respondents using case studies to make technology purchases. 78% of respondents also use brochures and datasheets. However, these rank behind white papers and case studies in terms of influence.

 What Disappoints

Eccolo asked what disappoints people when reading white papers. The most disappointing quality in white papers was poor writing quality. Other disappointments include papers that are not technical enough, and those with no real-life cases.

 What Confuses

These studies also show that marketers remain confused about how to best use social media. The B2B Marking 2010 Benchmark found that while 79% of respondents are adopting social media (excluding blogs) only 31% feel it’s an effective tactic.

 Surprising Results

It’s a well known fact that different people absorb information better using different methods. Some people are more visual, others prefer sound. Marketers are beginning to use this knowledge to provide the same information using different media in the same marketing piece. The Eccolo study found that an emerging trend in marketing materials was embedding audio and video files into digital versions of written documents such as white papers and case studies. Moreover, when these media are included, 93 percent of respondents clicked through to these embedded files. 

How do these findings match your experiences?

 

What’s the Right Length for a White Paper?

Over the past couple of years, many technology companies have begun requesting shorter white papers. While a typical thought leadership white paper might have once been 10-12 pages, today’s technology marketers are increasingly requesting 5-8 pages. This comes from the need to meet tight budgets and out of a belief that people are less interested than ever in devoting the time to reading longer documents.

My view is that the length of paper should depend on the topic and the audience. Here are some observations:

·     Length is not the issue as much as interest. Readers will read content if they’re interested in it, regardless of length. And some topics require more space than others. Often, technical white papers require more space than those geared to a general business audience.

·     Readability is key. To keep readers interested in a paper of any length, you need to make the content compelling. Obviously, content is only compelling if it addresses a problem or topic that’s relevant to the reader. That said, the content needs to be written clearly so readers can easily understand what you mean. Text also needs to be broken up so readers can easily scan each section to determine whether or not they’re interested in that section.

·     Some audiences have different tolerances for reading. As a general rule, technical audiences are more willing to pour through longer, detailed documents. Salespeople always hate text; they often prefer short, bulleted lists. Executives just want to see the high level points that focus on return on investment.

·      The tighter the focus, the shorter the document. One way to effectively create shorter papers is to tightly focus the paper. For example, one client created several white papers that answered certain questions that the salespeople kept getting from customers such as how does your product support RFID. Another paper discussed how the client supported SAS 70 Part II. Because the paper we created was so tightly focused, it was easy to create a very short document.

Overall, no matter how short, a white paper remains a significant investment. You don’t want to short change that message by leaving out valuable content that could help drive the point home, on the other hand, every word needs to support the important messages.

 

What are your thoughts about the correct length for white papers?

 

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?

My Annual Tirade: The White Paper that Wouldn’t Go to Bed on Time

 

My 14-year-old daughter has bedtime issues. She puts off her homework for hours and then insists she has to do it or her GPA will suffer. Then there’s the sneaking off the check Facebook and email. Then she needs to wash her face for 15 minutes. Then she needs to pick out corn kernels from her pet rabbit’s food for another 15 minutes. Then she’s thirsty. Then she forgot to give me a field trip form. After all this, maybe she’ll get to bed by 11 p.m. on a good day.

The same is true for some white paper projects. Out of the dozens of white papers I write every year, there’s always one or two projects that simply refuse to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Usually, it works like this:

· First the client takes one direction with one set of messages.

· Then they take another direction with another set of messages.

· Then they take a third direction.

· Maybe the general direction gets set by the fourth try.

The Cause of the Problem

One cause is very articulate people who nevertheless haven’t thought through their messages before they started the project. They think they have their messages. They sound like they have their messages. But when they see them brought to a logical conclusion on the printed page, they realize that that wasn’t what they wanted to say after all. Another cause is when different people or groups in the company have different ideas about what the message should be.

Here’s where my tirade comes in. A professional writer can help shape a company’s message, sharpen the edges, and make it clearer. But ultimately the message has to come from the client and the client has to own the message. The most important prerequisite for any white paper project is that everyone at the company producing the white paper must agree on the 30,000 foot view of what they want to say.

Thinking Through the Issues

To avoid embarking on a project that will not go to bed, you must think through four key issues before you get started. These issues are:  

1.    Audience. Your product can have many audiences. But your white paper can only have one.  That audience can be people with a particular role within a client company, such as a line of business manager or a finance director. It could be a vertical industry. Or it could be a particular buyer profile or persona. But you have to know who exactly you’re talking to or you’ll never be able to define the appropriate message.

2.    Challenge. Your audience will only read your paper if there’s something in it for them. Usually people reading white papers are looking to solve a particular problem. Your white paper needs to be very clear on what problem you’re going to help them solve or no one will read it.  

3.    One key message.  Sixty to seventy percent of the time, companies run into trouble with their white papers because they haven’t truly defined the one message they want to get across with their paper.  Even if your paper is a thought-leadership piece that does not directly discuss your product, your main message will undoubtedly point to your product’s key differentiator for the paper’s audience. If you haven’t defined a differentiator, your white paper will run into trouble because there’s not much of a story to tell.

4.    Three to five key benefits.  The other thirty to forty percent of the time, a paper doesn’t work out because people haven’t defined the three to five benefits they want to discuss in this paper. Sometimes, a product has a very broad range of capabilities—this is a big problem for ERP and related products—and the company is afraid to narrow down the discussion for fear of missing a benefit that will appeal to a particular reader. Other times, the company has established messaging and they haven’t figured out how to tweak that messaging to apply to a particular target market. Whatever the cause of the problem, it’s critical to remember that readers can only absorb so much information. You want to give them only the information that’s most relevant to them.

So, the next time you want to get your white paper to bed at a reasonable hour, start by nailing down the answers to these four questions before you start the project.

How do you get your white papers to bed on time?

Make the Most of Your Content: 13 Ways to Repurpose Existing Materials

Despite the alleged economic recovery, marketing budgets remain tight. Yet, as industry publications shrink and become less critical gateways for distributing your messages, you must publish more of your own content to get your messages out to buyers.

How can you create more content for less dollars?

Like the thrifty and creative domestic god/goddess who can squeeze six meals out of a single chicken, you can make your content budget go a lot farther if you repurpose your existing content assets.

Here are some of the many ways I’ve worked with clients to breathe new life into existing content:

1 - 8. Customer Stories

Interviews with customers can give you a jackpot of content. From a single customer interview you can obtain:

· A press release announcing that the customer has adopted your product. This shows that your product has momentum. It might also show that you’re gaining ground on competitors.

· A customer success story that you can use early in the sales cycle to demonstrate that customers achieve measurable value from your products.

· An implementation story that helps customers evaluating different vendors see how well you partner with customers to meet their specific requirements.

· An article for your company magazine, online newsletter, or even a blog post.

· A video or pod cast of the customer endorsing your product.

· Quotes for use in datasheets.

· Abstracts of essential points for use in sales presentations.

· Abridged case studies that can be used to illustrate trends in white papers.

 

9. White Papers

Turn white papers into thought-leadership articles for placement in a trade magazine, company newsletter, ezine or even a short blog post with a link to the original. In some cases, you may have to cut the paper down slightly for length—white papers are typically 2,500-3,000 words, articles are usually 800-2,000 words. Often, you don’t even have to do that much.

10. Product Solution Guides

Repurpose product solution guides into industry solution guides or white papers. Many B2B companies understand that they need to talk about the customer challenges as they relate to the customer’s specific industry. Many solution sheets or vertical white papers combine new content that discusses problems of a specific industry and wrap it around existing product information to create industry-specific solution guides or white papers.  

11. Datasheets

Once you’ve written a datasheet that describes your key differentiators, how your product works, most important features, and three to five key benefits, it takes just a few minutes to crank out a page for your website describing your product.

12. Presentations

Many companies translate presentations into white papers and vice versa. I worked with one company that explicitly did this because the CTO didn’t want to have to travel so much in person and wanted to send a white paper in his place. In other cases, the white paper could be used as an offer for a lead generation or nurturing campaign.

13. Repurpose Print into Rich Media

And of course, since people absorb information in different ways and have different preferences as to how they wish to receive information, you present the same information in different formats. For example, excerpt a white paper into a podcast or video. Translate a video into an article, and so on.

How have you repurposed your content?

 

At Last, Discover the Ultimate Secrets of Proven Power Words, Now! (White Paper Headline Series, Part 6 of 6)

How many power words are stuffed into this headline? 

Six!

Power words are words that allegedly boost the readership of an ad, document, or white paper dramatically and compel people to act. Articles and blog posts abound that claim these words are virtual hypnotists, commanding people’s fingers to click and read further or, even more astoundingly, get people to “throw money at you.”

 Research Studies

I have to admit, anytime someone says that something as simple as words like proven, at last, discover, ultimate secrets, and now will compel my customers to not just cautiously call me about my services, but “throw money at me,” my skepticism meter hurls into overdrive. So I looked into the proof points that these articles gave for these words working so well.

The proof points generally fall into two categories:

1.    Anecdotal observation. People tell you to look at ads that seem effective and keep a list of the words they use. This is certainly a valid, though unscientific approach to finding words that you might try in your headlines.  

2.    Serious academic research. Unfortunately, the source of this research is difficult to pin down. Some people have attributed “proven” lists of words to studies at universities that range from the University of California, Duke, and Yale. I was unable to find anyone who cited the actual studies.  

Lists of Power Words

Let’s take a look at the actual words themselves. The following are on a few of the lists I found all over the blogosphere:

Guaranteed, money, save, new, easy, love, discovery, results, you, proven, health, safety

Another list includes:

Announcing, advice to, yes, insides secrets of, love, new, amazing secrets, discover, only, break through, do you, free, which, how much, now, life, how would, amazing, here, this, facts, sale, at last, bargains

And another list of words that sell includes:

Improve, trust, immediately, discover, profit, learn, know, understand, powerful, best, win, hot special, more, bonus, exclusive, extra, you, free, health, guarantee, new, proven, safety, money, now, today, results, protect, help, easy, amazing, latest, extraordinary, how to, worst, ultimate, hot, first, big, anniversary, premiere, basic, complete, save, plus, create

You can find another 186 power words for selling here.

Why They Might Work

Clearly, while there’s no single list of “power words” that capture people’s attention and compel them to act, the words on this list do have a lot in common and it makes sense that some of these things may well encourage people to act:

1.    Emotion: Powerful words create emotions that drive people to act. The most commonly evoked emotion in these lists is clearly fear. For example:  safety (fear of getting hurt); proven, guarantee, sure fire (fear of risk), last chance, urgent (fear of missing out).

2.    Curiosity/news: Curiosity about new things can definitely draw someone in to read further. Words that evoke curiosity or provide news on these lists include: astonishing, inside secrets, how to, discover, learn, understand, breakthrough, new, ultimate, amazing, surprising, latest.

3.    Superlatives: I think the appeal of superlatives is in their curiosity factor: rare, unparalleled, outstanding, unsurpassed, terrific, unique—who wouldn’t be curious about a product that possessed these qualities. For other people, these words derive their influence because people covet “the best.”

4.    Greed:  People want to make money or, better yet, get something for nothing. That’s why words like free, money, profit, bargain, bottom line are perennial inhabitants of power words lists.

Proceed with Caution

Of course, many marketers do use these words quite effectively. Indeed, very few technology marketing materials go out that don’t promise to improve your profits, ROI, bottom line, or other terms for making money. It’s always a good idea to be on the lookout for compelling marketing copy that works and to develop a swipe file of words and phrases that have proven to be effective that you can use in your white paper headlines.

The problem is that many so-called power words sound unbelievable and, quite frankly, like spam. When you have a well-educated, skeptical audience like IT buyers and you use words like these, you better back them up carefully or they’ll ultimately backfire.

The Bottom Line: Test, Test, Test

The bottom line is that the only definitive way to answer whether a title will work is to test, test, test. Speaking of testing, I’ll let you know after this post has been up for a few days whether my six “proven power words” really work.

What’s your experience with power words?

Attracting Readers with Headlines: Why White Paper Headlines Need Keywords (White Paper Headline Series, Part 5 of 6)

When people are searching for the solution to a problem, they typically start by doing a search with an engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. In order to ensure that your paper is found, you need to help search engines find them. One of the most important things you can do is to put keywords in your headline. (While there are other things you can do for SEO, this post will focus strictly on headlines.)

Why Headlines are Critical to Search

Normally, companies post white papers on their own sites, as well as on content-aggregation sites, such as TechTarget and KnowledgeStorm. They post these white papers as PDF files, which people typically access through a Web page that includes a title and an abstract. The title is typically the headline and the abstract is usually the executive summary of the paper.

As with any other Web page, the headline on this introductory page is a vital part of search-engine optimization because it’s the first thing that a search engine sees when it goes to figure out what the page is about. You can’t rank highly in results or get clicks without having keywords in the title.

Why?  According to Rick DeJarnette in this post, search engines look for keywords and key phrases where writers use them to emphasize key points. They automatically give words in certain places a higher prioritized value. For example, search engines consider words used in page titles definitive for assessing the contents of that page. Because the title defines page content, those words carry more weight than words found in body text. Words that describe the body text as a whole or even other pages as a whole carry the weight of those pages.

But keywords aren’t only important for inanimate search engines, they work for people too.  Keywords are what users type in when they’re looking for something. As such, keywords give you an idea of the problem your potential customer is trying to solve and of the language they use to describe that problem. If you want people to think you understand their problems, you’ll be most effective if you use their own language. And that means including keywords in your titles.

How to Use Keywords in Headlines

The big question people always have is how to balance a headline that grabs people, with one that attracts search engines. The assumption is that this is a dilemma with an “either or” answer. That is, either the headline is interesting to people or it works for search engines. In fact, it’s a balancing act. You can use any of the techniques I’ve been describing as long as you keep in mind a few guidelines:  

1.    Since search engines pay attention to only a finite number of characters in the title, put your keywords as close to the beginning of your title as possible.

2.    Focus on one topic

3.    Write for the end user using the techniques described in previous posts but keep keywords in the back of your mind.

4.    Balance keyword relevance with eye-catching style. Don’t pack the headline so full of keywords that it’s awkward; avoid something that’s clever but lacks keywords.

How have you used keywords in your headlines?

Steal This Headline: Use These 10 Headlines Today (White Paper Headline Series, Part 4 of 6)

While it’s important to understand the rules behind good headlines (as I discussed in my last post), you probably just want an easy way to get started. The good news is, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. The best way to write a good headline is to steal a good headline.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t recommending plagiarizing. But you should get yourself a swipe file. Collect headlines that get your attention and compel you to read the white paper. Many copywriters recommend looking at great ads, sales letters, and even tabloid newspapers. Then try to understand why these headlines work and apply those principles to your own headlines.

But when it comes to white papers, I again want to add a word of caution. As I mentioned earlier, white papers are successful because they deliberately take a soft-sell approach. People read them because they’re helpful—not salesy. So as you evaluate headlines, think about whether the approach will appeal to—or repel—your highly skeptical readers.

The following is a list of headline types and examples that you can swipe to write your own headlines.

1.    State Your Biggest Benefit. My favorite approach to headlines is to transform the solution’s major benefit into a headline. After all, you want people to see your top selling point up front. This type of headline stands the best chance of selecting the right audience and preparing them to respond. Plus, if they read nothing else, they’ll still have seen your best selling point.

· Improve FISMA Compliance and IT Security with GRC Software

· Integrate IT with Your Mission

· Plugging ERP Productivity Gaps: At Step-by-Step Approach to Automating Documents Throughout Your Business Processes

The big advantage of this approach is that the headline practically writes itself. If you have trouble writing this kind of headline, it’s a sure sign you need to think more about the real benefits of your product or service. Most often, I’ve found that companies try to squeeze in too many benefits, which leads to an unwieldy headline.

2.    How to. Copyblogger wrote a great post on How to headlines. In it, Brian Clark wrote that How to headlines for white papers are all about helping your reader improve in some way. (In the case of white papers for technology companies, the white paper will be about improving the customers’ business in some way.) The key is to focus on your audience’s real need—not on the process. For example, instead of saying something like: “How to Backup Your Hard Drive,” you’d want to say: “How to Make Sure You Never Lose Your Most Valuable Data.” In other words, you want to follow the words How to immediately with a benefit statement.

3.    How to Variation Number 1. A successful variation on the How to headline is to use a How to headline with two benefits. The most famous double benefit How to headline of all time is probably Dale Carnegie’s: “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

The reason this type of headline is so successful is that the first benefit automatically implies the second. Now this isn’t the case in “How to Win Friends and Influence People” because plenty of people have friends and no influence. But it will make for a more powerful headline if there’s a logical link between the two benefits. For example: “How to Achieve a Better Relationship with Your Suppliers and Improve Customer Satisfaction.”

4.    How to Variation Number 2. Another variation is “How to [mundane task] that [rewarding benefit].” It’s often quite difficult to figure out how you really benefit from learning something. Often, you can make a normal How to title better by simply using the transition word that right after the subject matter of the tutorial. Next, state the top benefit of your tutorial. Then say it in a manner that’s as specific as possible: “How to Set Up an Information Lifecycle Management System that Improves Performance of Your Production Systems by 5X.”

5.    The Secret. Another successful headline is one that says, “The Secret [blank]”; for example, “The Secret of Litigation Readiness.” This headline uses curiosity as a draw. It acts almost as a challenge to the reader to see if they’re missing anything.

6.    What Everybody Out to Know. “What everybody ought to know about [blank]” is another proven formula; for example, “What Everybody Ought to Know about SaaS.” This works for the same reason as “The Secret.”

7.    Pose a Provocative Question. Asking a question directly involves your reader. For example, “Are You at Risk of Compromising Critical Corporate Data on Your Laptop?” But your questions can’t be random or clever. They must relate directly and clearly to the major benefit of the product. It must also prod the reader to answer “yes” or at least think “I’m not sure, but I want to know more.”

8.    Be commanding. Sales copy often is unsuccessful because it fails to tell the reader what to do. This headline type allows you to be direct, provide a benefit, and tell people what to do simultaneously: “Stop Wasting Money on White Paper Design: Use Publisher to Lay Out Your White Paper in Minutes.”

9.    Do you make mistakes? No one likes to make mistakes, so this headline will grab attention. If you know your audience well, helping people avoid common mistakes is a sure winner. For example, “Do You Make These Ajax Coding Mistakes?”

10.   What about the news? One commonly recommended type of headline is a news headline. You might use this when announcing a new version of your product. However, you’ll need to think carefully about the purpose of your white paper and where it fits into the sales cycle before you use this type of headline. If your white paper is strictly meant to be an in-depth description of your new product to go along with a product launch—by all means, announce it in your headline: “The First Laptop You Can Use Nonstop from Chicago to China.”

But remember, many white papers are meant to describe new ways to solve a business problem. In the excitement of the launch, you may be tempted to blow the horn for your new product in the title anyway. Be sure that your title reflects your focus and talks about the benefits of solving this business problem.

What are successful types of headlines you’ve used?

Reel in the Right Readers for Your White Paper (White Paper Headline Series, Part 2 of 6)

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?

 

 

 

White Paper Headline Series: Why White Paper Headlines are Different

 

White papers are the Number One tool IT buyers look for in the research stage of the buying process. And the most important element in ensuring that IT buyers find your white paper online and open it is the headline.

When IT buyers begin to research the solution to a particular problem, they typically Google keywords. Headlines play an important role in Google deciding whether or not a document is relevant—and thus whether it will be found and how high in the rankings it appears.

Once the IT buyer finds a white paper, 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. Of course, the ultimate success of your white paper will depend on how well you follow through on the promises of your headline—but that’s a discussion for another blog post.

Why a Series Specifically on Headlines for White Papers?

Because headlines are critical for driving action from any type of copy, whether it’s a white paper, sales letter, advertisement or website, much has been written about them.  However, most of what I’ve seen applies mainly to ad copy.

This is not to say that many principles that are effective for ad copy won’t work for white papers. It’s just that white papers are different from ads in significant ways and if your headlines are to be effective, they must reflect those differences.

The biggest difference is the audience.  While all audiences are skeptical of ads, IT buyers (and technology experts, in general) make skepticism an art form. IT buyers are exceedingly leery of anything that smacks of the slightest hint of hype. I’ll never forgot a conversation I once had with an engineer friend—who later went on to become a co-founder and chief technology officer of a billion-dollar technology company—who implied that marketers were bottom feeders who added nothing of value to technology companies. (Although I’m guessing that once he started a company of his own, he may have changed his mind.)

White papers are effective with this tough audience because they’re meant to appear objective and educational. Successful white papers take a soft-sell approach that discusses problems and solutions, rather than specifically doing a hard sell for the vendor’s product. They offer thought leadership on new ways to solve vexing problems. They discuss trends and provide lots of evidence, statistics, customer ROI, and so on.

Headlines for white papers must reflect this soft sell/educational/thought-leadership approach. This series will look at ways to adapt time-tested principles for writing headlines to this soft-sell approach.

Future Topics in this Series

In the rest of this series, I’ll cover the following topics:

· What you need to think about before you write your headline

· Attributes of effective white paper titles

· Templates for effective white paper titles  

· The role of keywords

· Whether “proven” words can boost effectiveness of your titles?

What types of titles have you found most effective for your white papers?