White Paper Pundit

The idea of leveraging white papers into new leads is nothing new. In fact, it’s one of the primary reasons that most companies develop them. But, once a white paper has been completed, they won’t generate new revenue by sitting on your hard drive. You need to incorporate that paper into other business relationships.

An interesting blog by UK blogger Onefish, Twofishpost entitled, “Convert Your White Paper into Leads and Sales“, presents several interesting ideas to get your white papers into propsects’ offices, hearts and minds, especially with companies that contributed to the content of your white paper. Some of these are well known, but always good to hear from another contributor:

How to generate business from companies who contributed to a white paper:

1. Hold a round table – invite any contributor/interviewees, existing clients and warm prospects.
2. Contact all contributors and ask to share the findings in an in-person meeting.
3. Take the same approach above with existing business prospects.
4. Offer to present the findings in full to a team (e.g. Marketing, HR, etc).
5. Use your own case studies to illustrate points and showcase your work.
6. Build a contact strategy for every contributor or round table delegate.
7. Build a web of contact between contributors by setting up follow up discussions between individuals (include yourself in these meetings) and referring contributors to existing clients with shared interests.

How to use a white paper to build new relationships:

1. Link to the white paper from your email signature e.g. “Find out how to… click here”.
2. Put the white paper on your website, behind a simple registration form (name and email address is plenty).
3. Focus your cold calling and cold email efforts on breaking the ice using the white paper. Explain that you are offering a complimentary copy to people in X role in Y type of organisation because of its high relevance.
4. List and leverage the contributor list at every opportunity. Use their brand profiles to boost your own.
5. Start a Google Ad campaign, offering a complimentary copy of the white paper. The competition for key words is likely to be far lower than for related sales pitches.
6. Lurk on online forums relevant to the white paper subject matter. When the opportunity arises, explain that (by coincidence!) you have just conducted some research in that area and are happy to share the results.

These ideas point out how multi-faceted the white paper medium has become. The wide variety of uses with a single white paper shows the ultimate value of these documents. This is something that every business should consider given our leaner economic times when most of us are looking for more cost-effective ways of getting a strategic marketing message out to a target audience.

A new blog post entitled, “5 Tips for Better White Papers“, listed several ways to use your white paper to generate quality leads. These are:

1. Choose the Right Title

2. Focus on the Buyer

3. Avoid mention of the product or company until the end of the paper.

4. Use the Right Language

5. Choose the Right Length

I have to disagree with item number 3 on this list. I think its perfectly fine to mention your product or company in the white paper. Here are some of my reasons:

1. It’ not a turn off – There’s a lot of hype in the market about the use of “sales” language in your white paper. This makes most decision makers seem like a bunch of hyper-sensitive, spineless weenies. Let’s get real. C-Level decision makers know they are going to get a sales pitch when they come to you website to download your white paper. What they want to see is if you understand the extend of their business problem, and HOW your solution addresses those problems. The manner in which you accomplish that will determine whether or not your white paper comes off as a sappy sales pitch. If done well, with clear facts, case studies, and reasoning will go a long way to validate your solution and your white paper.

2. No guarantees - There is no guarantee that turning your white paper into some generic education piece will buy your product or company any greater credibility in your customer’s eyes that translates into a contact request or hot lead. The education approach may work for an industry analyst or magazine that must be unbiased to maintain credibility, but that does not always extend to a commercial enterprise. By creating a generic, educational white paper that does not associate a brand with a solution, you leave the opportunity for your competitor to say when asked, “Yeah, we do that do!”

3. Can you afford not to? In today’s soft economy, few companies can afford to spend the money to develop a a high quality white paper and leave it to chance that the white paper MAY generate leads. Most companies today are concerned with the ROI for their marketing dollar investment. You have a much greater chance of achieving greater ROI and generating warm leads, by mentioning your brand by name in your white paper and telling a prospective customer the advantages of deploying that solution to address their existing business challenges.

4. The proof is in the pudding - I have personally created hundreds of white papers, many of which have openly mentioned a company brand or product by name that have resulted in significant amount of lead generation and closed sales. One of which is a large financial services organization that indicated that the white paper (which mentioned their company and solution by name) resulted in the highest number of downloads of any white paper in their entire white paper library. What more can I say?

It’s time to stop this industry-wide hyper-sensitivity about white paper selling that can’t be backed up with facts, and has not correlation with what the customer needs and the white paper reader finds perfectly palatable.

If you’d like to read more about this issue, you can read a recent article I wrote about this very subject by clicking this link.

For a very long time, the concept of the business brochure served an essential role as one of the primary tools in the corporate marketing bread basket. Whether you sold a highly technical niche service or a mainstream consumer commodity, the idea of having a brochure was not open for negotiation. You simply had to have one.

I recently read a very interesting blog post from QualityWriter.com, which has posed this thought provoking question. Their blog post entitled, “Is the White Paper the new Brochure”, compared the traditional role of the brochure to that of the white paper:

A typical, average, traditional brochure that presents the company and it’s products is the antithesis. These old-style brochures usually “led with their chin”.. meaning they presented a “hey look at us and our product” position before ever considering the needs and challenges of the customer/user. This kind of leave-behind, corporate overview brochure is a dying breed.

I think the white paper is a new form of brochure. Web sites generally function as the company brochure nowadays, however the white paper acts as an extension of the web site. It gets people to act and engage, like the leave-behind brochure used to. In the old scenario, the salesman came to the office and offered the pitch then left the brochure behind as a reminder/in-depth business card.

In the new web scene, the site is the cold call, the white paper is the voluntary demo, and the email capture is the relationship builder/reminder. For example, you can offer a white paper after you’ve captured an email or phone number. Or, you can produce a white paper that’s so strong it gets high rankings on Google and generates its own leads via a call to action on the final page. In any event, the white paper is the key value proposition builder and demo. It’s got lots of flexibility, too. You can go deep into challenges and issues while doing a really soft sell on your presentation (or even a no sell). On the other hand, you can go really deep into solution discussions and product features on the back-end of the white paper if it’s appropriate.

I think one of the most important points here is the idea of engagement.

A white paper engages the reader via education, a brochure engages the reader with emotion, primarily using visual means. When you can provide a reader with higher level educational information, you will typically have a greater chance of engaging that reader to the point where they take action on that information. This could include visiting a website or asking for follow up contact from a sales representative.

Higher engagement is the primary reason why white papers are considered one of the most effective B2B marketing solutions available today and the reason why the use of white papers will continue to grow.

What is an abstract?

Merriam-Webster defines the noun “abstract” as:

“a summary of points (as of a writing) usually presented in skeletal form ; also : something that summarizes or concentrates the essentials of a larger thing or several things.

What is the closest example of an abstract in a white paper? Answer: the Executive Summary.

A new report released by InformationWeek, entitled How to Maximize the Use of White Papers in Your B2B Marketing and Sales Process, and recently published on the WritingWhitePapers blog focused on how professional IT buyers utilize white papers. The report shows the positive impression that the medium has with business decision makers, namely:

- 93% of buyers pass‐along up to half of the white papers they read/download.
- 75.8% go to a search engine for more information after reading a white paper.
- 68% learn about a vendor’s solution by reading a white paper.

But the most interesting statistic compiled by this study shows the overwhelmingly positive and crucial role that ‘abstracts’ (aka Executive Summaries) play in a white paper.

The study showed that the best white papers should have:

- A tight, to-the-point abstract (80%)
- Minimal marketing (78.6%)
- Use/Case studies (75.6%)

The results of this study are clear and reinforce something that I have been saying for years. Abstracts such as Executive and Concluding Summary play an essential role in white papers. If your white paper doesn’t include them, you are doing both your client and your reader a disservice by requiring them to read more information than necessary to uncover key bottom-line points.

The importance of abstracts also reinforces another point I have been making: Time is limited for these individuals. You MUST format your information for the short-attention, and time-challenged executive reader. This includes incorporating critical elements such as bulleted items, callouts/pull quotes, and graphics.

This is one of the reasons you should subscribe to my new newsletter, “Short Attention Marketing Tips“ to learn how to format your white paper information to appeal to this important and growing business audience.

One of the things that I have been passionate about is the use of formatting elements designed to grab executive attention and deliver critical business messages in today’s white papers.

My reasoning is simple: Keep it simple and straightforward (K.I.S.S.) if you want your critical business messages to be clearly understood by your reader!

The limited amount of time that today’s busy executive has set aside for reading complex information limits their attention span. If your most important business solution messages are buried deep inside pages of left flush paragraphs that require more of their valuable time, then you are making it harder for that reader to quickly understand those bottom-line points of interest.

Over the years, I’ve tried to show you examples of what you CAN do to format your white papers for this ‘short-attention span’ reader. Here’s an example of what you SHOULD NOT do that limits that ability to attract executive attention. The paper is entitled “Who Really Knows Enterprise Data?”, by Chuck Backus, the Chief Technology Officer at Qbase, Inc.

Setting aside the issue of white paper graphics, the formatting mistakes in this white paper include:

1. No Summaries - either Executive or Concluding Summaries making it difficult to deliver important ‘walk-away’ messages.

2. No Sidebar Callouts/Pull Quotes - the paper is devoid of any sidebar white space to accommodate these essential elements.

3. Lack of Section Headers – that would separate content about business challenges from key solution messages.

4. Insufficient Length – the paper is about 3.5 pages, hardly enough space to effectively educate an uninformed reader to all of the issues surrounding the topic.

5. No Shaded Text Boxes – the skim reader has to read the entire document to understand the bottom line message, something that hey are unlikely to do.

6. A Lack of Basic Formatting- no use of bold, italics, underlining, bullets, etc make the document very boring.

This is a great example of a misplaced resource that has taken on the responsible for white paper writing. I’m sure this CTO is a great subject matter expert that knows a lot about his company, industry, and solution. Without an effective way to present those nuggets of wisdom via a well formatted white paper, his chances of getting reader attention become significantly reduced.

White papers like these are one of the reasons I started the newsletter, “Short Attention Marketing Tips”, to help today’s white paper writers add these essential ‘attention-grabbing’ elements so that key B2B messages will be quickly and clearly received. If you’d like to learn more about how to use elements like the ones I’ve listed above to make your white papers more effective, and avoid mistakes like this white paper, then my newsletter is for you.

For years, Google Adwords has been considered the ‘de-facto’ way for any business to gain exposure for their brand, product, or service on the Internet.

Now with the explosion of social marketing communities like Facebook and MySpace, many businesses are now considering new approaches to leveraging the traffic on these sites into greater business opportunities.

A recent article on marketing site, WebPros.com, entitled, “Facebook can drive more Traffic than Google“, showed some interesting statistics that compared Google to Facebook with regard to unique visitations. As the article indicates:

Facebook gets over a third of the number of unique visitors that Google does according to comScore. And it continues to grow. Compete shows the lines between Google and Facebook getting closer together.

If Facebook’s growth continues the way it has been, perhaps it should be considered Google’s greatest threat (when I say threat, I mean competition) – maybe not in general search, but in terms of where advertisers are spending their money. Certainly in the foreseeable future, people will continue using Google to search, and advertisers will continue to spend money advertising with them (probably even more now that they are doing more targeting), but Facebook also targets, and it’s not going to be overlooked. It could put a dent in Adwords revenue.

Does Google need to worry based on these stats? Maybe not in the short-term. But over time the need to reduce online ad expenditures with Google will certainly have many small businesses, especially those that cater to the consumer marketing, taking a more serious look at the possibility of using communities like Facebook and MySpace to promote their products or services.

After all, word of mouth advertising is a one of the most powerful advertising mediums known to man. Facebook is merely putting a ‘face’ (sorry for the bad pun) on something we’ve all known for years.

What’s your opinion? Do you think Facebook will eventually drive more traffic than Google?

One enterprising LinkedIn group called “Lead Nuturing”conducted an online poll among their peers that came to the same conclusion reached by a number of B2B marketing websites. Specifically, that white papers are considered to be a more effective business marketing medium than established venues such as meetings and conferences.

The results of the poll were published by Vazt, in a blog post entitled, “Trade Shows vs. Content Marketing.“:

On Friday, there was an interesting question asked in a Linkedin™ group called Lead Nurturing, headed, Conference/Trade ROI, Does Anyone have a good way to figure out a show’s ROI? Or a good system for qualifying a show?

For a significant portion of my career, I worked for a research advisory company who had a high percentage of their revenue coming from conferences. This company had it all, field sales, great content, and lots of events. The question always intrigued me, which channel had the greatest ROI? Since our inception, we have been asking that question via a poll on our website, “What is the most effective way to market your product or service?” I pulled the latest results, below:

Meeting and conferences 21.43%

Surveys and white papers 25%

Direct mail and email 10.71%

References 42.86%

When it happened, I was quite surprised that conferences slipped to 3rd behind white papers.

Obviously, this poll creates many additional questions:

1. Why are meetings and conferences combined? They are very different venues.

2. Why are surveys combined with white papers? The combined results disproportionately favored white papers.

3. What type of “References” constitute this category? Verbal, virtual community, forum, email?

The most important aspect of this poll reflects the same trend as other leading business marketing resources. Namely that white papers are quickly becoming one of, if not THE most effective marketing medium influencing business customers.

The results of this survey match a 2008 TechTarget Benchmark Report on Media consumption among IT marketers and buyers entitled “Perception Versus Reality of the IT Pro and IT Marketer“, that found white papers to be the first choice for evaluating a business solution.

While many areas within business marketing circles look bleak given a soft economic climate, white papers continue to represent a substantial value for today’s businesses marketers.

Are micro-blogs and micro-communities courtesy of Twitter making traditional blogs obsolete? Is it due to a rapidly decreasing reader attention span?

That’s the conclusion being construed from the blog, ExpertSEM, in a post entitled, “Twitter Killed the Blog“. As the blog post indicates, a recent TechCrunch blog about Technorati’s Authority Index (defined as the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months; the higher the number, the greater the level of authority), blogs are losing their power as authoritative sources. Instead, users are turning to Twitter and other rapid content providers for info and links within these communities are stealing authority.

As the blogger, Angie indicates in this post:

I love Twitter—it’s a great way to interact with people in the industry and get timely information without having to trudge through a million sites. And if I’m not interested in a tweet, it’s simple enough to dismiss—it only takes up two lines of text and it will be pushed down my feed in a few moments anyway. However, I am often frustrated and embarrassed by people’s short attention spans and inability to read more than a few paragraphs. And I fear for future generations.

I hope that blogs do not go out of style any time soon. I rather enjoy reading them and love writing them. And as more and more newspapers become defunct (see Rocky Mountain News), I think we need insightful sources with quality content of more than two lines total. Besides, where would we all link to and how would we gauge authority?

I still prefer the weighty feel of an actual book. I like writing in the margins, highlighting text and dog-earring pages. I believe tattered pages and a cracked spine show that a book has been loved. Needless to say, I will never, never purchase a Kindle.

So I’ll pose the same question as the blogger: Do you think blogs will become obsolete in the near future? Would you prefer to use Twitter as your one source of news and information? Do you think Twitter has decreased your attention span and willingness to read more lengthy content such as books, white papers, and long articles?

While Googling the other day, I stumbled upon an interesting blog called “More than Words“, written by Dr. Dale Jacobs, professor of Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor in Ontario Canada.

In his post entitled, “The Strong Points of Shortcomings: An Analysis of Writer/Artist Interdependence”, Dr. Jacobs speaks to the very point I have been touting for several years and emphasizing in my new newsletter: “Short Attention Marketing Tips“, namely that visual elements are essential in order to gain greater reader attention. In this blog post, he makes the point that writers and artists must collaborate to make the comic book medium work effectively and in doing so, gain greater reader attention.

One of key points discussed in this post comes from Will Eisner in a book entitled, “Comics & Sequential Art”, where Eisner discusses at length about the importance of the writer’s role in comic book storytelling:

The visual aspect dominates the reader’s attention. “This lures the artist to concentrate his skills on style, technique and graphic devices which are designed to dazzle the eye. The reader’s receptivity to the sensory effect and often his evaluation of its worth reinforces this concern and encourages the proliferation of artistic athletes who produce pages of absolutely stunning art held together by almost no story at all”.

What Eisner is saying is that the writer and the artist must work together to form a complete 50/50 collaboration. There needs to be interdependence between them. “In view of [...] interdependence there is therefore no choice (in fairness to the art form itself) but to recognize the primacy of the writing. In doing so, however, one must then immediately acknowledge that in a perfect (or pure) configuration the writer and the artist should be embodied in the same person. The writing (or the writer) must be in control to the very end”.

In the same way that the comic book writer of is in control of the comic medium and collaborates with the artist to deliver the primary story line message in the comic book, the same relationship is true with the writer and the artist in a white paper project.

The writer is in charge of the direction of the white paper. The writer decides what type of graphics elements to use and where those graphic elements need to be placed throughout the paper. This is essential so that the graphic elements can be used as the primary driver to pull the reader into key business messages delivered throughout the white paper content.

Visual elements don’t have to be graphics. They can be sidebar callouts/pull quotes, shaded text boxes containing bottom-line advantage messages, or bulleted text. The principle is the same. Without these ‘attention-getting’ elements, it is much harder for a white paper to gain the same amount of reader attention using only left-flush text-based paragraphs.

Do you think the principles of text and graphics are the same in a comic book as a white paper? Do you think an author can gain the same amount of reader attention without graphics using only paragraph-based information?

No one will doubt the fact that maintaining a daily or semi-weekly blog takes an extensive amount of time and work. Now one blogger asks the question whether regular participation in Twitter has made a negative impact on both the blogging and white paper writing process.

According to the blog Traffick, in a post entitled “ I’ll Be Blogging Less, So Please Follow Me on Twitter“, Twittering and blogging represent two distinctly different forms of social marketing: Serious and Fun:

My hope is that blogging less and tweeting more will save time and also put me in touch with the thoughts of a highly select group of people who can help me think faster (and have fun doing it). Blogging “less” here means that I will be making a conscious choice between serious writing, and the type of writing I do to stay fun and connected, rather than just have it all jumble together.

Serious writing:

• Maybe someday, more work on “books” (never say never).
• Real columns are ongoing at Search Engine Land.
• Reports, emails, proposals, internal Page Zero communications, website copy and white papers now and then, and the day to day written work that focuses on the needs of our clients!

Fun and connected writing:

• Twitter – necessarily pithy observations and pointing to the best most useful stuff
• A city blog: it’s my dream to find the time to start a blog in the area of citizen photojournalism for my beloved Toronto, something that would capture a more varied flavor than existing entries such as Torontoist. This is very much on the back burner and would likely work better if I lived in a tiny village.
• Just a personal blog. If I get around to it, I’ll probably set up a personal blog as Danny has done with Daggle. I’ve meant to do that for years to discourage me from putting personal stuff here. Again, that’s on the back burner but as with the city blog, I have the domain name picked out.

Here’s my view: While I find myself Tweeting more now that I have discovered Twitter, it has become a more difficult task to allocate the same amount of time to blogging as I did before.

The difference is that Tweeting is a new and more powerful marketing tool for your blog. Within a few seconds I can dramatically increase the readership to my blog posts than I ever could have accomplished previously using SEO, Google Alerts, or links from other complimentary blogs.

In a sense, Twitter has created a new incentive to update and maintain my blog posts more frequently. I do not view it as an either/or proposition. As to the question of “fun” versus “serious”, I find Twitter more fun, and blogging more serious.

What do you think? Has Twitter decreased your blogging? Do you feel you have to pick one or the other? Which is fun, which is serious?