You have created the perfect white paper. But you can’t drive leads or close sales if your target market doesn’t notice it.
Luckily, grabbing your prospect’s attention is as easy as spending some focused energy on your title. And once you understand the formula, it takes almost no time at all to transform your paper into the sought-after gem it deserves to be.
To understand how important titles are to the success of your white paper, imagine that you have created a white paper about your company’s newest software offering. It is designed for improving throughput in a manufacturing plant. Your preliminary title reads:
ABC’s new software positively affects throughput for manufacturing plants
So far this title sounds very professional and seems pretty focused. But try to imagine how it sounds to your ideal target. A little self-serving? A little dry? Delving into what your prospect wants to hear can help you craft the titles that will grab their attention.
Step One: Identify the problem
Business executives buy solutions to problems. When creating the title for your white paper, ask yourself “What’s in it for them?”
In our example, it sounds like we have identified the problem: a need for better or faster throughput. But let’s dig a little deeper. What does a manufacturing company get when they have better throughput that they are not getting now? If they can produce more units with the same number of employees, they are lowering their costs and therefore increasing their profit margin. That’s way more exciting than “throughput.”
Step Two: Identify the prospect
No one wants to waste time reading about a solution that is not relevant to them. Again, in our sample title, it seems that we have identified “manufacturing plants” as our target, but we can be even more specific. The IT director is the person who is likely to making the decision on software purchases.
Step Three: Identify the solution
Our solution is a software product. But there are a lot of software products out there. If look closer, we can also identify that it is a user-friendly software product that requires little technical savvy and that it can be implemented in less than a day.
Voila: The perfect title for your perfect paper
Now all you have to do is put it all together:
A manufacturing IT director’s guide to user-friendly software solutions that can begin increasing profit margins today
Following these three simple steps will help your white papers stand out and help you get more return on your white paper investment.