Category: White Papers

A tight economy means you need more focused marketing efforts

In a tight economy, doing more with less is the reality for product marketing managers. Many companies slash marketing efforts that focus on branding and name recognition and get back to basics – lead generation. In recent years, white papers have emerged as a staple in the product marketer’s toolbox, largely due to their reputation as powerful lead generation tools with an attractive cost-benefit ratio.

 In fact, the power of an effective white paper to connect with prospects and produce abundant, quality leads is unparalleled. According to the TechTarget 2008 Media Consumption Benchmark, “80.5% of buyers find white papers to be either very effective or somewhat effective in the decision making process, more so than any other marketing tool.”

 Why white papers fail

Even so, some white papers simply fail to generate leads. And no one can afford to spend precious resources on efforts that return lackluster results.

 When white papers don’t perform as expected, the quality of writing is usually at issue. According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, the main reason white papers fail is their readability factor; “the topics are uninteresting, titles blah, and content far too salesy or just plain dull.” 

 Many organizations make the mistake of thinking that a white paper is just another data sheet, or just another product brochure, and turn this critical piece of writing over to an engineer or junior marketing copywriter.

 The problem for product marketers is that, in a market saturated with marketing messages, a poorly written white paper is not only a waste of the time it takes to produce it, but could end up turning off prospects and sending them running to the competition.

Outsourcing costs less and produces better results

Creating white papers that command attention and deliver leads is a highly specialized skill. A professional white paper writer charges from $4000 to $7000 for a white paper depending on the market and their experience level. While hiring a professional writer may, at first glance, seem like an unwarranted expense, when you look at the numbers it starts to make a lot of sense.

Tasking an internal employee to write a white paper when they are not practiced at it can take their time and focus away from more business critical projects for a considerable period of time. The deadline tends to slip as other initiatives pop up and take precedence, and soon your white paper is not only poorly written, it’s late to market and has cost the whole team in productivity and added stress.

By outsourcing your paper to a professional, you get a compelling white paper with a greater ability to attract leads, much faster and without the drain on your internal team. Still think it’s not worth it? Ask yourself this – how many solutions do I have to sell to recoup the investment? Now, in this economy, can you afford not to?

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.