The title of your white paper is where you sell your idea to the prospective reader. Don’t blow your chance to make a good impression.

Industry colleague Jonathan Kantor publishes a list of free white papers each week from his blog, White Paper Pundit. I’ve followed it the last few weeks, looking for interesting titles. They are few and far between. (Mind you, these are not papers that Jonathan himself has written.)

Have a look at this list from last week and tell me what you think of them:

1. Hosting a hybrid online conference
2. Enrollment Marketing Predictions for 2010
3. Lessons Learned From Windows 7 Early Adopters
4. Real World Predictive Analytics
5. Protecting Your Constituents’ Personal Information
6. Collections Lawsuit
7. Engagement: Understanding It, Achieving It, Measuring It
8. Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness
9. The Empowered RIM Manager
10. The Predictive Enterprise
11. Social Media and the 401(k) – The Time Is Now
12. The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication
13. An Unfortunate Surprise: Why Predictive Response Models Decrease Marketing ROI
14. Do Fortune 100 companies need a twittervention?
15. Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
16. SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
17. The Lisbon Treaty
18. Why Vyatta is Better than Cisco
19. Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
20. HP_UX 11i v3: Congestion Control Management
21. The Road Traveled
22. How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
23. Transloading Efficiency
24. Sustainable Agriculture

Did any of those grab you? Even if you were in the position of needing to read up on these topics, did any of these titles raise its hand and squeal, “Oh, pick me, pick me!”?

White Paper Titles – Good and Bad

Let’s examine a few of these.

• Collections Lawsuit
• The Lisbon Treaty
• Sustainable Agriculture

This seems like search engine optimization gone wrong; the titles are perfect for SEO, but when they show up in the results, they’re not very tempting, are they?

Whose point of view does each paper examine? What aspect of each topic does the paper cover? Who is in the intended audience? What will they get out of reading the paper?

Consider another group:

• Real World Predictive Analytics
• SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
• The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication

These titles give us a bit more information and help us qualify them better. “I don’t need to consolidate my SQL Server implementation; I need to build it up. Guess this paper’s not for me, thanks.” Or, “Maybe duplication is what’s bogging down our backups. This might be worth a read.” And, they’re SEO-ready.

These titles give us steak, but not much sizzle. Your paper deserves both.

One final group:

• How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
• Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
• Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness

These are pretty well evolved titles. They demonstrate that the paper is not for everybody, and they save me time by giving me enough information to qualify them.

They’re long, but there’s nothing wrong with that, especially with SEO-ready keywords at the beginning.

3 Steps to Good White Paper Titles

1. Include the job title of the intended reader. This is part 1 of the steak; it tells me you have done homework to find out who I am.
2. Include the business problem the paper addresses. This is part 2 of the steak, in which you focus NOT on your expertise, but on the thing that has my hair on fire. (See David Meerman Scott on the single most important pitching tip.)
3. Include verbs. This helps the sizzle.

So, how about:

• Literacy Instructors Scramble – Get the Most Out of No Child Left Behind before It’s Left Behind
• Let the Casual Bloggers Decide: WordPress or Blogger.com over the Long Haul
• What Is My Pancreas, and What Did I Do to It to Deserve Cancer?
• Rubbing the Buffalo off the Nickel – 5 Ways Deans Can Increase Revenue and Lower Expenses

And, since you’re front-loading the title with SEO keywords, you can consider publishing the paper under two different titles (A/B testing), with each one focusing on either 1 or 2:

• Translation and Manufacturing – How Managers Can Successfully Mix the Two
• Manufacturing Managers Take on Translation and Make It Work

What are you doing with titles to get your customers to read your content?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: Doug Coldwell

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I was pleased to see that client Xiam Technologies was making excellent (re-)use of their white paper, “Make It Easy on Me – 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet,” the fruit of our collaboration this past summer.

Xiam is using the white paper as a content-lead into msearchgroove, a knowledge portal on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media.

Personalization is also a topic Colm Healy — CEO of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators — will examine in a series of thought leadership contributions on MSG beginning later this week.

The first in the series will outline the key takeaways of the company’s white paper, titled “Make It Easy For Me: 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet.”

Content like white papers, case studies and technical articles is rich in SEO-potential and industry authority. Why restrict it to the corral of your Website when you can give it away and get it to roam the plains of the Web, seeding your brand? (Tip of the hat also to msearchgroove, who obviously sees the potential for leverage.)

Never forget the Content Buffet. Xiam is one of those laying out a rich spread.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: KVDP

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Re-purposing content is part of the art of marketing. Have your marketing communications writer convert big-bite content into multiple smaller pieces and put them into different channels.

“We have a white paper, but it’s too long for this day and age.”

Of course, the engineer or executive who wrote the paper doesn’t think that, but you as the marketing manager can see it, as you peruse your content-landscape for pieces that will catch the attention of prospects and influencers in your industry.

Have your writer edit long pieces down to short marketing pieces that take on their own life and tell your story more succinctly. MarketingProfs’ “Get to the Point!” series does this very well for its paying members by distilling marketing-oriented content from a variety of long-winded sources down to regular, five-paragraph e-mail messages.

Source Content

Some obvious candidates for repackaging:

• White papers and thought-leadership papers. Companies place a lot of store by these pieces, so don’t treat them like wedding china and leave them hanging in a cupboard on your Web site for only occasional use. Have your writer pull out individual sections (The Problem, Current Approaches, What the Industry Needs, etc.) and make them self-standing.
• Webinars and podcasts. These are good sources, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is a simple matter of transcription. Even trained speakers introduce a lot of non sequiturs and interrupted sentences to live delivery, so your marketing communications writer needs to bend the text back into useful shape and logical flow.
• Slide deck presentations. I’ve posted on this before, and presentations are bagfuls of bullets waiting for an chance to live outside of the projector. Your sales and product teams probably have dozens of them that you’ve never seen before, but that can help you tell your story better and more authoritatively.

3 Ways to Make Them Work

You don’t need to tell your in-house contributors that their content is too long; just tell them that you’re going to give it life in several more important channels.

1. Teasers. Use them like movie trailers to bring visitors back to a landing page with the entire piece. The right five paragraphs in front of the right technical audience will result in clicks, page visits, downloads and conversions.
2. Blog posts. You do have a blog, don’t you? Have a look at Seth Godin and Tom Peters on the power of blogging, and follow Denise Wakeman for tips on making corporate blogging work. When you have ready-made content you can post, you’re halfway there.
3. Article/content marketing. Another important place for shopping your content out is in content repositories like ezinearticles, goarticles, articlecity, buzzle.com, articledashboard.com, amazines.com, ideamarketers.com and others oriented to your industry. Of importance here is the resource box you create to ensure that readers can find and follow you once they like your content. Read Steve Shaw at Creative Article Marketing for more on this channel.

In most organizations it’s easier to find long marketing pieces than short ones, but there’s a lot of value in the content once you’ve re-purposed it for new channels.

Have you tried this in your organization? What results do you see?

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When you hire a marketing communications writer, you should expect a description of her method. Ask for it, and be sure it makes  sense to you.

You’re evaluating a marketing communications writer to do a white paper or a case study for you. “So, how do you do this?” you ask her. “What’s your writing process? What steps do you follow in writing a piece like this?”

You should get an answer that makes sense to you, and that doesn’t sound like a rambling, off-the-top-of-the-head proposal.

Here are 5 steps a professional may enumerate for your writing project. If the writer includes these, so much the better; if not, at least you’ll know what to ask for.

1. Review existing materials. A good writer is willing to perform some research on your industry and specialty. To save her time and ensure that she avoids material that will muddy the waters, you should point her to the basic information – Web sites, analysis, published reports – she’ll need to know to conduct a fruitful interview.
2. Interview – Assuming the task is to take what’s in somebody’s head and get it into print, the writer will need to conduct an interview with those somebodies. This is not a grilling, broadcast journalist-caliber interview, but one designed to get the subject matter expert talking. Perfect interviews are rare, and few experts are adept at imparting their information flawlessly, but a professional marketing communications writer can always get something writable out of an interview.
3. Outline – For a paper or a report, it’s important that the writer lay out the piece and let you verify that it makes sense to you. While it’s not so important in short pieces like brochures and case studies, long pieces need to guide readers down a path to explain and convince. You need to see the path the writer envisions and ensure that it’s where you want to guide those readers, and the outline is the best way to do that. Extra credit goes to the writer who fleshes out the outline, say, by writing the introduction or conclusion, so that you can see whether she has picked up your messaging correctly.
4. Drafts – Once you’ve approved the outline, the writer hangs text on it and produces a draft. Most of the battle should be in the first draft, which should result in something close to what you had in mind. Circulate this, get comments, reconcile them and get them back to the writer for a second draft. The writer gets extra credit if she introduces ideas and angles you hadn’t seen before. This is one of the big advantages of hiring an outside writer: you breathe your own exhaust day in and day out; a good writer who sinks her teeth into your business provides outside perspective.
5. Final review – After the final draft, there’s not much for the writer to do, but her job isn’t yet over, either. Most content requires layout (Web, print, InDesign, Quark), and that effort begins after the final draft. You should have your writer review the piece once it has emerged from layout to find and resolve any discrepancies between her final draft and the pre-publication piece. (Hint: There will almost always be some, intentional or otherwise.) This is a good chance for the writer to clean up final typo’s and tell you what looks right and wrong before you go live with it. (BTW, as I’ve posted before, most companies omit this step.)

Don’t go into the writing process blind. Good writers have a method and they can explain it in ways that will make sense to you.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

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• Let it die on the vine – There is always a bit more work you need to do once the authors, reviewers and artists are finished. As marketing manager, you need to give birth to the paper and ensure it sees the light of day. Pushing it those last few inches can take a lot of effort – like the effort to send that last e-mail message of the day when you’d rather close your laptop and go to bed – but do it.
• Hide it under a rock – You need to put the paper where target readers will find it. You probably know that already, but perhaps your organization doesn’t know how to capitalize on what good bait your white paper can be. Many companies bury this kind of content several levels down in their Website, on a product- or solution-page. Surfers are looking for this kind of paper, so don’t make them work for it; link to it from your home page, or create an easily visible page on which your white papers, case studies and published articles all live.
• Give it to the wrong stakeholder - Who is the best custodian of your new white paper? Sales? Business Development? Channel Marketing? Engineering? I’ve had good, rich content – news articles, which have time-value – slide into obscurity because it went to a Website owner who stuck it wherever it would fit, instead of to the champion who really promoted it on the site.
• Put a big form-fill in front of it – If you really want to waste time and money, put your white paper behind a long form. No reader wants to put up with that in this day and age. Naturally, you want to capture the lead, but people would rather buy without being sold to. I posted before on the idea of giving away your content, which is a good idea if you have mountains of it, but if you’re not ready to make it so freely available, just ask for an e-mail address (be prepared for it to be a throwaway address) and an optional comment on what the visitor is looking for. Whenever I’ve done that, I’ve been surprised at the uptake.

This series has described white paper projects that don’t go well, and how you can avoid this situation. Of course, they sometimes go quite well, and as a marketing manager, that’s where you’ll want to focus.

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