Posted in keywords, publishing content, search engine marketing, titles, white papers

Good White Paper, Lousy Title – 3 Ways to Fix It

Title for White Paper

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

Have a look at this list of white paper titles. Do they grab you?

  1. Hosting a hybrid online conference
  2. Real World Predictive Analytics
  3. Protecting Your Constituents’ Personal Information
  4. Collections Lawsuit
  5. Engagement: Understanding It, Achieving It, Measuring It
  6. Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness
  7. The Empowered RIM Manager
  8. The Predictive Enterprise
  9. Social Media and the 401(k) – The Time Is Now
  10. The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication
  11. An Unfortunate Surprise: Why Predictive Response Models Decrease Marketing ROI
  12. Do Fortune 100 companies need a twittervention?
  13. Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
  14. SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
  15. The Lisbon Treaty
  16. Why Vyatta is Better than Cisco
  17. Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
  18. The Road Traveled
  19. How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
  20. 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 those titles raise its hand and squeal, “Oh, pick me, pick me!”?

White paper titles – Good and bad

Let’s examine a few of them.

  • Collections Lawsuit
  • The Lisbon Treaty
  • Sustainable Agriculture

Those seem 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 are the intended readers? What will they get out of the paper?

Middling

Consider another group:

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

Those titles give us a bit more information and help us qualify them better. If you’re not trying to consolidate your SQL Server implementation, then you know that paper’s not for you. Or, if you’re not using dedupe technology, that could be why your backups take so long. Might be worth a read.

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

Now, you’re talking

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

Those are well-evolved titles. They demonstrate that the paper is not for everybody, and they save you time by giving you enough information to qualify them quickly.

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 white papers?

photo credit: Doug Coldwell

Related posts:

  1. “Who is the Audience for this Piece?”
  2. 5 Ways to Change Your White Paper Strategy. Hurry.
  3. Marketing Mangers: Make Up Your Own Job Title
  4. 3 Ways to Make Your Subject Matter Expert Think
  5. “You want research with that white paper?”
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Author: John White

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a content marketing writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Content Marketing Writer.”
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2 thoughts on “Good White Paper, Lousy Title – 3 Ways to Fix It”

  1. Using the job role in the white paper’s title is a good one. For #18, how about:

    Open Source Networking: 5 Connectivity Solutions Silicon Valley Giants Hope IT Managers Never Discover

    1. Sure. I (and the search engines) would prefer to see it near the beginning of the title, but that’s a good start.

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