B-to-B Insights: Are Whitepapers Dead?
Breathing life back into free content offerings
June 2008 By Robert W. Bly
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It’s often the case that when a marketing technique is overused, it gradually loses its effectiveness. When that happens, usage drops off, and prospects are no longer bombarded by the technique. Example: the AOL CD mailings.
A year or so later, a marketer remembers the old technique, realizes it hasn’t been used for a while and decides to test it again. Sure enough, it works because the market hasn’t seen it for some time. Other marketers who use it also start getting good results, and the marketing tool becomes popular once more.
Now, in B-to-B, some direct marketers are questioning whether whitepapers are running out of steam. The concern is that there are too many whitepapers—so that the offer of yet another one has lost its appeal. As one whitepaper skeptic told me, “Prospects already have too much to read; why would they ask for more?”
Yet the numbers tell a different story: namely, that whitepaper marketing is alive and well. “The demand for whitepapers has never been higher,” says Michael A. Stelzner, executive editor of WhitePaperSource.com. “During business downturns, corporations rely more on marketing to help them acquire leads and establish thought leadership. Whitepapers are the secret weapon for companies. Our organization has seen a major increase in whitepaper use among businesses of all sizes, but especially those selling costly or complex products.”
Titles: the Root of the Problem
To begin with, I think it’s not whitepapers themselves that are tiring but the name itself. “Whitepaper” signals to some prospects a document that is a selling tool. And with virtually every whitepaper in the world available for free, whitepapers have a low perceived value as a giveaway.
The solution is to keep using whitepapers in your marketing but to call them something else. The mailing list broker Edith Roman Associates used to publish a print catalog of mailing lists, but instead called it the “Direct Mail Encyclopedia.” Offering a free Direct Mail Encyclopedia helped generate more inquiries for its brokerage services.
Copywriter Ivan Levison calls his whitepapers “guides.” Marketer David Yale uses “executive briefing.” I’m partial to “special report.” For consumer marketing, marketing expert Joe Polish suggests “consumer awareness guide,” and for a B-to-B whitepaper giving product selection tips, I’d change this to “buyer’s guide” or “selection guide.” For a whitepaper giving tips or instructions on a process, I might call it a “manual.” If you publish a print version that fits in a #10 envelope and is saddle-stitched, you can call it a “free booklet.”
All of the above are variations on the free content offer. Direct marketers refer to free content offers as “bait pieces,” because they are used to “bait your hook” when you go “fishing” for sales leads. Does what you call your bait piece really matter? I think it does, because calling it a report or guide creates a perception of greater value—after all, thousands of publishers actually sell special reports and booklets for prices ranging from $3 to $40 or more. I often put a dollar price for the guide or report in the upper-right corner of the front cover, which strengthens the perception that the freebie has value; I don’t think this would be credible on a document labeled as a whitepaper.
Don’t Make It a Chore
What about the complaint that prospects already have too much to read? There is more information on the Internet than you could process in a thousand lifetimes. But good whitepapers don’t merely present information; they offer solutions to business and technical problems. Virtually every B-to-B sale you make is because someone thinks your product or service is the solution to his or her problem. A whitepaper can help clarify the problem as well as convince the reader that your idea or method is the best of many options for addressing it.
Every marketing campaign has an objective, yet if you ask most managers what the objectives of their whitepapers are, they probably couldn’t tell you. Too many see whitepapers as an opportunity to merely collect and publish a pile of research material. To make your whitepaper successful, you must define the marketing objective before writing a single word.
For example, a manufacturer found that consumers were not buying its do-it-yourself (DIY) underground sprinkler kits, because homeowners perceived installing the irrigation system by themselves as too difficult. Solution: a free DIY manual on how to install an underground sprinkler system in a single weekend. Clearly written and illustrated, the manual overcame the perception that this was a tough project.
Format Follows Function
In the pre-Internet era, bait pieces were mainly paper and ink. Thanks to the PC and the Internet, bait pieces now can be produced as PDF files and instantly downloaded online. But at the receiving end, they usually are printed by the prospect and read on paper.
It may be that what’s wearing out is not free content, but the standard whitepaper format: pages of black ink on 8½˝ x 11˝ sheets of paper. To make your bait piece stand out, consider using alternative formats: DVDs, CDs, podcasts, webinars, teleseminars, flash cards, stickers, posters, software and games.
Most whitepapers are six to 10 pages, but you are not locked into that length. You can go shorter or longer, depending on the content you want to present and the marketing objective of the bait piece. The bait piece can be as short and simple as a list of tips printed on one side of a sheet of paper. Or it can be as long as a self-published paperback book.
Tap Into the Information Craze
Free content offers have been used in marketing for decades, and rather than tiring, they have been given new life, thanks in part to the information-oriented culture spawned by the Internet. “Every organization possesses particular expertise that has value in the new e-marketplace of ideas,” writes David Meerman Scott in his book “Cashing In With Content.” “Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with customers, employees, the media, investors, and suppliers through content.”
Robert W. Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books including “The Whitepaper Marketing Handbook” (Racom). His Web sites are www.bly.com and www.thelandingpage
guru.com. E-mail him at rwbly@bly.com, or call (201) 385-1220.
A year or so later, a marketer remembers the old technique, realizes it hasn’t been used for a while and decides to test it again. Sure enough, it works because the market hasn’t seen it for some time. Other marketers who use it also start getting good results, and the marketing tool becomes popular once more.
Now, in B-to-B, some direct marketers are questioning whether whitepapers are running out of steam. The concern is that there are too many whitepapers—so that the offer of yet another one has lost its appeal. As one whitepaper skeptic told me, “Prospects already have too much to read; why would they ask for more?”
Yet the numbers tell a different story: namely, that whitepaper marketing is alive and well. “The demand for whitepapers has never been higher,” says Michael A. Stelzner, executive editor of WhitePaperSource.com. “During business downturns, corporations rely more on marketing to help them acquire leads and establish thought leadership. Whitepapers are the secret weapon for companies. Our organization has seen a major increase in whitepaper use among businesses of all sizes, but especially those selling costly or complex products.”
Titles: the Root of the Problem
To begin with, I think it’s not whitepapers themselves that are tiring but the name itself. “Whitepaper” signals to some prospects a document that is a selling tool. And with virtually every whitepaper in the world available for free, whitepapers have a low perceived value as a giveaway.
The solution is to keep using whitepapers in your marketing but to call them something else. The mailing list broker Edith Roman Associates used to publish a print catalog of mailing lists, but instead called it the “Direct Mail Encyclopedia.” Offering a free Direct Mail Encyclopedia helped generate more inquiries for its brokerage services.
Copywriter Ivan Levison calls his whitepapers “guides.” Marketer David Yale uses “executive briefing.” I’m partial to “special report.” For consumer marketing, marketing expert Joe Polish suggests “consumer awareness guide,” and for a B-to-B whitepaper giving product selection tips, I’d change this to “buyer’s guide” or “selection guide.” For a whitepaper giving tips or instructions on a process, I might call it a “manual.” If you publish a print version that fits in a #10 envelope and is saddle-stitched, you can call it a “free booklet.”
All of the above are variations on the free content offer. Direct marketers refer to free content offers as “bait pieces,” because they are used to “bait your hook” when you go “fishing” for sales leads. Does what you call your bait piece really matter? I think it does, because calling it a report or guide creates a perception of greater value—after all, thousands of publishers actually sell special reports and booklets for prices ranging from $3 to $40 or more. I often put a dollar price for the guide or report in the upper-right corner of the front cover, which strengthens the perception that the freebie has value; I don’t think this would be credible on a document labeled as a whitepaper.
Don’t Make It a Chore
What about the complaint that prospects already have too much to read? There is more information on the Internet than you could process in a thousand lifetimes. But good whitepapers don’t merely present information; they offer solutions to business and technical problems. Virtually every B-to-B sale you make is because someone thinks your product or service is the solution to his or her problem. A whitepaper can help clarify the problem as well as convince the reader that your idea or method is the best of many options for addressing it.
Every marketing campaign has an objective, yet if you ask most managers what the objectives of their whitepapers are, they probably couldn’t tell you. Too many see whitepapers as an opportunity to merely collect and publish a pile of research material. To make your whitepaper successful, you must define the marketing objective before writing a single word.
For example, a manufacturer found that consumers were not buying its do-it-yourself (DIY) underground sprinkler kits, because homeowners perceived installing the irrigation system by themselves as too difficult. Solution: a free DIY manual on how to install an underground sprinkler system in a single weekend. Clearly written and illustrated, the manual overcame the perception that this was a tough project.
Format Follows Function
In the pre-Internet era, bait pieces were mainly paper and ink. Thanks to the PC and the Internet, bait pieces now can be produced as PDF files and instantly downloaded online. But at the receiving end, they usually are printed by the prospect and read on paper.
It may be that what’s wearing out is not free content, but the standard whitepaper format: pages of black ink on 8½˝ x 11˝ sheets of paper. To make your bait piece stand out, consider using alternative formats: DVDs, CDs, podcasts, webinars, teleseminars, flash cards, stickers, posters, software and games.
Most whitepapers are six to 10 pages, but you are not locked into that length. You can go shorter or longer, depending on the content you want to present and the marketing objective of the bait piece. The bait piece can be as short and simple as a list of tips printed on one side of a sheet of paper. Or it can be as long as a self-published paperback book.
Tap Into the Information Craze
Free content offers have been used in marketing for decades, and rather than tiring, they have been given new life, thanks in part to the information-oriented culture spawned by the Internet. “Every organization possesses particular expertise that has value in the new e-marketplace of ideas,” writes David Meerman Scott in his book “Cashing In With Content.” “Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with customers, employees, the media, investors, and suppliers through content.”
Robert W. Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books including “The Whitepaper Marketing Handbook” (Racom). His Web sites are www.bly.com and www.thelandingpage
guru.com. E-mail him at rwbly@bly.com, or call (201) 385-1220.
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