B-to-B Insights: Are Whitepapers Dead?

Breathing life back into free content offerings

June 2008 By Robert W. Bly

multipage

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.