Category: Content Marketing

Call me a snoop, but when I’m at a technology conference listening to a speaker, I glance around at what other people are doing on their laptops. I swear to you I am not looking for

intellectual property, which is a good thing because I wouldn’t find any anyway. While the speaker drones on, people are typing emails, checking their Twitter feed, and reading news sites. I’m pretty sure I saw one top analyst sneak onto a recipe site.

And that’s happening when people are trying to look polite and attentive. So when your white paper comes over the transom, how are your would-be readers going to react? They don’t need to be polite to their email, so will they scan your headline and make a run to the recipe site? You hope not.

White papers are not cheap to write. Even when you write them in-house, you still devote a staff person to the research and writing. Don’t forget the interviews with the subject matter experts. Then you have the designer, the media placement people, the marketing campaign people, and even the salespeople. You need your white papers to sell. So why in the world should you take all this time to write a boring white paper?

No Pulitzer’s Here

Granted, a good white paper isn’t going to be up for Pulitzer Prize. They’re factual and logical, they’re aimed at an IT audience, and they’re talking about technology and not the latest celebrity breakup. But white papers equally do not get prizes for incredibly dull.

Build your white paper from these beautiful bones to grab and keep interest:

1. Your reader must care about the topic. You can’t control individual readers, but you can promote the heck out of your paper and make sure it appears in your prospects’ favorite channels.
2. You need a good headline. You don’t have to be uber-clever, that strategy can backfire with IT audiences. But don’t put them to sleep either in the first six words.
3. You need a good opening. This is a great place to sketch the problem that your prospect probably has. If you are speaking to your prospects’ pain points, they’ll listen. They’ll read on. Create a compelling thesis statement by telling them that there is a solution to this big problem, and they’re going to find it in this paper.
4. Clarify your points. When I went to Fuller Seminary about 1 million years ago, the Presbyterian preaching professors drilled into you that each sermon needed a strong intro, an inspiring conclusion, and 3 clear points in the middle. Plus never go longer than 20 minutes. White papers aren’t sermons, but the best ones present a distinct set of supporting points. 3 to 5 is ideal, each supporting and expanding your thesis statement. You are creating a logical progression of thought leading to your conclusion and call to action.
5. Speaking of which, write a strong conclusion. Now sum up your sub points and map them to your thesis, conclude how right you are, and how very smart your customers are going to be by taking a specific action. Call a number, email someone specific, or best of all follow a link to a landing page specific to this white paper.

Adding Some Skin

In addition to this working skeleton of a persuasive essay, you’re going to want to add to some skin to the mix. By the way, I apologize for the autopsy-like imagery. Apparently, I watched one too many NCIS episodes.

• Visual interest. I’m a writer, not a designer, but so much content is flowing through marketing channels that your white paper needs to stand out. A good headline will help immensely, and so will solid design. Note that I did not say flashy. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with flashy except when the visual elements overwhelm the written message. This might be fine in fashion marketing, but is not be fine with an IT readership. Use clear and interesting design elements to draw attention to the paper in general, and to your main points and evidence in specific.
• Tell stories. Yes, stories. Even in a white paper — perhaps especially in a white paper — you want your readers to picture your technology in their environment, solving their problems and making their professional lives worth living. But if you don’t communicate that happy story to them, they might not get it at all. Don’t give them that chance. Tell stories that demonstrate how serious their challenge is, and what a risk they’re running by not solving it. (Admittedly you don’t have to go all the way to “and everybody dies,” which is the story summary for every tragic opera ever written.) Tell the truth about the very real risk they are running by not adopting a solution like yours. Then tell the story of how your solution works and how it greatly benefits your customers.

Your white papers must be clear and be logical. They also need to be interesting. And that means excellent flow, visual interest, and good stories that stick to their ribs. Or rather stick in their memory… once again, sorry for watching all that NCIS.

 

Christine Taylor may be too smart-alecky for her own good, but she writes a mean white paper. Talk to her today at 760-954-1807 or email her at christine@christineltaylor.com.

I’ve been a technology marketing copywriter for years. About a year ago I came across the concept of B2B marketing using stories. I was excited because outside of work, I’m a storyteller. I thought this will be right up my alley. I could offer storytelling techniques to my copywriting clients, which will make my work more valuable to them. Everyone will be happy.

But when I started to study B2B storytelling, I got more and more confused. It wasn’t the confusion that occurs at the start of a learning curve, because I knew storytelling. My problem was that the people who were teaching storytelling for B2B didn’t seem to be teaching storytelling. The method didn’t fit the storytelling archetypes, they didn’t have any story structure, they lacked any emotional touch points, and “hero journey” that they were talking about wasn’t the classical hero journey at all. As I got more confused, I got irritated.

Beyond the Video

It wasn’t all as black-and-white as that. Stories clearly fit well in in video. The more successful storytelling video tended to be high production collateral. Scripting and filming quality video is not a cheap ticket item, and you would usually see companies like Apple, GE, and Intel spending big resources to make them.

I concluded that most of my clients—midsize companies and divisions of larger companies–won’t be able to produce an award-winning video, so forget telling stories in content marketing. (The only exception I could see was the case study, which is already a story.) I did not look back for quite a while.

Recently I took another look and I’m glad I did. The idea of storytelling in B2B marketing has started to mature from thinking video-only and link bait articles about the “hero journey.”

I began to think about what kind of story works in B2B content marketing. The case study sure, but what about white papers, blogs, e-books, and articles? Because so much of content marketing is feeding the beast. You need to produce a lot of content to get the kind of attention that you want. It needs to be quality content and you want to be able to leverage it. And you don’t want to write the same generic content that your competitors keep churning out. How can story help in this context?

Story helps you stand out because it’s a fundamental part of being human. Human beings tell stories to themselves and to each other. And because story already holds such a fundamental place in the human conscience, in marketing communications a little goes a long way.

Let’s take the most obvious type of story-related content, customer success stories. Their challenge is:

1. So many vendors are doing them that customers are getting weary of reading them. Don’t get me wrong — customers generally respond positively to case studies — but you need to rise above the average to get the attention you need.
2. Many case studies are poorly written. The traditional format of challenge / search / solution / benefit is all right; you don’t need to stray far from it. Nor do you want to come across as whimsical or emotional. But you do need to make your case study a rich reading experience by adding elements of good stories. Make the customer quotes accurate and interesting, choose rich wording, use active verbs. Et voilà, you have a compelling and accurate customer story built on subtle story elements.

Example: Enlivening the Basic Case Study

Let’s look at an example of a case study from a major storage vendor. The idea is good — a major enterprise shares their success with the vendor’s products. But the case study is full of jargon and stilted quotes, which diminishes its impact… in plain English, it’s boring. I took a section of the case study and compared the actual writing with my suggested revision paragraph-by-paragraph.

Original: “[Company] recognized that running its own data center—with all of its cooling systems, redundant power supplies, generators and other continuity measures—was inefficient in an age when service providers can offer higher service levels and lower costs thanks to their greater economies of scale.

Revised: “[Company] discovered that running its own data center cost them a lot more than they were willing to pay. Cooling systems, redundant power supplies, generators, business continuity: costs spiraled higher year after year with no sign of slowing down. They decided to seriously look at service providers, whose greater economies of scale let them offer higher service levels at lower cost.

Original: After successfully moving to a co-located facility, the IT department was able to increase its focus on delivering greater value to the business through improved integration and performance.

Revised: The IT department’s successful search replaced their resource-consuming data center with a state-of-the-art hosted environment. The change freed them to focus on their highest priority: increasing business value by improving compute integration and performance throughout the company.

Original: Any new solution needed to fit seamlessly into the company’s vision of a hybrid cloud infrastructure. As [customer] explains: “For all new application requests, we always ask: ‘Can it be run in the public cloud?’ That’s always our preferred option, because we don’t want to spend time managing things that can be run equally well by somebody else—giving us back vital resource time to spend innovating in our own business.”

Revised: The heart of the project was a hybrid cloud infrastructure, and any new application had to seamlessly integrate into the cloud. [Customer] put it this way: “When we get a new application request we always ask the same question: ‘Can we run it in the public cloud?’ We don’t want to spend our time managing things that someone else can manage equally well. We protect our time so we can spend it innovating our own business.”  

I did not change any of the facts or the narrative flow. I did replace wording and sentence structure for action, richer word choice, and a more human touch. See what a difference it makes: better readability improves reader retention, which adds value and legs to your case study.