In a recent article, “Traffic Building Tip: Use White Papers” (Feb. 27th) author Jonathan Kantor points to publishers like TechTarget that are fully leveraging the powerful pull of a well-written white paper.

He challenges a recent report that gives white papers a lukewarm ranking as a means to drive traffic to websites, and then proceeds to enumerate on the many applications of white papers. He poses the question as to whether we agree with this report ranking.

From our experience it is a combination of good SEO strategies coupled with the posting of a relevant white paper that will pull traffic to a website. White paper titles and abstracts need to have choice keywords embedded in them so to attract traffic to download the white paper in the first place and to earn high search results rankings.

In terms of lead generation highly relevant white papers pull the largest mass of leads-hands down. Anyone experience anything differently when it comes to white papers?

In past posts, we have discussed how to write a good white paper.  But, when it comes to actually syndicating the white paper, what are best practices?  This week, MarketingSherpa offers a comprehensive list of dos and don’t for content syndication.  In my opinion, one of the most important best practices for syndication that they provide is to take their white paper content and turn it into other media venues, specifically podcasts.  Our experience has shown that taking your content and syndicating it different media venues will help you attract IT pros in all different stages within their buying cycle.  Do you have any examples that support that?

After running thousands of papers on our sites, we have seen over and over again that educational papers always outperform product focused papers. However, many vendors still feel compelled to write exclusively on their product or solution.

I just read a very strong book on this topic by, Michael Stelzner, “Writing White Papers:  How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged” about how to write a successful write paper. This book carefully explains how important it is not to be self serving or focused exclusively on a product, service or solution.  Instead, a white paper should focus on the pain points experienced by the reader and talk about the problems caused by those pains.  No matter, how experienced you are in writing white papers, this book could help everyone gain some useful knowledge.  What has been your experience with product vs. educational white papers?

Last week, Michael Stelzner wrote an interesting article in MarketingProfs about the effectiveness of white papers. The article states, “New research shows that white papers are among the most compelling way to attract leads.”  He also comments on how to write effective white papers such as starting with a problem or need faced by the reader rather than the product or service offered.

After running thousands of campaings on our network, the results prove over and over again that education content combined with integrated media is the key to a successful lead generation program.  We have seen that product/sales focused papers result in poor performance. TechTarget also ran a recent study that points to White Papers as the most effective source when researching new technologies/vendors.  It shows that the majority of IT Professionals download between 10 and 24 white papers per year.

All these data points suggest, to garner success in your lead generation programs, invest in compelling white papers.

Many companies look for ways to position themselves as a thought leader in their market.

There are many ways to build your reputation as a thought leader – press releases, public speeches, and differentiating yourself through content.  I had a client in the CRM space looking to position themselves as a thought leader that offers a service that no other company offers.

My answer was to run a banner roadblock to create initial buzz. To maintain consistent presence the campaign followed up with an integrated online campaign that included banners, e-newsletters and print.  They started with a white paper offer followed by a webcast offer in order to educate and raise awareness for their user experience monitoring solution.  Insightful content (webcast/white paper) is extremely important in how the company differentiates themselves in the market place.  This client used a 3rd party expert to write the white paper and to participate in the webcast.  They also included prominent, easily recognizable companies as case studies to lend credibility and strengthen their case.  The results of the campaign were very successful. This is one example, of positioning a company as a thought leader - Does anyone else have other suggestions?

A couple of you asked for examples of promotional copy that we’ve seen to be effective in supporting clients’ marketing efforts. Rather than share specific client examples, I’d prefer to give you some overall tips that reflect our Best Practices for effective promotion. You can also check out our posted Best Practices link for even more specific suggestions.

When you think about it, your email marketing copy makes or breaks your ability to get the right leads and a lot of leads for your webcasts or white papers. You’ve got to break through the clutter right from the get-go. This means your subject line has to work.

We have found subject lines that identify a benefit in the content or the product being promoted work a lot better than subject lines that “show off” the merits of the item being marketed.

IT prospects don’t initally care as much about why your content or solution is so superior to others. Rather, they are focused on why they should spend time reading the white paper or attending the webcast. They want to be educated, they want short-cuts for their due diligence process, they want easy to understand strategies. They want to know how to avoid wrong decisions or traps.

So provide them with this by organizing your content around these pain points. Examples of the most effective subject lines approaches we’ve used; “Ten Most Important Tips for researching Intrusion detection solutions” or “5 Key Strategies to evaluating (technology solution)” or “The Complexities of (technology solution) simplified”.

The body copy following these subject lines may continue to discuss the problem the IT professional has around the subject at hand and point out how the white paper/webcast will offer sound advise or clear up confusion on the topic.

In general, put yourself in the mindset of the reader, the IT pro who has to research something, make a recomendation for a short list and eventually suggest a finalist. Your first attempts at capturing his attention must highlight what you can do to make this entire process simpler.

Bringing a message to a new market is a common challenge amongst many companies.

Recently, a network access management company switched their main marketing messaging from networking decision makers to security decision makers. This company has been very successful in the past advertising to our network audience. They wanted to leverage this success and reach out to the Security Audience.

To get their voice heard above the clutter, we created a single web page listing all their relevant security white paper and Webcast content. We also sent out a large amount of emails and ran banners to gain market presence for them in the Security space. In addition, we highlighted their content assets (linking to their single web page) on the home pages of SearchSecurity.com. Our media plan was to reach as broad yet targeted an audience as possible.