Six steps to winning white papers
When it comes to getting your content marketing seen by the right people, you’re on to a winner with a white paper. Here’s how to get started.
- Define your audience.
Do you know who you’re aiming your white paper at? Create a persona that you’ll be writing for and make it as detailed as possible. Put yourself in their shoes and work out what challenges they’re up against in their business life. What work pressures are they under and what’s keeping them awake at night?
Knowing your audience will not only guide your choice of subject matter, it’ll decide the structure of your paper, too. If you’re writing for time-poor CEOs, for example, you’ll want to think about including an executive summary to get your main points across in minutes.
Defining your audience will also determine your language; after all, you don’t want to get too technical if you’re not aiming your paper at a technical target group. - Decide on your topic.
Working out what to write about involves identifying the overlap between the expertise you have, and the questions your target audience want answered. It can take time to find precisely the right angle that makes the most of what you know, but also addresses one of your audience’s distinct pain points.
Above all, you want your paper to be interesting and relevant, so try to choose a topic no one else has covered, or one that you can update with new information. Remember that white papers are more successful than other types of sales documents because of their focus on education; it’s the shift from ‘selling’ to ‘helping’ that gets your messages across. But this is only effective if you’ve chosen the right topic. - Plan your structure.
Start by creating an outline of your paper, detailing the points you’re going to make, the references you’re going to include and the shape of the argument. Circulate this to key stakeholders before you begin to write. Making sure that everyone involved is in agreement about the paper’s content before you start will save you time and stress. - Think about design from the beginning.
Alongside planning your paper’s content, you need to plan how the design can amplify the meaning of its words. Your aim is that, together, copy and design will create a strong, cohesive piece that will grab the reader’s attention and stay in their memory.
Good design goes beyond choosing a font that’s legible and large enough for easy reading. Perhaps you can use infographics or charts to break up the text and present statistical information in an interesting and easy-to-understand way. Call out boxes can highlight great quotes from sources, and imagery can bring your theme to life. Use headings and typography effectively to make your paper as accessible as possible, creating signposts that help your audience find their way around.
Get the design right and you’ll help your visual learners to retain the information, as well as giving your skimmers a way to quickly absorb points. - Create a winning title.
As the first thing your audience will see, your title needs to hook your reader into delving further into your paper. You’re looking for a title that’s informative and intriguing, that’s an honest statement about what’s within — but withholds just enough to pique interest.
Think about how you can use emotional triggers to prompt your readers to take action and to read your paper. Use curiosity (what am I missing out on?), vanity (how much do I already know?), fear and doubt (what don’t I know about?) to guide your title choice. - Think ‘problem solving’ not ‘sales’.
Your white paper is not about selling your product, it’s about providing your readers with valuable educational content that will help them solve problems they encounter in their working lives. Follow the 80/20 rule and spend 80 per cent of the paper on education, and only 20 per cent on describing how your product can solve the problem discussed. Think about how you can use case studies to demonstrate how your solution solved a real-world issue, and use endorsements from satisfied clients to further make your point.
This is just the start of your white paper journey. Get in touch to talk through how we can help you create winning white papers.
Nearly every business makes the same simple mistake on their website. Here’s how to identify whether you have, too (and how to fix it).
Building from the wrong end
Chances are, when you built your website, you started with the homepage. From there, you likely thought about all the other pages you’d need to link to. This product, that service — they all went into the mix.
Unfortunately, starting with the homepage is the wrong way to build a website. It encourages you to view your site as a warehouse of information.
Instead, you need your website to be the next step on your prospect’s journey towards a defined call to action.
Using the audio guide effect
Imagine you visit a museum. You enter the front doors, knowing there are one or two key items you want to see. But the museum is so vast that you’ve no idea where to start looking. You wander around for ages, getting nowhere. And, as your feet start to hurt, you give up and go home.
Now think about how different your museum experience would have been with an audio guide telling you exactly where to go.
Your website has to act like the audio guide — directing prospects to where they want to go.
When you leave people to find their own way around your website, there’s every chance they’ll get lost and give up. So, no new business for you…
Focusing on your message
The whole point of your content marketing campaigns is to get your prospects to take some form of action. Buy this. Read that. Get in touch.
Your website has to share this focus. After all, it’s another piece of collateral promoting your business. So, rather than simply adding links to a bloated homepage, you have to reverse engineer your site.
Just as you would with your other content, you need to start with your call to action. From here, you can create a journey through your site that gets prospects from A to B with minimal fuss. This could be straight from your homepage or involve a range of targeted landing pages.
Either way, it’s the audio guide effect. Potential customers quickly access the information they want; you get to entice them into taking action (and buying stuff from you).
Creating a clear path for prospects
Take a look back through your website, and be honest with yourself. Does it provide the quickest, clearest route to your call to action?
If not, it’s time to think about how you change your approach. After all, you could already be losing a lot of potential new business without even knowing it.
So here’s our call to action. If you want a hand putting together a website that turns visitors into qualified leads, get in touch — we’d love to help.
Entering your organisation for an award can be great for business. Here are three reasons why.
How does ‘award winning’ sound to you?
Has it ever occurred to you that your business could be ‘award winning’? It’s true; no matter what industry you operate in, there’ll be at least one reputable award that you could try for.
What’s more, you have every chance of winning. Any business worth its salt will have completed work that it’s proud of — and that’s exactly what awards are looking for.
But what’s the benefit to your business (apart from the kudos, of course)? Well, there are actually three.
Three ways that entering awards is good for business.
- Market yourself.
This is perhaps the most obvious reason to enter awards — the simple power of being able to call yourself an award-winning business. It instantly tells current and potential clients that yours is a respectable, trustworthy and successful business. And remember that you don’t necessarily have to win an award in order to feel this benefit. Being shortlisted is an accolade in itself — adding to your reputation as a thought leader. - Evaluate your work.
An often overlooked benefit of entering awards is that they give you a way to thoroughly evaluate how you do things. The process of creating an entry for an award means looking at each aspect of your work and proving that it was a good idea. When finished, you’ll have a view of what you’d improve, given another chance. - Improve morale.
It should come as no surprise that employees like to have their hard work recognised. And awards are great for that. Simply entering your business, or a project, for an award lets your people know that their efforts are valued. Put winning the award into the mix and you have a potent recipe for raised morale.
How to get started.
Clearly, entering your business into awards is a good idea. However, there’s one hurdle: to win an award (or to get shortlisted) you have to write a persuasive award entry. This means gathering together all the relevant information, structuring the piece to create the most compelling story possible, and writing it all up without any errors.
If this sounds like a lot of work — you’re right, it is. But not if you get a helping hand.
We write award entries for a range of clients operating across a multitude of industries. In fact, in the last award season, two of our entries got shortlisted, and one won an award.
So, if you’d like to find out what it feels like to get recognised by your industry, then get in touch.
It’s all too easy to think that more is better when it comes to your content marketing. But here’s why it’s worth your while to slow things down.
Quantity versus quality.
According to WordPress, its users post 77 million new blog posts every month. That’s a lot of words. With that in mind, businesses need to make sure that their content can stand out from the crowd, and get in front of the people that matter.
You could create more content, upping the chances that something of yours will catch your customer’s eye. But that’s not the most effective way to bring your content to the fore.
The alternative is to carefully craft and curate your content. Making it more detailed, appropriate for your audience, helpful and better placed to reach the right people. That’s how to get your content seen, and make your marketing more effective. So let’s take a look at what this means in practice, and how to achieve it.
Five tips for creating high-quality content.
- Take your time
Publishing a hastily written blog every day will be less impactful when it comes to conversions than a well written and considered blog that goes out once a week. The more effort you put into a blog, the more your target audience will get out of it, and the more likely they are to engage with your business. So take it slow. - Think carefully about your title
Often, the title of your blog is the sole entry point into reading it. When potential customers are browsing a list of blog titles, looking for something interesting to engage with, you want them to pick yours. So spend some time crafting a title that really stands out. Make it as tempting as possible, but remember not to promise anything that the blog itself won’t deliver. - Squeeze older content for all it’s worth
Once you’ve made the decision to spend more time on your content, it makes sense to make the most out of that content. So make sure you continue to promote your older blogs. As long as the content is still relevant, and not time sensitive, then there’s no harm in continuing to use it. Just be careful not to saturate your readers with promotion for the same content over and over again. - Get it seen
It’ll feel bad if you spend a week creating a fantastic blog, and then nobody reads it. So, once you’ve created your content, make sure to get it seen. This could mean using paid promotion on social media, reworking your blog page to highlight new content, or even paying for Google Ads leading to your blogs. - Enlist help
Nothing says ‘quality content’ more than something that’s been crafted by professionals. So enlist the help of writers and designers to give your blogs that extra edge they need to really stand out.
On that note, you can contact us to talk about how we can help you improve your blogs — making sure that your content marketing delivers the return on investment you’re looking for.
There’s a yawning gap between the effectiveness of original research in content marketing and its use. Here’s why this needs to change.
Research bursts onto the scene.
When it comes to influencing the B2B buying process, there’s a new kid on the block who’s challenging word of mouth for supremacy — original research.
The latest findings on the role of content in B2B purchasing decisions show that 74 per cent of buyers consider original research to be influential. In fact, word of mouth (80 per cent) and original research (74 per cent) far outstrip the third-placed product reviews (58 per cent).
Delivering what nothing else can.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense: publishing original research satisfies the thirst for unique content that sets you apart from your competition. During the buying process — and after — your target audience is looking for reassurance that you are the right choice. Fresh insight into their questions or a new take on the issues they’re facing builds your thought leadership position and their confidence in you.
The action lag.
So why, then, are only 37 per cent of B2B marketers using original research within their content marketing? There’s definitely a gap here between buyers’ perceptions and the current marketing reality. A gap — and a missed opportunity.
Perhaps marketers don’t know where to start, or find the prospect of a new area somewhat daunting.
An approach for everyone.
Original research can mean as ‘little’ as collating the views of your subject matter experts, or as much as a global quantitative survey of the market. There are a multitude of ways to find the answers to the questions that perplex your target audience, in ways that guide their decision making. The bottom line is that you’re delivering what people can’t get anywhere else — and because that has great value, it attracts attention.
If you’d like to talk through how we can help you incorporate original research into your 2018 content marketing strategy, then get in touch.
Does effective B2B content have to be a question of quality or quantity? We spell out the definitive answer.
What would you choose?
Content marketing is the backbone of many organisations’ communications with customers and prospects. It’s particularly crucial in a B2B environment, where buying cycles are lengthy and 95 per cent of buyers consider content to be a trustworthy way of evaluating a company and its offerings. And, since content is the main form of contact with these nascent sales leads, you need to get it right.
So, which way do you go? Focus purely on producing high-quality content that’s useful and engaging? Or concentrate on building your presence through delivering content frequently, but often, repetitively?
A custom blend.
The answer is a mixture of the two; quality AND quantity.
Build your process around creating a piece of high-quality content that you then repurpose in a variety of ways. Think of it as creating a flagship piece of content, and then producing versions of it to offer frequent opportunities for your target audience to click, read and share.
You may want to take your original content and repurpose it by vertical, geography or buyer persona. You may consider turning your initial in-depth piece into more snackable forms, using your key points to catch attention. Perhaps you’ll want to think about ways to use your content across your communication channels. Your blog, for example, will probably see traffic ebbing and flowing from organic search, whereas your email newsletter goes to an engaged core audience who want to hear what you’ve got to say: there’s a place for your content on both channels.
Let’s look at how this might work in practice. You may start by researching and producing a white paper. This could then become the basis of a webinar, an email campaign, a series of blogs and infographics, and a whole range of activity on social media.
The essential ingredients.
Both the creation and distribution sides of your content-creation process require skill and commitment. Generating the initial piece of fresh research or thought leadership takes hard work, but so does getting people to consume and share that quality content.
We all know it’s not just a question of putting that great content online and sitting back; it takes work to make sure the right people see what you’ve produced. Content creation and promotion needs time and skill too, to provide the necessary exposure to your target audience.
If you’d like a hand with creating high-quality content in high-volume formats, and getting that content in front of your target audience, just get in touch.
Getting personalisation right in B2B content marketing is your ticket to better relationships and more effective sales enablement. Find out how…Ask any B2B marketer about how to boost content engagement, and we guarantee that the answer will contain the word ‘personalisation’.
Unfortunately, this term is in danger of joining the collection of buzz words people bandy about without specifying what they really mean — losing its power along the way. And, considering its potential, this would be a real loss to the effectiveness of B2B content marketing.
To help you outsell your competition, we’re going to break down personalisation into three key action points.
The three golden rules of personalisation.
- Make your content talk to a person, from a person.
If you were having a face-to-face conversation with a customer or prospect you wouldn’t just talk at them, you’d find out where they were coming from and adapt what you said accordingly.
It needs to be exactly the same in B2B marketing. By finding out who you’re talking to and how their buying journey has brought them to this point, you can match the content you offer to their needs. Plus, by discovering how they like to receive content and how they like it to be presented, you can make sure your information is more likely to get seen. You need to give your target audience a persona: your communications will have more of a ring of realism, and your target will feel understood — responding accordingly. And, using your audience’s natural language will reinforce your relationship, too. - Put a face to your communications.
Bring your C-suite executives and subject matter experts to the fore by letting your target audience ‘meet’ them through your content. By giving your organisation a more personal face (or faces), you make it easier for your customers and prospects to forge a relationship with you. People like talking to people, and a blog coming directly from an expert in the field is likely to have more impact than a generic one.
Explore the many ways you can create the personal feel your audience wants: grow personal brands within your organisation by letting your people’s personalities speak through their writing or video blogs. Something as simple as including photos of content authors with blogs or on social media quotes can add to the picture, too. - Keep it relevant.
When creating every single piece of B2B content ask yourself: how is this relevant to my audience?
Focusing on the needs and goals you’re seeking to address will make sure you’re offering value within your communications. Consistent relevance will draw your customers and prospects closer to you, as you develop a reputation for offering valuable content.
Get personal with us.
This is just the start of the personalisation conversation. If you’d like to find out more, then get in touch or sign up to receive our regular newsletters, packed with the insight you need to stay ahead of your competition.
The infinite vastness of the cosmos can make life on Earth look insignificant. But it can also teach us a thing or two about B2B content marketing.
You need to think ‘big’ when writing.
It’s always handy to get a bit of perspective when writing an article. Take the Universe, for instance. The Earth’s a pretty spacious gaff, right? Well, you can fit our planet into the Sun more than one million times and still have space to stack your DVDs.
And that’s not even all that impressive. The Sun is tiddly in comparison to the largest star we’ve discovered so far (2,000 times more tiddly, to be precise).
Avoid disappearing into a constant stream of content.
Like the Universe, the amount of content on the internet is massive. Let’s put it in perspective. Every second online sees around 7,770 tweets spring into existence, and 70,928 YouTube video views.
It’s now nearly impossible to keep up with everything, so you’ll probably only look at the stuff that really grabs your attention.
It’s the same for your prospects. They won’t read your articles if they don’t see a good reason to. So, to help you out, we’ve put together our top tips to make it happen:
Do…
- Use your people’s expertise — get your staff to write about what they know.
- Post regularly — build a body of work that shows your followers how reliable your insight is.
- Plan ahead — create a schedule and stick to it. It’ll help you organise your key messages more clearly.
- Write simply — lead your readers through a coherent argument with a clear conclusion.
- Make a point — Show how you can solve your audience’s problems.
- Be consistent — your audience is more likely to follow you if your tone of voice is consistent and becomes familiar.
- Promote your articles online — support your content by sharing it on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Don’t…
- Write for the sake of it — make sure you’ve got a clear message to put across.
- Rush to post your article — there’s nothing wrong with adding new ideas to your plan, but you need to leave enough time to create a good article.
- Overwrite — most articles are 300-500 words long. You don’t want your readers to give up half way through your message because you’ve drawn it out too long.
- Give up — you want your followers to see you as knowledgeable so you need to keep them up-to-date as frequently as you can.
Make your article writing simple.
Writing is easy. Writing something your audience wants to read is harder. Take a look at the rest of our blog to see how we do it, and get in touch if you’d like us to lend you a hand — we’ve got the Brian Coxs and Neil deGrasse Tysons of the writing world waiting to help you out.
Your company has asked you to write a blog post. So where do you start? First of all: don’t panic! Second: read these tips before you do anything else.
An ode to the SME.
We’re always impressed when one of our clients’ subject matter experts (SMEs) writes a blog for us to edit and post for them. It’s not easy. It takes time (which is usually scarce for busy SMEs), and writing something that will be published on the internet is far outside the comfort zone for many people.
Keeping that in mind, what’s even more impressive is how many of the SME-written blogs we get are downright good reads. But what separates a great SME blog from a good one?
They’re personal.
In the most engaging SME blogs, the writer is clearly passionate about their subject. And when someone writes about something they’re enthusiastic about, it’s infectious — no matter the subject. We’ve read blogs about network infrastructure that were page turners (or whatever the digital equivalent of a page turner is — a scroll-down-er?), and it was because the writers decided to discuss something they had a personal stake in.
They aren’t a sales pitch (but they can sell things).
Blogs are many things, but one thing they are not is a straight sales pitch. That’s what brochures, adverts, product pages and salespeople are for. Blogs are supposed to give potential customers something more. The best SME blogs don’t just list all the great benefits of a product — instead, they talk about something interesting. And here’s the thing: in talking about a fascinating area of the job, these blogs show thought leadership, which sells the company itself.
They have an angle.
As We’ve said, the best SME blogs aren’t simple sales pitches, they’re opinion pieces. And the really good opinion pieces are the ones that have an interesting angle. For example, one blog that sticks out for me used a simple, fun and relatable metaphor to explain a complex technology. The writer could’ve explained it in another, less imaginative way, and that would’ve been fine — but we probably wouldn’t remember it today.
They edit themselves.
What we mean by ‘editing themselves’, is that the really great SME blogs read as if the writer has thought about how they’re framing their thoughts. Many blogs we read are pretty much a stream of consciousness. That’s fine, and there’s usually a good story in there somewhere. But occasionally the writer has got so caught up in saying what they want to say, that they’ve forgotten how to make any sense. Of course not every SME has time to plan the structure of their blog, but a quick read of the first draft is an effective way to make sure the message is coming through, loud and clear.
If you’d like a hand with your SME blog posts, or would like to find out other ways we can produce expert content for you, just get in touch.
The difference between a good blog article and a great blog article… these eight top tips.
Blogging remains at the forefront of effective B2B digital marketing. There are plenty of benefits: improving your search ranking, enhancing your brand, driving traffic to your website, establishing your business as a thought leader… the list goes on.
But writing blogs can be a real challenge. First, you have to find the time in your busy schedule to sit and scribble something down. Then, you need to write something that’ll provide genuine value to your audience — not just sell your services. Plus, it needs to read well.
At asabell, we write blogs of all shapes and sizes, for different companies that operate in diverse industries. Doing this for over a decade, it’s fair to say we’ve picked up a few tips and tricks.
So, we thought it’d be useful if we shared some of the things we’ve learned. After all, the more great blogs out there, the better.
Get ready to write a better blog.
Here are the eight tips that we feel are most important.
- Writing with purpose.
There’s no point writing a blog for the sake of it. You should have a genuine reason for taking the time to compose an article, and this (to an extent) naturally improves your writing. The reader can tell if you truly care about your subject.
In addition, if you’re using valuable time, you want to produce a blog that is relevant and provides true value to your audience. At the end of the day, your aims are to generate blog views, website views and enhance your brand — and you’re unlikely to achieve any of these without writing about something that matters to both you and your audience.
- Your opinion matters.
People don’t usually read blogs for a dull overview of a topic or product; they want to learn from your expertise and hear what you really think about a particular subject.
By including your own opinion, you sound more genuine, provide more value for the reader and boost your reputation as a thought leader. It’s better to be a little divisive by presenting your own thoughts than to please everyone by playing it too safe and not adding anything new to the conversation.
- Construct a winning title.
There’s a reason this article is titled: ‘Eight top tips for better blogging’…
It works. It offers readers a concrete benefit in return for their time.
Now, a title isn’t the only factor in deciding whether your blog is a success or not. But consider what makes you click-through to blog articles you find online… it’s the title, right? And, how patient are you when browsing social media? Do you take the time to click a link when the title doesn’t grab you?
Your title should be short (so that it displays fully), engaging and contain the key words you need to grab people’s attention. Here’s some great, more detailed advice from HubSpot if you want to find out more.
And, one more thing that always irks us: don’t write click-bait headlines! Deliver on any promises you make in your titles, or people will leave your site and not return. Especially in B2B, it’s better to try and earn repeat blog viewers, rather than go for that easy one-time clicker who won’t return to your site after being disappointed.
- Keep it simple.
You should have one simple, core message at the heart of every blog article you produce.
If you try and squeeze in too much, your message becomes confused and diluted. If you have lots more you want to say, think about putting together a series of blog articles, which you can publish over a few weeks. Then remember to link to the rest of the series in each one, so that your audience can access your full range.
- Structure matters.
After you’ve written the first draft, think: “how can I improve this?”
A lot of the time, the answer lies in restructuring.
Make sure your story is set out in the most compelling way possible. Break down your stream of thought into short, snappy paragraphs. Use subheadings that both catch people’s attention and boost your SEO. Insert images or videos that will strengthen your blog and support what you’re saying. All of these things will help you hold the attention of your readers, and boost your reach.
- Promote the heck out of it.
It’s all well and good writing a blog — but how are you going to get people to read it? You need a plan to get your blog out there, and one of the best ways to do this is through your social channels.
Extensive promotion is vital to making your blog a success, so don’t be afraid to share it multiple times. Just make sure you customise your message for each channel you use. Getting your colleagues and partners involved and sharing your blog will increase your reach even further.
Use images to help draw attention to your blog on social, pull out key quotes and try to spark debate.
- Include a call-to-action (CTA).
One thing you need to include in every blog you write is a clear call-to-action. Tell your readers where they can find out more, and make it clear where they need to click.
- Learn from each blog you write.
An important (yet often overlooked) aspect of blogging is learning from each blog you produce and promote.
Explore how many views it received, its bounce rate, how it performed on social, whether it generated any interesting conversations. By taking the time to properly analyse how your blog performed, you’ll pick up some insights that you can take forward to your next piece of writing.
The CTA.
These eight steps aren’t exhaustive, but we hope they’ll help you to improve your approach to blogging, and ensure the time you spend writing is time well-spent.
Get in touch to see how we can help you improve your social media strategy or B2B marketing campaigns.