White Papers in the High Tech and Software Marketing Mix

There are many marketing methods in Software and IT marketing that can be appropriate in some, but not all situations. I'd put White Papers in that category. The term "white paper" is a broadly used term, and can mean different things to different people. I define a white paper as a document written to provide insight or expertise specific to a market, process or product category.

PRODUCT & MARKET APPLICABILITY

White Papers are used far more often in B2B marketing than in B2C marketing. I have seen them used in a B2C environment, but only infrequently. A White Paper is most often useful when there is complex technology or work processes involved. In a B2C environment, they would usually only be used in an "early adopter" market where a product concept is new, and prices and sales cycles are still long.

MARKETING RATIONALE FOR WHITE PAPERS

Why use a White Paper at all? The best reason is to build credibility for your company or product. White papers are most frequently accessed by prospects early in the sales cycle, when a prospect is just beginning research on a product category. These documents allow company personnel to show off domain or technology expertise, which should reflect well on the product you eventually want to sell the prospect. The white paper shows off your company as thought leader in your category. It also allows you to subtly and gently position your company and product in the prospects mind, very early in the sales process. It is often helpful to designate one (or a few) people in the company as the author of the white paper and as an expert in the field.

THE "RIGHT WAY" TO DO WHITE PAPERS

So what are the key factors to creating a successful white paper? Here's a few:

* Written by a domain or technical expert
* Succinct-no fluff or overt marketing, to the point
* Aimed directly at your target prospects
* Provides valuable information to your target
* Mostly solution-agnostic, any product or company promotion must be subtle

WHAT NOT TO DO IN A WHITE PAPER

And what are the things to avoid a wasted effort? Keep these points in mind:

* Can't be a product brochure -no relentless promotion
* Don't make it the length of a book
* Never stretch the truth
* If it's too general, so that no one will invest time to read it

BEST USES FOR WHITE PAPER

What can you do with your white paper, once you've put in the time, money and effort to create one? There are many good uses--here's a few to consider:

* It will contribute positively to Search Engine Optimization on your website
* An excellent item to use in a PPC campaign offer
* A great email marketing campaign offer
*An important intermediate step in the sales process; often useful just after a website visit, but prior to a webinar or product trial
* Versatile as "lead bait"; regardless of the medium or campaign, you should require contact info from the prospect prior to a white paper download
*Assists in moving a prospect along without "high touch" interactions--helping automate the sales process and shorten the sales cycle

SUMMARY

White papers can be very valuable tools in a number of market segments. These documents should be used to differentiate your company as a progressive thought-leader in your market category. The optimal goal for a successful white paper is to position your company as a preferred vendor or serious alternative for prospects in your market segment. This is accomplished by demonstrating expertise and providing credible, valuable and unbiased information which is valued by the target prospect. It is NOT accomplished by "tooting your own horn", playing fast and loose with facts, or duplicating your company brochure. If you want to be a successful white paper marketer, it's important to restrain yourself from tactics in the latter category. That's what I think about making white papers an important part of your marketing mix. Please post a comment and add your experience and thoughts on this topic.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

More SEO Tools

From time to time, I let you know about some of the more useful (out of the abundant crop available on the Internet!) online tools for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that I have come across. So here's the latest batch of valuable, and free, widgets that I've found:

The first is a site that checks on all of your back links, with a twist: it actually details not only the back link itself, but the anchor text associated with the link. For those of you sophisticated about SEO for your website, you'll know that this is very important information. There are a couple of reasons why this is important. First of all, the search engines use anchor text to associate your site with keywords that might be searched on in that engine, and uses this information in it's search rankings. So it's very important to have your most important keywords show up as anchor text on as many back links as you can manage. Secondly, if the search engines find that the anchor text on your back links is too repetitive, the engines will penalize you from a ranking perspective. The reason is that if the anchor text on all of your back links reads the same, Google and the other engines assume that the links are "manufactured" by the owner of the site--rather than generated naturally as a result of your site being interesting to others. So I highly recommend that you check out and use this tool:

Backlink Anchor Text Checker

A similar tool is the "C Class Back Link Analyzer". Once again, this is a tool for those sophisticated about SEO. The "C" Class Back Link Analyzer investigates the links pointing to a website, and then groups them according to the IP addresses they result from. If one back link comes from 54.37.14.5 and another comes from 54.37.14.6, the tool would group together. Links which come from the same C-Class IP are likely to be hosted by the same company, often lowering the site's search engine ranking.

"C" Class Back Link Analyzer

One last esoteric tool for the true SEO fanatics out there. It's called Deep Link Ratio Calculator. This tool measure the number of links to pages on your site other than the Index/Home Page, divided by the total number linked to your site. This is important because the Search Engines consider these "Deep Links" to be more "natural", more likely the result of someone creating a link to some great content in your site (as opposed to you listing your own site in a directory, for example). So this neat tool can give you another view of how "natural" the Search Engines are viewing the links to your site.

Deep Link Ratio Calculator

Finally, I present "yet another" Keyword Suggestion tool. I know, there are lots of them out there, but I find that when you're looking to generate keywords for SEO on a site, or when starting a PPC campaign, there are never enough good tools. This Suggestion tool claims to accumulate and report Keyword variations from the six most major search engines. Give it a shot and report back how it goes.

Keyword Suggestion Tool


I hope that you find these online SEO tools useful--post a comment and let me know!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Through Online Bookmarking

I've spent a fair amount of time talking about Search Engine Optimization in the past. The reason is that in the new century, this is as fundamental to marketing success as print advertising in the last fifty years, and maybe billboard advertising in the fifty years previous to the last fifty. The details and tactics of marketing change, but goals don't really--getting your products and business in front of prospective customers. It would be really hard to find a business of any size these days that doesn't have a website. If they don't, they are probably on the same path as the carriage builders of the early 1900's--becoming extinct.

That's why I spend so much time exploring SEO: it is nearly universally critical to the market presence of every company, especially high tech and software companies. So here is one more new technique that you can use to build your company's Internet presence, including the always present goal of improving your ranking in Search Engine Results for the keywords important to your business.

ONLINE SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Online bookmarking, also known as "tagging" is a way of making available to others online, your recommendations on interesting content to visit on the Internet. Think of it as making your browser "bookmarks" or "Favorites" available publicly. In fact, most social bookmarking services allow you to upload your bookmarks/favorites into their system to streamline the process. You often have the choice of making your bookmarks available to just people you are acquainted with, or broadly to the public.

While this is a neat thing to do for a consumer from a Web 2.0 perspective, this activity also can have application to online marketers, if used correctly. You simply bookmark or tag the articles that you've written and posted online, press releases, news stories, etc.--any important and interesting content related to your company. In doing this, you get the opportunity to include your name, company name and a link to your company's website in the tag detail. This will create some organic traffic to your site, but will also be of assistance in improving the SEO rankings of your site.

Some people consider this to be spamming, but it really isn't. You are simply tagging interesting things for people in your industry to find easily. I recommend that you also include your other interesting bookmarks along with your company-specific content, to minimize any concerns.

Now this is a bit of work, even for one social networking service. For maximum effect, you want to cover as many social networking services as possible.

I've come across another great, free website that's assists you in doing just that, greatly limiting the labor involved. It's called ONLYWIRE. You can use this site to place a tag across multiple social bookmark sites(currently 16 different sites). Using OnlyWire you only have to place the tag once, instead of 16 different times if you tried to do this manually. It requires you to visit the 16 sites and open an account first (which you'd have to do anyway), which is a bit of work--but OnlyWire then increases your productivity tremendously from there on. I've been using it for a couple of months and found it to work great. Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com