By B.L. Ochman
The Internet is littered with tens of thousands of marketing white papers, comprised largely of thinly veiled sales pitches.
They’re usually PDFs (a pain to download.) Many of them are 40 or 50 pages long: tedious to read on a computer screen, impossible to read on a mobile phone.
I dare you to tell one company’s white paper from another. Or to distinguish between the thousands of webinars, each an hour long, that sell every B2B service ever created.
Alas, dear Mr/Ms Marketer: Nobody really cares what you say about your company. Buyers educate themselves and learn from each other. Your website, white paper, microsite or ebook is the last place we go when we want credible information. Your marketing is boring.
Marketing Schmarketing
Here’s a student view of marketing that will resonate with a lot of What’s Next readers:
“Marketing is important in that it provides facts and demographics about a product or brand’s target audience or market. However, said information is actually highly stereotypical and elementary, my dear Watson. The information gathered and distributed by marketers is a “career” better suited for monkeys. Little monkeys.”
Companies drive traffic to their white papers, ebooks, and webinars with countless emails and online advertising. Request to see one white paper, webinar, or ebook and you’re asked to fill out a contact form which often leads to an almost immediate phone call from a sales person, or a chain of emails. Rinse, repeat. In more than one instance, I downloaded a white paper months ago and I still get a daily email suggesting others, despite repeated unsubscribe requests.
A cure – content worth sharing
“…go tell a story. If it doesn’t resonate, tell a different one. When you find a story that works, live that story, make it true, authentic and subject to scrutiny”
Seth Godin
One thing so sorely missing from B2B communication is humor. People like it when you make them laugh or cry. They like it when you tell a story instead of hitting them over the head with a sales pitch. Business is afraid to laugh, especially at itself. But once in a while, humor shines through, as in the case of Kinaxis – a software company that competes against Oracle, SAP and other giants.
Their online Supply Chain Expert learning community, is a “social place for learning, laughter, sharing and connecting.” It’s certainly not all fun and games (although I’d personally like to see a B2B community that is). It includes very targeted and serious information about their products and services, but it speaks in a human voice and includes the hilarious video series, Suitemates. Not only that, they held a contest in which you could win an iPad if you could spot the elephant hidden in each video (really).
Can’t be funny? Try being useful
Companies that don’t have the balls to use humor in their marketing can revert to actually providing useful information. Sounds like common sense, but, sadly, there’s a huge shortage of that in marketing.
Telligent, one of scores of companies in the crowded SaaS world. provides a Best Practices Toolkit – with access to studies by credible analysts, and puts on the Big Social conference for its customers – three days of sessions about the foundation and tools of social media.
Lithium, a Telligent competitor, provides a full library of formulaic white papers, which include more than too many thinly veiled sales pitches. But in among them are Forrester reports and Aberdeem reports about the industry trends and best practices, as well as helpful videos and podcasts.
I’m sure the white paper isn’t going away because they’re cheap and easy to produce, and safe because they’re familiar. Everyone does them. But nobody reads them and nobody cares. So it’s time to take the cure. Laughing at yourself is a good place to begin.
Cartoon: Hugh Macleod
Thanks so much for your kind words about Kinaxis’ use of comedy in our marketing efforts. We take great effort to blend humor with the serious stuff, so we’re pleased that you took notice and enjoyed it.
Lauren Bossers
Social Media and Public Relations Manager
Kinaxis
thanks Lauren! it’s so rare to find humor in the corporate world at all, let alone in technology. And I see you monitor the brand closely. :>)
Cheers.
Laughter is always good when you want to stop intimidating someone, and intimidating in the business world can be either very rewarding or very costly. Laughter is a language everybody can relate in, so making someone laugh can ultimately be the communication objective, you will understand each other. For me, laughter with knowledge underneath it is the best marketing strategy. Don’t be funny and stupid and not have anything to back it up with.
Tulane University
Hi BL
I’m at Kinaxis too, and find your comments about whitepapers really interesting. In my role as Thought Leader at Kinaxis one of my duties is to produce white papers, though many others at Kinaxis do too.
From a vendor perspective what I find fascinating is that, as you write, it is difficult to differentiate with white papers, and yet all prospects demand white papers. The difficulty in differentiation through white papers is that positioning is the easiest part for a competitior to clone. In other words white papers are not so much about winning as they are about staying in the race, proving that there is a baseline of capability provided by your company.
I’d love to get some private feedback on my blogs: http://blog.kinaxis.com/authors/miles/
Regards
Trevor Miles, Kinaxis
VP, Thought Leadershop
Hi Trevor – White Papers don’t have to be boring, and they don’t have to be sales pitches. I understand that people ask for the information and there are many ways to provide it.
When information from analysts outside a company are provided, when comparison charts are provided, and when information that can help people do their jobs is provided, white papers can be helpful.
Sadly, they’re almost entirely made up of thinly veiled ads, making them useless at most, and not particularly helpful at best.
And why do you need “private” feedback? afraid of what you’ll read here. Gimme a break.
BL
What about a White Paper with humor in it? Would that work for you? ;-)
depends on whether the content had value to me or my clients. if it did. humor would definitely be a plus