Actually, the ten suggested headings for the slides might work well in any sales piece, from a letter to a brochure. Now there's a thought.

The power of getting to the point

And it's true: most press releases are rubbish, including those from professional PR agencies, who just produce what the customer wants. Business-to-business press releases usually try to conform to what the company thinks a press release should look like (which is far too pompous), and fatally try to communicate their message simultaneously to both a lay audience and to technical specialists.

Back in the eighties and early nineties, trade magazines were well-staffed editorially, and could do a good job for their readers. In my first job, as assistant editor on Whats new in Processing, I might have responsibility for just half a dozen pages a month, which might mean having to research, select and edit just three or four "product news items" a day. I could actually take the time to re-write them from "press release speak" into something process engineers (our readers) found interesting, concentrating on benefits rather than features, of course. Because we had so much time to work on them, it wasn't so important that a press release would have been so alien to readers if it had ever been seen in public as originally written. However, the few which were written with readers/customers in mind would certainly get favourable treatment from editorial departments!

By the start of this decade, trade magazines had slashed their editorial staff to the extent that many magazines were just thrown together, and press releases would be published almost as written. In addition, web-based publications (pioneered by the likes of Engineeringtalk) just published press releases "straight to the reader" with very little editing. So it became crucial that press releases were written directly for the reader. And were they? Were they heck. Go and have a look at a typical website which syndicates press releases and see how many actually read like interesting articles to potential customers, focusing on benefits and assuming a high degree of technical knowledge. But prospects represent the majority of the people who'll be reading them, and they're the most important readers too. Who are your press releases written for?

Who are your press releases written for?

Essentially, a white paper is a good explanatory document aimed at helping readers make decisions. If you want to establish yourself as an authority in a subject (and who doesn't?), then a white paper is a great way to go. It's a tremendous hook to pick up new potential prospects, especially now that the web has made distribution essentially a free process.

If your target is to use a white paper to fish for new prospects, the decision you have to make is whether to try to get their details in exchange for the white paper, or to disseminate the white paper as widely and freely as possible, and then try to get their details once they've read it. We launched Business Marketing Online with our own white paper at the start of the summer (How to slash your marketing expenditure …while increasing your incoming sales leads), and over 400 marketing managers requested it. Many of them went on to become subscibers to our Insider Programme.

We decided to ask for details first, but the other approach is discussed in 3 calls to action you must have at end of your lead generation white paper on the B2B Rainmaker blog. It's difficult to truly A/B test these two approaches, but if you have white papers which ought to attract similar levels of response, you may be able to try out both and get a rough comparison of response.

Deliver first, ask questions later?

Why should anyone care?