Enjoy this presentation by Jeffrey Eisenberg which was presented at Dreamforce 2011 in San Francisco:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising?

Many sites offering “free” white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn’t treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won’t either.

The problem starts by thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information, you need to show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange: valuable information for valuable information.

1. Your white paper needs an interesting title: Would you rather read a white paper titled “Mobile Analytics” or “Why 90% of Your Mobile Visitors Aren’t Being Tracked and What You Can Do About It?” The same technique that works for selling books, getting people to read blog posts, and even to attend webinars can significantly increase your white paper downloads. But don’t go for such an interesting name that no one knows what the paper is about. For borderline cases, a strong subtitle can bridge between interesting and descriptive.
2. Every white paper needs a cover: Instead of just giving the white paper a title alone, merchandise it the way you would a book. No plain vanilla covers; make it engaging. Keep in mind, many people prefer to download and print white papers before they read them. Which is more likely to catch someone’s attention on a busy, cluttered desk: a white paper with no cover or one with an engaging cover design?
   
3. Make it easy to digest: How often have you downloaded a white paper for it only to be pages after pages of block text? No headlines, sub-headline, or bullet points. No graphics, charts, or screenshots. People are busy. It’s fine to make a long white paper if the topic deserves it, but make it reader-friendly.
4. Tell them what they are going to get: Write persuasive copy that not only informs people what they’ll learn from the download, but also what they can do with the information. Make sure this copy is crisp, simple to read, and formatted for online readers. You may want to offer key takeaways, a table of contents, or even an example chart to show them how valuable the paper is going to be.
5. Give them download details: Let them know how many pages it is, how big the file is, what format the paper is in (PDF, DOC), etc.
6. Give them an excerpt: Very few people like reading poorly written, monotonous sounding, corporate gobbledygook. By providing an excerpt, you can help prove how well-written, easy to understand, and valuable your white paper is.
7. Prove other people like it: Like endorsements on a book cover, “credible testimonials” on the download page of your white paper can help sell the value of the content and improve conversion.
8. Don’t ask for too much information: Make sure your forms are optimized to ask only what you really need. And please don’t ask people to “submit to you.”
9. Let them know what will happen with their personal information: Provide them with point of action assurances around their privacy.
10. Make it easy for people to share: Give people an easy mechanism for them to share your white paper via social media, e-mail, or pass along. Do it on the offer/landing page as well as on the thank you page. Visitors are most engaged when they are already downloading the white paper, so a suggestion for them to share it often helps. Don’t forget to add shareable links within the white paper itself.
11. Have a follow-up program: Let’s face it, you created your white paper and offered it for download in order to get leads. That means the white paper has to generate a response or conversation. Making your white paper interesting, actionable, and readable will help, but you’ll be far more successful getting responses if you initiate the post-download interactions and follow-up conversations through a well-planned lead nurturing campaign.
12. Offer contact information: Some people actually prefer to contact you immediately upon finding the white paper, so make sure your contact information is on the download page. Others prefer to contact you as they are reading the white paper, so make sure your contact information is found there as well. I like adding simple contact information in the footer of my white papers. Others just feel a sense of confidence knowing you are providing your full contact information and not trying to remain anonymous while asking for their personal information. In simple terms, make it easy for them to find your contact information everywhere.

What other techniques have you tried to increase leads from white paper requests?

When you ask salespeople about their biggest gripe about marketing, they complain about not enough qualified leads. You can often tell that this is an issue just by looking at a company’s lead forms. What you’ll typically see is that the the forms ask for too much information and that can hinder conversions from visitor to lead.

Marketers are often measured by the number of leads they generate. Sales people are measured by sales. Marketers don’t want to be held accountable for sales because they aren’t actually selling. Sales people criticize “poorly qualified” web leads. This all leads to a lot of tension.

The Consequences of “Low Quality” Leads

In fact, in a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com they set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies, several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and found:

• Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes
  *Optimum response time should be within the first hour

• Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes
  *Optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes

• How many companies even responded?
  *Only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!

Web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6x in the first hour according to InsideSales.com.

Obviously, there is a huge disaster in the making. Marketers have potential customers who indicated some level of qualification to buy from your company and sales people who practically refuse to respond. In the end everyone loses out.

Five Steps to Solving the “Lead Qualification” Problem

1. Identify which sources of traffic generation are creating improved qualification rates and ideal close rates. You need to have the analytics and a CRM / sales workflow system that helps you close the loop from marketing all the way through the close of the sale.

2. Identify which offer types improved qualification rates and close rates. Understand your personas and what actually matters to them. Spend time testing and refining offers and generating additional content that you can prove matters to your prospects.

3. Improve your method of qualifying and capturing leads. Test your lead forms to find the right balance of questions that keep the quality and lead count up. Use a platform that enables you to capture web activity (pages/content viewed, tool/calculator interactions) and include that information in the customer profile for sales. This usually involves tagging content to identify its value in the sales and buying process.

4. Improve your method of distributing leads. Often times the delay in getting form submissions responded to is your internal process of routing leads to the appropriate sales person. This should never be a manual process considering you lose a leads effectiveness with in the first few minutes. Think about it, the last time you submitted a form on a site, when did you want the response to your inquiry. Now! So do your prospects. Use a platform that will automatically distribute leads based on the profile of the customer you have collected through their visit(s). Distribution is often based on geographic region, company size, product/service they are interested in, etc. Either you can have the prospect fill this out in a form or most of this information can be collected and gleaned by web activity.

5. Improve your lead response time. When marketing aligns with sales using effective content planning, integrating the customer buying process with the company’s sales process, distributing leads that have not been turned off by your processes (and horrendous forms), providing sales people with details that matter to them about the prospect’s interests and motivations and then distribute those leads effectively, their isn’t a salesperson who wouldn’t want to respond to that kind of “qualified” prospect right away.

If you knew the true intent of a search inquiry (query) and you could respond to that intent perfectly then you’d convert most of the time.

For more than a decade Bryan, John and I have been working with clients to determine all the different buying modalities (read “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?“) and provide relevant pathways for them. That’s complex. It’s hard work. I won’t deal with all that here.

I will share just one powerful concept that will make you a lot of money if you execute it well.

If you want to convert your prospective customer into an actual one you’ll need to scratch her itch. That’s just common sense. The offer must be relevant to the query.

It helps to think of EVERY hyperlink (PPC ads, SERPS, your navigation, banners etc.) as a contract between you and your reader/ prospective customer. Every time someone clicks on a hyperlink they are asking a question either implicitly or explicitly that they expect you to answer with relevant information. Understanding and planning relevant hyperlinks and the content that corresponds to that hyperlink (UX people call this concept “scent”) is how we teach companies to maintain persuasive momentum.

Relevance is always relative to buying mode. Lots of factors affect buying mode (economics, demographics, psychographics, stage of buying process, etc.) but for the sake of this discussion let’s assume a rather straightforward-mythical-ideal you-have-what-I-need-at-the-price-I-want-and-I’m-ready-to-buy sort of prospective customer.

If this prospective customer finds you through SEO and it takes too many clicks with questions unanswered for them to find the relevant scent, shame on you. You may very well have lost the ability to convert them. It’s a lot of work, even if it’s worthwhile, to make sure that you’re relevant for all your prospective customers. Nevertheless, while SEO isn’t free at least you’re not paying directly for the privilege of disappointing your prospective customers like you are in SEM.

It’s so sad! Sad is the amount of smart companies we see paying for keywords that are not helping them convert well. The real money cost is often so large that it approaches tragic.

It’s not that these smartest companies haven’t thought through the you-have-what-I-need-at-the-price-I-want-and-I’m-ready-to-buy questions and provided mostly relevant responses. They have, and not only that but many have done extensive keyword research to find all the terms associated with their product or service. Additionally they’ve tested the SEM ad for click-throughs. Plus the very best of them have probably even done some landing page optimization. This is all good and necessary because there’s a deep connection between the landing page and the search query.

Keywords are the bridge between the prospective buyer’s intent (want, desire and/or need) and the experience you provide. Divining the searcher’s intent and responding appropriately should be the holy grail of all search marketing.

Bryan often says:” Keywords don’t fail to convert…it’s the fault of the marketer to not offer the right landing page experience.”

I agree.

If you get the landing page right you’re well on your way.

But wait, there’s more!

Have you ever considered that a landing page can become irrelevant simply because of the way you’ve set up an SEM campaign? Your keywords/ key phrases are only the triggers for the actual search queries. Both the ad and landing page need to be in sync with the intent of each query;  so it seems obvious that you need to focus on the keyword and the landing page.

But it’s not obvious that you need to pay really careful attention to campaign structure, match types & negatives when you test your ad copy and landing pages for maximum results.

My colleague and friend Craig Danuloff, President & Founder of ClickEquations, offers a wonderful explanation of how to to do this in his free ebook “21 Secret Truths of High Resolution PPC“.  May I recommend that you download it, read it and put it into action immediately?

*** P.S. Full disclosure Bryan and I are advisors to ClickEquations

Can you spare an hour this week for what took me the past decade to put together?

This Thursday, January 7, 12pm EST, courtesy of my friends at MarketMotive, you can join me for this free workshop on the 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites.

The average conversion rate for a website is around 3%, but many websites convert at 10% or higher. What do they do that you may not be doing? Bryan Eisenberg, who has been helping companies improve their conversion rates since 1998 will reveal 21 of his most valuable tips that will help you increase your conversion rate. In this fast paced session you’ll find relevant examples from retail sites, B2B sites, publishers and everything in between. You’ll learn the key principle of GTC – Get the Cash! Guaranteed you’ll never be able to look at a website the same way again.

Why is this webinar free?

1. My good friends from MarketMotive and I want you to kick off 2010 the right way by focusing in on improving your conversion rate. They gave away all their workshops in December, but I pushed them to give this one for free as well.

2. This is my last presentation for MarketMotive before we begin our Certification in Conversion & Landing Page Optimization course on January 11. We want people to see the caliber of information we provide monthly in our workshops, so please invite others to check it out. They may decide that learning internet marketing online from MarketMotive’s esteemed faculty may be just the edge they need in 2010.

3. If you want to find out more about how you can improve your conversion rate after learning the 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites, you can always sign up with MarketMotive to have me be your hands on instructor  for the Conversion & Landing Page Optimization certification, so you can do it yourself or you can reach out to me and I’ll help you find someone to help you in your efforts.

I dislike the term “Demand Generation”, also referred to as “Demand Creation” because it’s misleading.

Surely marketing professionals know better. I hope. You could always look it up on Wikipedia where it’s reasonably explained.

It’s only in several conversations with business owners and C-level executives over the last few months that I realized how misleading the term is.

Think about how the term sounds to non-marketing professionals. I mean really, you get this image of a marketer ripping and tearing peoples clothes off so that clothing would be in demand.  Or perhaps a mafioso showing up and asking you if you might need some fire insurance.

The demand for your product or service should already exist or you wouldn’t have a business, right?

As marketers, we want prospective customers to raise their hands, call, email or pick up the phone and talk to us. We want the opportunity to explain how their demand is met by us supplying our solution. So the objective is to frame our solution, product and/ or service as the answer to the prospective customer’s existing problems, needs or desires.  Therefore the objective is to re-frame the prospective customers questions so that you are answering them. In order to do this you must determine, in advance, what is their angle of approach.

What does that mean for your online marketing? You could have two different prospective customers reading the exact same content with each coming from a different angle of approach.  So that content you created can mean one thing to one person and another thing to the other person. You might convert one into a lead and not the other. The sad part is that both might be demanding exactly what you offer.

If you’re planning a persuasive experience, that’s more than a landing page for complex sales, please remember that people don’t read pages online.  Instead they experience online hyperlink to hyperlink. That’s why you need to plan the persuasive paths of your campaigns, website and lead nurturing material carefully in order to remain relevant and answer the questions they have the way they want them answered; that’s their angle of approach. An early stage buyer and late stage buyer would have different questions and therefore their angle of approach would differ. Plan your content that way, from the persona’s ( please read “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?” for a more thorough discussion about personas) point of view, not your point of view and you’ll be successful at re-framing demand. Only once you’ve re-framed the prospective customer’s demand will they be willing to discuss your offering.

I hope that helps.