B2B technology marketing is a challenge. Even the largest high-tech companies are swimming in a sea of direct competitors and competing technologies, and it's easy for smaller and newer companies to get lost in the information shuffle.

One of the best all-around ways to get people to notice and contact you is to consistently present your company, your products, and your message using a marketing communications method called "The Core Collateral Program."

• Distribute white papers. White papers are the heart of your Core Collateral outreach. They directly influence a high number of immediate sales and help close warm and cool sales leads.
• Publish bylined articles. Bylined articles are a vital part of Core Collateral since they cost-effectively increase your marketing reach and position your executives as industry experts.
• Collect case studies. Case studies are critical to Core Collateral because they prove your success with given industries and dissolve sales resistance.

The Core Collateral Program: White Papers
Using white papers to prove your technology

A white paper supports PR, marketing and sales because it works for all levels of decision makers. Engineers and executives may not be too impressed by brochures, but they are impressed by well-written white papers.

Decision Makers/Executives. Decision makers are the managers and executives who have the final say in spending budget and buying your products and services. White papers written to decision makers should contain a strong business focus. If they like your white paper, they'll pass it along to other executives and staff. This role is an increasing trend: CIO Magazine reports that 68 percent of CIOs believe that CIOs should proactively envision business opportunities and apply technology to achieve them. Your white paper can help the decision makers do that.

Influencers/IT. IT staff and managers aren't looking for a spec sheet but for a technology that will meet a pressing need. They're using white papers much earlier in their buying cycles. A recent TechTarget survey reported that 79% of IT professionals read white papers to learn something new about technology relevant to their job, 73% of them consider white papers very valuable for keeping up-to-date on the latest technology trends, and 62% said they use white papers to get information on actual implementations.

Best Practices for Marketing Your White Paper
Here are the three best practices for drawing attention to your white paper: catchy titles, effective promotion, and good contact information.

A catchy title is the name of the game
Compelling titles encourage readers to click and download your white paper. Direct mail geniuses John Caples and David Ogilvie report that a gripping headline is responsible for 50%-75% of advertising response rates. Take a hint from their extensive ad testing and give your white paper a title that makes people want to read more. Here is an example of the power of a compelling title:

Before (Not compelling, to say the least)
Title: "Protecting Your Email Directory with Guardian Software from SecureLock"

After (A whole lot better)
Title: "How Spammers are Assaulting Your Critical Systems -- and How to Stop Them"

Effective promotion
Promote your white paper through syndication and mailings. A few top ways to reach your audience include:

• Mailings: email and direct. Mailings, whether email or print, are a great way to reach your targeted audience. Use email to reach mid-level professionals and managers, and use direct mail with high-level executives. Consider leveraging in-house or highly targeted lists like VARBusiness.com to reach channel partners and partner prospects.
• Newsletter sponsorship. Advertising in a newsletter targeted to your audience works very well with mid-level IT professionals. Since a popular newsletter can go to more than 10,000 subscribers, this is an excellent balancing technique to direct mailings.
• Content syndication. Posting white papers on syndication sites like Bitpipe and TechTarget works especially well for white papers in hot categories. Ideally, links should point to a landing page or microsite that's specific to your white paper.
• Paid search. A cost-effective method of presenting your ads, paid search or pay-per-click advertising is based on user-entered keyword searches. Google Adwords is very popular and can extend paid search into business and IT sites.
• Customized microsite. A great way to bring those registrations home is to have a customized landing page or microsite for the white paper. Create the Web pages with a registration form on the landing page and a benefit-laden abstract to encourage readers to fill out the registration form and download your paper. You can even develop a microsite with 2-3 supporting tabs for more information. Like "What's in it for me?" which explains how the white paper will help them, and "Learn more" with further resources to download like case studies and positioning documents.

Resist the urge to use your main site template with all its navigational choices. The only thing on your landing page/microsite should be ways for them to a) download lots of good information, b) leave their name and contact information, and c) give permission for you to contact them with even more helpful information.

Contact information
I'm astonished at the number of companies who don't list real people to talk to on their sites. The infamous "info" or "sales" email address has its place with autoresponders. But you should list individuals to contact, not just "sales." Why? In a recent TechTarget survey, 64% of the IT managers who contacted a vendor after downloading their white paper did so within one month of the download. And of that 64%, a good 44% did it within a week. These hot prospects viewed catch-all email addresses as black holes - they wanted to talk to knowledgeable individuals who could expand on the white paper's points. They were also suspicious of contact information that lacked a phone number.

White papers are the centerpiece of integrated technology marketing campaigns. The better you connect leads with information that they want and value, the more likely readers are going to think of you when they're ready to buy. So write a compelling white paper, craft catchy headlines and abstracts and actively market it - and watch your ROI improve and your sales rise.

The Core Collateral Program: Bylined Articles
Proving yourself with positive media attention

Writing bylined articles for trade journal magazines is a time-honored activity for technology companies. Bylined articles:

1. Build industry recognition for your technology.
2. Position your executives and engineers as experts to your target audiences.
3. Yield highly qualified leads that lead to sales.

All these good things can be had by submitting a vendor-neutral bylined article on your technology to a trade journal serving your targeted audience.

If it's vendor-neutral how can it work?
A vendor-neutral bylined article is not a brochure or a press release. The only place your company will even be mentioned is the small tagline at the end of the article and your product probably won't be mentioned at all.

So what good is it? It's good because the article strongly positions the technology you are selling. Let's say your product is called DiskEase, a software that tracks disk capacity, automatically provisions another disk at a preset capacity threshold, and then migrates data to the new disk. You can't mention DiskEase in the article. But what you can do is position your technology for capacity tracking and automatic provisioning as the answer to storage administrator nightmares without ever coming out and saying that it is your approach. You simply write an information article on this valid and interesting technology. Then in the tagline you put your company and contact information, usually a website.

Shift scene to an engineer has been losing sleep at night because he can't provision his disks on time - leading to network downtime and over-provisioning issues. He picks up the magazine, reads the article, and goes to your website to see if this technology will solve his problem. Of course it will, and he'll contact you.

Leveraging High-Tech Bylined Articles
Another beauty of bylined articles is that you can leverage them. Here are some possibilities:

Reprints
Reprints are good things: they significantly increase your exposure to the market. Make sure you use the reprints anywhere you can including press kits, presentation handouts and conference take-aways. Post them on your site too. (Be sure to work out reprint rights with the publishing magazine, preferably beforehand.)

White Paper
Don't use the as-is published article as a white paper, articles are structured differently from white papers and you'll run into copyright issues. Instead use the article text to form the technology section of a white paper. Edit it to highlight customer benefits since you don't have to be vendor-neutral for your own white paper, and add white paper sections around it executive summaries, problem statements, in-depth product/technology information, etc.

Booklets
One of the best press kits I ever saw included a sharp and informative booklet on the vendor's technology. The booklet explained the general technology's development and background, presented the vendor's product, and listed clear customer advantages. It impressed both journalists and customers in a way a press release or even a white paper wouldn't have done. Booklets are labor-intensive, so use your trade journal article as the basis for writing your own.

Speech Outline and Handouts
Use existing articles as the basis for client speeches and presentations. Since trade journal articles are usually vendor-neutral, they'll work for conference talks too. When the presentation is about a product you can still use the article outline for the background technology and analysis then add product details, customer case studies, and Q&As. You can use article reprints as a handout, or turn the outline into speaker's notes and use that instead.

Why are they so popular? Because they are compelling to prospective customers. References and testimonials are great things to have but customer success stories flesh out those testimonials and give them teeth. And if you match the case study customer's industry to the prospects, it's clear to prospects that your company knows how to successfully operate in a given market.

The ubiquitous case study can range from a 3-paragraph online snippet to a full-blown magazine article. The most popular case study in the marketing/PR arsenal is the 600-1000 word customer success story following this pattern: company overview and challenge, project details, and positive results. Elements include:

Customer Overview and Challenge. Start with a 2-3 paragraph overview of the customer's company. This should be very positive - since you're going to detail a problem the customer was having, the last thing you want to do is make them sound like a jerk. So compliment them. Feel free to adapt the overview from their own Website text, where they're already placing themselves in the best possible light.

Then move on to the business challenge. Don't make the customer sound stupid or incompetent. The challenge should always be centered on something good that is happening to them -fast growth, industry prominence, strategic IT changes - whatever. Their challenge should be applicable to your readers' own business issues.

Project Details. Everyone knows that no project goes perfectly, but save the debriefing for the longer-form trade journal article. These short customer success stories should report on the successful project by briefly discussing specific products and benefits.

Don't go all over the map. If the project is fairly narrow or specific, you won't have any trouble sticking with the main point or product. In the case of very large and complex installation, concentrate on the main product or application. For example, Microsoft Great Plains has more modules than you can shake a stick at. Concentrate on the ones that had the most positive impact on your customer.

Business Benefits. Always quantify improvement if you can. Numbers can be dollar savings, percentages, or other measures of saved staff time, more efficient workflows, better customer service, etc. Be sure that the benefits you list are the benefits the customer perceives - hard costs are most easily quantified, but soft costs may have the higher perceived benefit to a customer. Ideally you will have both.

Putting the Customer Success Story to Work
How can you use your completed stories? Some ideas:

• Post them on your website. The more you have up and the more frequently you post new ones, the more often spiders will find you and you'll move up in the search engine rankings.
• Include them in sales kits. If you have a lot of case studies put them in a separate notebook, which can be very impressive physical proof for a prospect.
• Make them searchable. Encourage prospects to go online and search your case studies. Use parameters like vertical market, products, or customer challenges.
• Use them as marketing support for resellers and integrators. The easier your product is to sell, the more resellers and integrators will push your product when they talk to their own customers.

How many customer success stories should you have on hand? The answer is the more the better. A large company may have hundreds of them available on their website and in sales and marketing kits, and even many smaller companies commonly have 25 or more. Start capturing those customer success stories today, and watch those sales rise.

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