Tornquist: There’s a lot of interest around vertical search, but at this point it’s driven more by the inflation of prices on Google and Yahoo! than by any competitive advantages in vertical search. The marketers we’ve spoken to are split into two camps. One is still finding the vertical search audience limited and the prices high, while the other has found effective combinations of search property and offering. The question for me is whether niche searchers are going to be driven to use these engines by failure in the top tier to serve relevant results.

WhitePaperSource: How can marketers of white papers utilize the changes for better lead generation?

Tornquist: The syndication services for white papers across the different networks work pretty well. That was the highest rated online tactic in our survey of roughly 1800 technology marketers. The challenge is that there are a lot more white papers out there these days, and many are syndicated, so for the technical browser, there’s an awful lot of content. That’s why I think white papers are going to be increasingly coupled with podcasts or other multimedia content to differentiate them, as well as expose them to other types of search engine listings.

The other thing that’s a must for white paper distribution is good search engine optimization (SEO) of your press releases. There are some very simple, but absolutely vital, tricks of the trade in PR-SEO, and they can make the difference between having your release fall into the ether, or having huge pickup in the blogs and perhaps the mainstream press as well.

WhitePaperSource: Which white paper titles did you find generate higher response rates and why?

Tornquist: Think about how you look at book titles.

1. Keep titles as short as you can, and put the key content words at the front.

2. Make the title punchy but non-metaphorical - we found that people often don’t want to bother deciphering the metaphor your author worked so hard to build.

3. Keep the super-techie terms out unless it’s very specifically for that audience. Increasingly, white papers are used by different members of the ‘buying team,’ so you don’t want to make a title so specific that only two people read it (unless the content warrants that).

4. Given that, you can even consider using the meat of a white paper as the basis for several versions aimed at different audiences (CIO/CTO, line manager, techie, etc.). Each one of those will key in on different words, so that should play into your search optimization of the white paper and the release.

WhitePaperSource: What is your take on coupling white papers with the new emerging media like podcasts and blogs, and how can marketers take advantage of those to increase conversion rates?

Tornquist: We got very strong reviews from marketers who are using podcasts for tech marketing. I was a little surprised at the degree of positive ratings for such a new medium, which barely has any best practices. Of course, that newness may be driving the uptake of podcasts, and there’s not much competition, for the moment anyway. I think the approach to podcasting should resemble that of blogs - is there someone in the company who has a passion and a unique ‘voice’ when talking about products, inventions, etc.? Podcasts that work have a tone that’s somewhere between the casualness of a blog and the formality of a white paper.

A few things to remember:

1. This isn’t a webinar, so keep it short, usually around 15-20 minutes. Even recently, it’s been said that the ‘average’ podcast was 44 minutes long, and that doesn’t apply to business-to-business models.

2. People listen at their computers more than their mobile units, so your potential audience is larger than you think.

3. Don’t think that just doing one podcast and posting it to your home page is going to make a difference. Like anything else, you have to commit to a schedule and produce a series of these things to get uptake.

WhitePaperSource: How have the response rates with lead generation campaigns, particularly with email, changed? Is email still a viable channel for reaching out to technology buyers with your white papers?

Tornquist: Year after year we saw a small increase in conversion rates, and an equally small decrease in the rate of leads generated, so it’s basically a wash. The benchmark data, as an average, is fairly stable. Occasionally, you see a real dip or spike that’s related to some change in technology or the economy, but this wasn’t one of those years.

Regarding email, it’s very much a viable medium, if you’re talking about house email list contacts, especially. We recently did some research into the ROI of different online and offline tactics with a group of search-focused marketers. Even they put the ROI from house email at the top of the list. On the other hand, deliverability can be an issue, and it’s murky because the non-delivery is invisible behind the firewalls of corporations. But every medium has its drawbacks, and overall we see email as the unsung workhorse of the lead generation and management process.

Whenever we correlate increases in email budgets with success, we find that the investment was worth it. Unfortunately, in many companies, search marketing is grabbing dollars at the expense of upgrading email content and technology.

WhitePaperSource: What are some of the ways the Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide revealed that marketers can capture the interest of CIOs? What messages are they most receptive to and which do they ignore?

Tornquist: First, we see CIOs reading more tactical/how-to level material, as opposed to being solely concerned with the ‘30,000-foot view.’ Some of the most successful white paper titles - and I should have remembered this before - are those with things like “Top Ten Ways…” and “Seven Successful Tactics…”. People respond very well to those.

CIOs are extremely wary of marketing, but do respect PR coverage, webinars/white papers at a high level, and print advertising.

Finally, if you want CIOs to sign up for your newsletter, it had better be very obvious that the information is at their level, and equally clear how often it will arrive (not more than once every 1-2 weeks).

Basically, I think as marketers we can sometimes get more obsessed with the tactics of delivery than the content we’re delivering. You know, should we use just a white paper, add a webinar, maybe podcast, banners, print, you name it… Meanwhile, we don’t have anything interesting to say. A number of marketers I’ve spoken to recently have said that their best investments are in people who help them produce compelling content, and often that’s someone outside the organization who has an objective view of what’s interesting.

Be sure to pick up a copy of the comprehensive Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide.

About the interviewer: Nettie Hartsock is the managing editor of the WhitePaperSource Newsletter, and specializes in developing compelling interviews and case studies. She can be reached at nettie@whitepapersource.com.