White paper marketing: Walk a fine line

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Investment, wealth management, and financial planning firms agree that white papers are useful marketing tools. However, they don’t always agree on what constitutes a good white paper. Opinions diverge even more when I discuss white papers with members of the broader community of marketers and writers. These disagreements inspired the white paper survey that I report on here.

White papers should be objective, yet opinionated. This is the bottom line from the survey. If it sounds familiar, it’s because you may have seen the shorter version of this post I wrote for the American Society of Business Publication Editors blog.

Three characteristics of white papers stood out in responses to my white paper survey. Respondents said it is “very important” that white papers

  • Are factual – 82%
  • Offer “thought leadership” – 67%
  • Pose a problem and describe how to solve it – 39%

In addition, these were the only three characteristics for which no one checked “does not apply.”

To explain what these three characteristics mean to respondents, I’ll share some responses to my open-ended question, “For you, what is the most important characteristic of a white paper?”

There’s tension between these three traits and the use of white papers for marketing, so you need to walk a fine line in your white papers.

1.  Emphasize factual information

For me, “factual” means based on facts and relatively objective, although the facts in a white paper should be mustered in support of an argument. For example, a white paper about reasons to invest in small-cap stocks should present credible evidence about the broad asset class. It shouldn’t simply tout the sponsoring company’s fund.

Here are some related quotes on white papers’ most important characteristics.

  • Intellectual honesty
  • Actual education instead of attempting… to sell a product
  • Unlike blog posts and small articles, a white paper should be a somewhat seminal, all-encompassing piece on a topic. It should look at the topic from multiple viewpoints and should be an all-in-one resource on the topic.
  • That it be informative and give me concise information on a business issue about which I want to learn more (but not get a PhD!)

2.  Display thought leadership

“Thought leadership” is a tough term to define. I think it should involve uncovering new information or new solutions to problems. At a minimum, I believe, a white paper should present a distinct opinion or point of view. This is what enables white papers to influence their readers. Here’s another definition of thought leadership: “Ideas that educate customers and prospects about important business and technology issues and help them solve those issues—without selling,” said Chris Koch in a tweet to me.

One respondent said a white paper should provide “real insight into an important area of my work.” Another said, “It must contain an original idea or perspective.” Here’s a reply specific to financial services, calling for “Some genuine blue-sky thinking about something related to the market or our industry.”

3.  Pose a problem and suggest a solution

For me, it’s critical that a white paper pose and solve a problem faced by readers. I emphasize this because it gives your audience a reason to care about the white paper.

For example, if you write a white paper aimed at wealthy individuals, you should start by identifying a problem that they face. Sure, it should be a problem related to your business, but if your topic doesn’t hit your readers’ pain points, it won’t command their attention.

Here’s one response from the investment world.

I start with “what do our customers/prospects want/need to know?” Then I connect our expertise to that need. In investment white papers it’s very often economic outlook, emerging trends, or new approaches to old issues. These topics are the ones that people will be drawn to and read.

Here’s a response that also discusses how to organize a white paper. “Take a topic critical to the audience we support and define it. Show why it matters. Issue, at a minimum, a soft call to action for addressing the issue.”

The next quote introduces the issue of marketing along with thought leadership. For this respondent, it’s essential that a white paper “project thought leadership and portray a firm’s associates as industry experts.”

4. Don’t brag about your company or its products/services

The final question in my survey addressed marketing. I offered respondents five choices for completing this sentence: “The company or organization that sponsors a white paper should…” I asked respondents to “check all that apply,” so totals sum to more than 100%.

Here are the questions along with the response rates.

38% 1. Not be mentioned other than one line identifying it as a sponsor.

36% 2. Promote itself only in a “call to action” at the back that invites readers to contact it.

14% 3. Mention its products, services, or programs in the white paper.

10% 4. Pose a problem that it can solve through its products, services, or programs.

2% 5. Discuss itself in detail throughout the white paper.

Respondents disliked heavily promotional white papers, with 74% calling for minimal mention of the company sponsoring the white paper.

Here’s one person’s take on this topic.

I think the most effective white papers sell extremely softly. The harder the sell, the less likely it’s going to do anything for the company. The research itself needs to be as close to straight as possible. It’s incredibly easy to lose credibility in a paper the minute you start talking about the sponsor’s solutions etc. The only exception that works is if you quote an employee as an expert and his advice does not involve say hiring XYZ to build them a new IT system.

I received some great comments on this question, so I’m mulling over incorporating them in a new blog post on white papers.

Note on the survey

This survey was conducted in January-February 2011. Responses were solicited through my LinkedIn Groups, Twitter, and my monthly e-newsletter. As a result, many responses may come from marketers, writers, and financial professionals. I did not collect information about individual respondents.

Do you agree?

Do my survey results fit with YOUR thoughts about white papers?

Feb. 24, 2014 update: I edited this post to delete an outdated link to one of my past presentations about white papers.

 

New publishing opportunity for investment professionals

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Investment professionals, mark April 1 in your calendar if you’re interested in expanding your professional publications.

April 1 is the deadline for submissions for potential publication in the September 2011 issue of the New York Society of Security Analysts’ new online peer-reviewed journal.

The society says it is “particularly interested in articles on financial regulation and risk management.”

The journal is aimed at practicing investment professionals. Here’s how it describes its goals.

  • Educate investment professionals on theory and practice in securities analysis
  • Offer a forum for the latest in thought leadership in the investment industry
  • Promote discussion among various groups in the industry: professionals, regulators, private investors, company boards of directors and CEOs, students, etc.
  • Supplement the programs and professional development curriculum offered by NYSSA
  • Serve as a career development resource for readers

Start writing today!

“Smart people”: A good ad by Bessemer Trust

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“You” is one of the most powerful words in the English language. You’re much more likely to read a sentence that addresses “you” than one that starts with “we.” But sometimes alternatives work, as in a recent ad by Bessemer Trust, which uses “smart people” instead of “you.”

Do you think of yourself as one of the “smart people”? Bessemer Trust plays on its audience’s desire to be smart in its recent ad. If you still have The Wall Street Journal from yesterday, you can see it on page A5.

The ad starts with the following text:

THERE’S NO SUCH THING

AS SMART MONEY.

ONLY SMART PEOPLE.

THE MONEY JUST GOES

WHERE THEY GO.

Bessemer’s text hooked me. I’ll bet it also snared your attention.

The text benefits from being short and plain, in addition to working the “smart people” angle. It has a nice conversational tone. It sounds more like a blog post than an ad by a firm that was founded in 1907.

If you saw this ad, I’d like to know what you thought of it.

FEB. 11 UPDATE: View the Bessemer Trust campaign online

You can view the entire Bessemer Trust ad campaign on the website of www.munnrabot.com. Go to “current work” and then Bessemer Trust. Click on the ad that appears there to see more ads. Thank you, Orson Munn, for letting me know this!

Your email subject lines make a world of difference

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A simple subject line can make or break the open rate for your emails.

Would you click on an email with the following subject line?

Subject: =?windows-1252?Q?Conference=20Planning=20Survey?=

I’m probably not alone in my instinct to trash this email. I figured it was probably the work of an unsophisticated spammer.

Looking at the snippet of email address displayed by my email service didn’t inspire confidence either. All I saw was “marketer-ese.” At best, I figured, this was an email from some market research firm.

However, I felt curious, so I expanded the email line. I discovered the email was from an organization I respect, but won’t name. The full email address was something like marketresearch@ORGANIZATION.com

Your bottom line: Pick your subject line carefully

If the organization had a better subject line, I would have opened it without thinking.  Something simple, such as “ORGANIZATION NAME wants your input” would have done the trick.

Have YOU ever deleted or ignored an email because of a poorly written subject line?

Financial writing tip: Don’t ignore the elephant in the room

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Don’t write about something controversial as if it is an accepted fact.

“Research has shown that the most active managers can beat their benchmarks handily,” wrote Eleanor Laise in “The Return of The Market-Beating Fund Manager” in The Wall Street Journal.

Oh, really? Many financial advisors and investment professionals disagree.

Laise should have acknowledged that her statement was controversial. Her failure to do so undercuts the credibility of her article. Keep this in mind the next time you say something that isn’t widely accepted.

Laise could have rephrased her sentence along the following lines: “New research suggests that most active managers can beat their benchmarks handily.”

Research on active managers’ outperformance

Laise’s article alerted me to an interesting research paper, “Active Share and Mutual Fund Performance,” by Antti Petajisto of NYU University’s business school.

Here’s a provocative quote from Petajisto’s abstract:

I find that over my sample period until the end of 2009, the most active stock pickers have outperformed their benchmark indices even after fees and transaction costs. In contrast, closet indexers or funds focusing on factor bets have lost to their benchmarks after fees. The same long-term performance patterns held up over the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

My LinkedIn contacts responded with scepticism when I quoted Laise’s sentence. What do YOU think about the performance record of actively managed funds?


Introducing Susan to marketing managers at investment and wealth management firms

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White papers, articles, and investment commentary are great marketing tools. But it’s not easy for your firm’s experts to find the time—or maybe the skill—to turn their insights into compelling prose. I can help. I can interview your subject matter experts, review research materials, and write a piece your company can publish under its name. If you prefer, I can edit your draft. Or even teach you how to do it yourself.

You may benefit from my writing, editing, or training services if you are a marketer or communicator for

  • Investment managers—especially if you’re marketing to financial advisors
  • Wealth managers
  • Vendors to any of the above

What you want to write–and how I can help

If you are bursting with ideas, I can turn them into

  • White papers
  • Articles
  • Market or investment performance commentary—commentary may be based on interviews or on attribution analysis and other materials provided by you

If you want to write a piece—or improve your draft—you have several options. You can hire me to

  1. Interview your experts and write your piece
  2. Turn source materials you provide into a polished piece
  3. Use a combination of methods 1 and 2

When you contact me, ask for the graphic of my typical writing process. You’ll get a better idea of how we can work together.

 

How you’ll benefit from working with me

  • Your content will attract a bigger audience because the value you provide will be highlighted in reader-friendly text.
  • You receive your finished product quickly and on schedule. Having worked as a staff reporter for a weekly trade publication, I understand the importance of deadlines.
  • You don’t have to explain yourself in endless detail because I understand your industry. I’m a CFA charterholder who can use language as a financial professional and a journalist.

Contact me today to learn more! You can also check my testimonials on LinkedIn.

 

Boost your writers’ skills

Want to help your subject-matter experts and writers deliver better content? Take advantage of my writing workshops. I’ve presented “How to Write Investment Commentary People Will Read” to CFA societies across the U.S. and Canada. I’ve also spoken about “Writing Effective Emails and Letters” and developed customized writing workshops for corporate clients.

This post was updated on Dec., 19, 2013

Reader question: Writing resources for equity research analysts?

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“What are some good resources to improve my investment writing skills with an emphasis on equity research writing?” This question recently arrived in my email in-box.

Here are my suggestions:

I offer customized writing workshops for corporate clients in investment and wealth management. I’m not a research analyst. However, I’m good at analyzing client writing samples and then using them as the basis for training.

Equity analysts, can you suggest any additional resources?

I’m always interested in readers’ ideas.

 

July 24, 2013 update: Warren Miller, CFA, CPA of Beckmill Research, LLC has some more suggestions for you, starting with “Read what good analysts write, and then copy it by typing it into a Word document.” As you re-type that research, study what makes the reports good. That means looking at how the analyst tells the company’s story and at details such as sentence length, transitions, and measures of reading difficulty, such as the Fog Index. As Miller says, “Good writers read great writers.”

Disclosure: If you click on the Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I only link to books in which I find some value for my blog’s readers. – See more at: http://investmentwriting.com/blog/?s=disclosure#sthash.NlvDZLSB.dpuf

May 30, June 3, and June 27, 2014: I updated this with additional links.

Disclosure: If you click on the Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I only link to books in which I find some value for my blog’s readers.

Disclosure: If you click on the Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I only link to books in which I find some value for my blog’s readers. – See more at: http://investmentwriting.com/blog/?s=disclosure#sthash.NlvDZLSB.dpuf

 

 

 

Guest post: “The ABCs of Creative Capital Rights”

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Creative rights are complicated, but every writer and marketer needs to understand them. I’m happy that my friend, writer Wendy Cook, is letting me share her blog post on this topic.

The ABCs of Creative Capital Rights

By Wendy J. Cook

First, let me make myself perfectly clear: I’m not a lawyer. Before you act on any of my personal ruminations here, do please consult an attorney. (1)

That said, as a creator of creative capital, I think I can offer some good ideas from the front lines on frequently asked questions about its ownership, such as:

(1) How can I safely “borrow” from other people’s work?

(2) Should I protect my own work?

(3) What if I’ve hired a freelance writer?

Learning the Alphabet

Let’s begin with a brief tour of the creative lingo.

  • Creative capital is anything you’ve invented (created), that is of some relatively demonstrable value to you and/or others (capital) — whether it’s written content, artwork, a product offering or a process.
  • Copyrights protect your words.
  • Moral rights protect your artwork.
  • Trademarks protect your corporate identities, including logos, taglines and product names.
  • Patents protect your products and processes.(2)

Lawyers the world over are likely cringing at my broad strokes here, akin to using a blow torch to light a candle, but it’s how I think about it all, anyway. Now that we’re in the ballpark, let’s touch on the bases.

Borrowing From Others

No matter how convoluted, laws exist to guide us on what we communally consider fair or foul. So “Do Unto Others” remains a great starting point for drawing on other people’s creative capital. Remember your grade school teacher’s response when asked if you could have a hall pass to escape? “Of course you can,” he or she would smirk. “But may you?”

Same thing with copyrights. Just because you can reproduce an article or a picture does not mean you’re allowed to. Whenever reproducing somebody else’s creative capital (beyond brief, properly cited quotes as described below), it’s your responsibility to proactively seek copyright or moral right permissions from the author or artist — which may justifiably involve paying them for it.

An exception to this rule of thumb is if: (1) you briefly quote and properly cite somebody’s content, and (2) you’re adding substantial value of your own, versus simply repackaging somebody else’s book report.

Protecting What’s Yours

In a perfect world, everybody would respect each other’s creative fields, and you’d need never worry about someone unfairly harvesting the fruit of your labors.

Last I checked, it’s not a perfect world. If you’ve got creative capital that you want to protect against theft, here are some ideas.

Copyrights Have You Covered

Copyrights (and I believe moral rights too) are subject to an interesting characteristic. Authors automatically hold copyright to their work … at least until they choose to sell or grant it elsewhere. That’s whether or not you formally register it with the U.S. Copyright Office or display a notice on it, like: “Copyright © 2011, John Doe.”

So why bother with notices or registration? As I understand it, without these, your legal recourse is limited. For example, should someone violate your copyright when notice and/or registration are lacking, you may still be able to achieve a “cease and desist” order to prevent further offense, but you might have trouble collecting on damages done.

Thus, since it’s cheap and easy to do, go ahead and display a copyright notice on most of your work. Formal registration becomes appropriate if we’re talking book-length or for work that you highly value, but it doesn’t seem worth registering every scintillating word you share, unless you’ve got a whole lot of spare time and money you’re looking to get rid of. (If you do, I’ve got some better ideas; call me.)

Trademarks Are a Different Breed

Trademarks have very different rules from copyrights. My understanding is that you must not only formally establish registered trademarks for your logos, taglines and similar corporate identities, but you must also carefully maintain your ownership, lest it be lost through attrition. Protecting your trademarks requires at least these two important steps:

  1. Including the “®” symbol in almost all appearances of your trademarked content
  2. Regularly monitoring for and aggressively acting on any violations that occur

If you can’t demonstrate that you’ve been diligent on both of these steps, my understanding is that you can lose the ability to protect your trademark — even if you’ve gone through the bother and expense of establishing it to begin with. Ugh.

Bottom line, if it would be a serious blow to your business to lose the rights to your company name and/or particular product names, taglines or similar marks, it may be worth establishing and maintaining trademarks to protect them.

Freelance Writers and Designers

What if you’re working with a service provider to assist you with your corporate communications? As you might expect, the legal transfer of rights can be handled — or mishandled — in all sorts of ways. There are surely enough variations to provide an army of intellectual property lawyers with job security well into the next century. Since there is no universal standard that I’m aware of, whenever you work with creative alliances, it behooves you to ask how they personally handle it and to ensure that their processes work for you.

Personally, I’m fond of the KISS strategy. My practical goal is to transfer the copyrights and moral rights for client-specific projects to the client … once I get paid for doing the work. Brilliant, huh? I contracted a lawyer to help me form a legal agreement that describes this simple goal in copious legal language. Just as good fences make good neighbors, I believe that good formal agreements make for good working relationships. So far, I’m pleased to report my beliefs on that count have held true.

Even though this is one of my longer blog postings, clearly there’s plenty of remaining learning opportunities on the subject of protecting your creative capital and respecting that of others. So I’ll part with a couple of resources I’ve found handy in my own schooling:

Wendy J. Cook Communications offers writing, editing and presentation services expressly for the fee-only, passive/DFA, Registered Investment Advisor community. By focusing on this niche, Wendy helps these firms effectively communicate with their clients, prospects, media and the general public in print, social media/Web and e-newsletter forums.

(1) Lawyers who specialize in these sorts of things are often referred to as intellectual property (IP) attorneys.

(2) Patents are not addressed in this blog but seemed worth a brief mention here.

How do you define outperformance by stock funds?

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Portfolio managers want to outperform their benchmarks. There’s no question in my mind about this. But how much of an advantage do you need before you can claim outperformance?

Outperformance for stocks

To keep things simple, let’s focus on portfolios investing in stocks.

Is it okay to claim outperformance if your return exceeds the benchmark’s by more than 1 basis point (0.01%), 25 bps, 50 bps, or 100 bps?

Or should the margin be calculated relative to the benchmark’s return? After all, exceeding the benchmark’s return by 26 basis points (0.26%) looks better when the benchmark returns 0.01% than when it returns 45%.

Please answer the poll in the right-hand column of this blog. I’ll report on the results in my February e-newsletter.

Diverse opinions on “outperform”

I’m literal-minded. To me, a fund “outperforms” when it beats its index by the tiniest margin, though I doubt that I’d crow about that. However, asset management companies often report such returns as “in line with” or “closely tracking” the benchmark. The concerns of their legal or compliance departments probably influence this decision.

Here’s one example:

…the Wasatch Heritage Fund posted a return of 6.22% for the quarter. These results closely tracked those of the Fund’s benchmark, the Russell 1000 Value Index, which returned 6.78% over the same period.

Meanwhile, some managers–including the manager of the Wasatch Global Science & Technology Fund–question whether their returns should be compared to benchmarks.

Typically, the first paragraph of our quarterly letter to shareholders includes a statement regarding the Fund’s performance relative to its benchmark. We intend to move away from this approach beginning with this letter, as
we think the industry norm of tracking performance versus a broad index on a quarter-by-quarter basis distracts from the Fund’s long-term investment strategy. Our new mantra, forged by the pressure of the 2008–2009 credit crunch, is that we must invest “away from the market” as we attempt to deliver exceptional long-term returns.

I’m looking forward to learning what YOU think.

Dec. 27. Oops. I made a miscalculation in discussing the Heritage example, so I’m deleting the offending sentence thanks to David Lufkin.


Forget your spell checker!

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You can’t rely on automated spell checkers. They won’t catch all of your typos.

I remember a beautiful institutional investment pitch book shared by a senior portfolio manager. I’ll call him George Miller. The front cover billed him as “George Miller, Portfolio Manger.”

Yes, that’s “manger” not “manager.”

You can use the proofreading methods in “Six ways to stop sending emails with errors” to complement your spell checker.