Jacques Turner, senior account executive at Maxus For Business, explains how to ensure your whitepapers are a success and generate leads
Whitepapers are the most established digital engagement channel for B2B. When produced and promoted correctly, they can be extremely valuable content marketing tools. The growing focus on bespoke content to deliver highly personalised experiences to the right audience at the right time (93 per cent of B2B organisations rely on custom content for brand building and demand generation, according to the Content Marketing Institute) the case for producing whitepapers remains strong.
More than half of respondents to a survey by business.com cited whitepapers as a ‘valuable’ or ‘extremely valuable’ source of leads. Indeed, the most popular benefit of using whitepapers is generally lead generation. The combination of learning (via informative content) followed by persuasion makes them one of the most powerful marketing tools available. Beyond this, they are also a great way for a brand to position itself at the forefront of developments in its industry, while developing trust and legitimacy for its customers, to spread expertise and build a mailing list or social media following.
Whitepapers will always be staple inclusions in many B2B marketing plans, and while their importance has never been underestimated, many well intentioned yet misguided marketers regularly produce and publish whitepapers that are almost guaranteed not to succeed. The objective is to make sure they don’t stagnate, but rather are used effectively to ensure clients get the most out of their investment. Follow these five steps to ensure you gain maximum ROI from new whitepapers:
1. Determine the end goal
This will always be the first step in writing a whitepaper. The goal/end result of the whitepaper must be the first thing that is asked before it is written. Some of the most common goals include lead generation, thought leadership status, making customers aware of a new product, or to elaborate on a unique service. Once this has been decided, the development of the whitepaper and its promotion should follow.
2. Develop a fully integrated content strategy
Whitepapers deliver the best results when used as part of a plan that adheres to the needs of customers. Before you launch a whitepaper, you need to have a plan. A recent HubSpot report found a staggering 56 per cent of survey respondents said they were promoting whitepapers without a plan in place. Develop a content plan that includes well-defined targets, a deep contextual understanding of the buyer and the buyer journey, clear conversion goals and the ability to scale.
3. Identify the right audience
Who are you trying to target with your whitepaper? A survey of the 50,000+ members of the B2B Technology Marketing Community showed that the majority (71 per cent) believe content success starts with audience relevance.
All organisations have a wide range of audiences and trying to address all of them with one whitepaper will not work. When you narrow down who you want to reach, you must think about what influence they will have on the eventual desired outcome. So, if the goal is to make the consumer aware of a new product/service available, then target the c-level and decision makers within a business.
The most integral part of any advertising campaign is to reach the right audience, even more so with a B2B campaign as achieving this is traditionally more difficult.
Whitepapers must capture attention early on in the buying cycle, based on the underlying truth we all know as B2B marketers – attracting the wrong audience in B2B can be worse than attracting no audience.
4. Use other tools and content to support and promote the paper
To get the most out of whitepapers, extra assets must be used to help drive traffic to it. This can start from before the whitepaper has been published: if it is a great piece of content, why not promote it? A great way to inform your target audience of upcoming material can be through social media.Posting regular updates to a social media platform will create a buzz and interest around the subject – aim to write up to six posts in two weeks for maximum impact. Within every post, there should be a link to the relevant landing page and a call-to-action asking the reader to register (either for lead generation or to download the whitepaper).
5. Measure, measure and measure again
Broadly speaking, with whitepapers or any content format, it’s crucial to take a ‘big picture’ approach that maps out clear objectives before drilling down to the specific uses and requirements of each tool. Many B2B brands still do not have a concise approach to measuring the ROI of their marketing spend – but if marketers are to successfully protect budgets then they have to be able to articulate what the business gets as a result of the investment.
To get the clearest picture of the results of your whitepaper production efforts, it’s important that you manage and track the data over a long period of time. This can be in the form of leads you have accumulated, reaction and general feedback via social media and day of the week content was published. All results can be built upon for future campaigns, with marketing strategies and content plans continually adapted according to what your data is telling you.
