White Papers As a Marketing Tool For Your Small Business
Last week SMEketing launched a whitepaper campaign for a local IT company here in Hampshire. Wikipedia defines a white paper as:
“An authoritative report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions.”
If the product you sell is expensive, sophisticated, technical and/or involves a complex buying process, or if your company sells to other businesses (B2B), then the use of whitepapers is definitely a marketing method you should be employing. A well written white paper should be a few pages long, and should state your company’s position on how a problem should be solved. The white paper isn’t a sales tool however – you are not pushing or selling your product or solution. What you are doing is identifying a problem, and writing about the best way to solve it. Feel free to mention your product as an example of the type of product that can solve the problem you are writing about, but be factual about it, rather than pushy and salesy.
So why are whitepapers such great marketing tools? Firstly, the people who read them have an active interest in what the paper is about. So for example, if you sell an IT solution that improves the efficiency of organisations telephone system and write a paper focusing on how businesses should manage the problem of missing too many telephone calls, the people who read your white paper are those who have a problem with their telephone system, and could probably do with a solution like yours. The leads generated from a white paper should be very high quality and targeted to a specific product or solution.
Secondly, by uploading the whitepaper to your website, and promoting it online, you’ll help to improve and maintain your rankings in the top search engines. Search engines, like Google, love websites that constantly add new material. A white paper would be classed as new content – and because it is written about your product or solution, it will be jam-packed-full of those all important key terms.
The key to a successful white paper is the promotion and follow up. There’s no point having a well written, good looking white paper on your website if no one knows it’s there.
What we recently did for a client was to create a press release and submit that to relevant press as well as uploading it to newswires online. We also created dedicated eblasts (tailored to match their stage in the buying process, or based on the level of contact which our client had already had with them), which were sent using the our Email Marketing Tool to their contact and prospect lists. We also created a new Google AdWord campaign for them – advertising their white paper and driving relevant traffic to their dedicated white paper landing page.
The results were already impressive. The dedicated landing page we created included a simple form which requested just the name, email address, company and telephone number, as well as a drop down box asking people to say where they heard about the whitepaper. Keeping this form simple and quick has meant that the our client had a huge number of people filling in the form and downloading the white paper.
These contact details from the online form were then be passed onto their sales team to be followed up.
The press releases that were submitted online are now starting to be published and are creating links to their website – again, adding another boost to their search engine rankings.
So you can see that the benefits of a white paper are multiple. By creating a white paper that has been optimised to contain relevant key terms, repurposing it into a press release and eblast, and promoting online and offline, our client has not only gained many high quality new business leads, but will also improved their rank in Google for the key term that the paper was about.
