White paper marketing is indeed an effective for B2B marketing. Publishing white paper often is a good way to target your customers. Blue chip companies like Accenture, PwC, Deloitte etc invest lot of resources to do research and publish various white papers about the industry sector they serve.
The true value of a whitepaper is how it reflects on the organisation (or whoever wrote it). Whitepapers add to company becoming a “thought leader” in the specific field. The golden rules of white paper are shown in the figure below.
Addressing the right topic is very essential, frequently lot of white paper address topic that are neither useful for sales people as well as for prospective buyers. So it is very important to select the right topic initially. If the white paper is intent to generate leads it is a good idea to involve sales people in the early stages of writing because they know what customers talk about think about the sales process questions etc.
The type of the white paper is another consideration, it can intend to generate leads, projecting organisation as a thought leader, strategy, market trends, industry overview etc. White papers vary in their structure, and the best type of white paper to accomplish goals and appeal to stakeholders should be carefully considered.
The white paper should write after understanding the customers. You should provide the right amount of information in the paper. Lengthy white papers sometimes not good to target the customers. Effective white papers information in a compelling way that helps potential customers understand both how and why the offering will benefit them.
Unsubstantiated claims about the service or offering may alienate the objective of the white paper and the customer may become more dubious about the problem or solutions which you offer. To improve credibility of white paper it is very important to cite third party research papers, articles, industry reports etc.
Finally but most importantly it is very effective if you choose a veteran writer to write the article, a white paper is doomed to failure if the writer lacks the exceptional writing skills, technical savvy, and marketing experience that these documents require.
How to market a white paper?
This is a very important consideration to market the paper. It is very important to choose the right channel for marketing. Sometimes if the white paper is a blatant info capturing tool, customers just skip over it. There are often different reason for this, customers may not want to spend time to fill the form or they are not ready to reveal the the personal details to the white paper providers.
Some of the mechanism, I normally use are:
1) Organic marketing through B2B social tools like LinkedIn, Xing etc.
2) Email marketing, which is very efficient to market white paper actually, Tools such as Jigsaw, Zoominfo, Pearlfinder, Hoovers are very useful to get email address of target customers.
3) Viral Twitter campaign using PaywithaTweet This is very effective mechanism to capture information and reach mass.
Tags: B2B marketing, branding, Innovation, linkedIn, white paper, white paper marketing, Xing
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