This helpful guide will explain at a high level the benefits of white paper marketing and how to market your white papers to generate leads.

Benefits of White Paper Marketing

White papers can be very powerful tools for marketing products or services, particularly for complex sales with long sales cycles.  Often times your prospects may not even be aware that a solution exists that can help them with their business needs.  This is where the white paper can be leveraged as an educational tool to help inform your leads about a particular business issue, and give them a little nudge and wink to let them know that you offer a solution for this.

Compared to other forms of marketing, white papers are a bit softer in their approach, relying instead on the value they provide the reader and the assumption that if someone truly has a business need, they will investigate it further after becoming more educated about it.  Educating your prospects is always a good thing as it leads to more intelligent discussions when it comes time for the first actual live communication.  The added perk here is that if they were educated on a matter by your white paper, you are viewed as a thought-leader on the issue and have gained additional credibility as compared to your competition in the eye of the prospect.

How to Market White Papers to Generate Leads

If it was as easy as creating a white paper and posting a link on your site, a lot more companies would be doing it.  Unfortunately, the one downside of doing lead-generation with white papers is that the content is only one part of the equation–the more important part is the distribution.  (Note: This section assumes you know how to write a white paper or have the resources to hire someone to do it for you.)

When looking to distribute a white paper you have many of the same options as the rest of your marketing campaigns with one unique additional option which we’ll cover at the end.

Your Website

There are two schools of thought when it comes to posting white papers on your website for people to download.  The first says to give it to make it as easy as possible to access the content without requiring any information in return (such as their contact information).  The assumption here is that your white paper content is powerful enough and will educate the prospect enough where they will identify themselves to you as a hand-raiser who wants to learn more about your offering and continue down the sales pipeline.  There are several benefits to this approach:

• There is less friction in the navigation which means you will likely get more downloads of your content, and depending on the strength of your content/offering this could very well lead to an increase in leads
• Your content will get indexed in search engines and can significantly increase the amount of organic traffic your website receives which in turn will likely result in an increase in leads
• Other sites may link directly to your content on their site, thus providing you will valuable backlinks that improve your rankings in search engines

These are some pretty powerful benefits so you must be wondering what the other school of thought could possibly have to say about this.  Well, it turns out that some businesses simply do better by playing the numbers game.  This means that they might prefer to obtain contact information from as many prospects as possible to use with marketing automation software for example.  The benefits of this approach are:

• Potentially higher volume of leads since you will have the contact information from anybody who downloads your content, regardless of whether they take it upon themselves to contact you directly
• Better chances of prospects actually reading your content since they had to give something valuable (their personal contact info) in exchange for accessing it and are thus more vested in the process

As with all forms of marketing and lead-generation, it is strongly advised that you test, test again, and then do some more testing.  Every business is different and there are so many variables to adjust that it is hard to make generalized statements as to what works better.  The metrics you’ll want to look at when testing both approaches are:

• Website traffic
• Volume of leads generated by the content
• Number of content downloads
• Quality of leads generated as measured by conversion rates to different states of your pipeline and the speed with which they move through those stages

At Qualified B2B Leads, we are typically fans of the first approach of making it freely available.  While we make sure to test everything, our experience has shown us that if someone took the time to come to your website (and was subsequently exposed to all of the other marketing on the site) they are aware of who you are and have already expressed some level of interest in you.  But again, that will not be the case with every business so be sure to test.  You will also likely see a difference in results between leads that come to your site organically and access your content and leads that come to your site through paid search (like Google AdWords).

Email Blasts

Email is still a great way to reach people for numerous reasons, however there are a few things you should be aware of when promoting a white paper via email:

1. You are interrupting your audience.  Unlike traffic that comes to your website through organic or paid search, you have actively put yourself in front of your prospect and said “Hey, LOOK AT ME!”  The result of this varies tremendously depending on the source of your list.  If it is a highly-qualified house list, you will likely receive a great response rate if you are providing quality content and not being salesy in your approach as they are familiar with you and value you enough to have opted-in to your list.  If it is a rented list, or even worse, a harvested list (or one purchased from a site that harvests), it is incredibly hit or miss and you will likely end up with many spam complaints which can cause issues in and of themselves
2. You are educating, not selling.  The second someone gets a whiff that you are trying to sell them (typically in the subject line), you’ve blown your chance at reaching them.  Focus purely on educating them about a business issue and communicating the value of your content as an objective piece of information and you will do much better than if you plaster promotional messages all over the email
3. If you are sending this blast as part of an auto-responder series for a lead-nurturing campaign, make sure your prospects are made aware beforehand that they will receive educational/informational emails from you from time to time.  By informing them of this in advance, they’ll know what it is when they see it land in their inbox and won’t just toss it in Junk Mail as a gut reaction

Outside Websites

There are several websites that allow you to post your content for free on their websites.  These generally fall into two categories: article directories, and document hosting sites.  A quick google of “article directories” will pull up more than you could possibly want, just make sure you read their terms before you post as they vary from site to site.  The benefit of directories is that they tend to rank well and get eyeballs on your content.  More importantly, you can use the signature section on them to include a targeted backlink to your site for SEO purposes.  Document hosts (like scribd.com) allow you to post documents and share them with others through the website.  These are similar to photo and video sharing sites except they allow you to post text documents or powerpoints.  These sites also rank well and are great for getting additional eyeballs on your content.  You should be using both of these sites in conjunction with one another, however just be sure to post the content on your site first and make sure Google indexes it so that your site does not get punished for duplicate content.

Publication Websites

This gem is tailored specifically for content marketing and works great with white papers, downloadable videos, etc.  Essentially, these sites take your content and market it on your behalf to their highly-qualified audiences.  This lends you the credibility of the publication as well as indirect access to their house list which is typically of a much higher quality than any other list you could hope to get your hands on from an outside source.  However we would offer several words of caution.  With these sites, you typically pay a flat rate or a CPM-based rate to have your content hosted for a certain amount of time or for a certain number of impressions.  If you are fairly new to content marketing and have not gone this route yet, this can be problematic as this payment model has you shouldering all of the risk and not the publisher (who gets paid regardless of how your campaign performs).  Understandably, publishers love this approach!  Additionally, it can be quite the challenge to find publishers who are the right fit, and if you don’t have established relationships with them you will be paying ridiculous rates that media firms like ours would never pay.

Automated Pay-Per-Lead Content Marketing

We’ve saved the best for last.  After having many experiences with the publisher websites mentioned above, we here at Qualified B2B Leads became very frustrated with the existing model.  It wasn’t fair to the advertiser and created no incentive for the publisher to work with you to optimize your campaign since they were paid either way.  That is why we decided to take the good elements from them and use our expertise to eliminate the risk on your end as an advertiser.  We leverage our relationships with our vast network of publishers who cover a wide range of industries to market your content to the appropriate audience.  Most importantly, we only charge you on a per-lead basis for leads that meet your qualifier requirements as defined by up to three filter questions you provide.  The net result is you are only paying for performance…ie. leads that you deem qualified.  This allows for accurate projections around the number of qualified leads you will generate for a given spend and more accurately model your pipeline conversion rates.  We also take the grunt work out of the process by actively managing the campaign with our publishers so as to entirely automate the process on your end once you submit your content and qualifier filters.

Essentially all you need to do in order to generate leads from your content is the following:

1. Submit content and qualifier filters
2. Receive qualified leads
3. The cost for each lead is automatically debited from your pre-filled account (similar to how billing works with Google AdWords)

It’s that easy (well, on your end at least).  If you’d like to have a discussion about whether this might be a good solution for your needs, feel free to contact us.  We pride ourselves on not being pushy or too “salesy” and even if there isn’t a fit, we’d be happy to offer some suggestions.  We also appreciate any feedback you might have on this guide so feel free to post in the comments section or contact us directly.