Customers are exploring newer ways of making well-informed buying decisions, and marketers are going big on educating and spreading awareness among the customers. Especially in the B2B segment, marketing teams had to ramp up their efforts to educate the customers at each stage of the consumer decision journey.
Enter Whitepapers. The be-all and end-all for consumers looking to gain knowledge, make decisions and understand the philosophy of a business on a specific topic or field.
Whitepapers are vital for your sales team to generate leads.
If you’re a business trying to get into the upper echelons of your industry, creating a whitepaper is one among the best practices to establish your thought leadership and demonstrate your expertise.
Whitepaper creation is a cumbersome process – it requires thorough industry research, collecting responses from consumers, liaising with content and design teams to create a stunning masterpiece. However, your combined efforts will go into vain if you have never thought about a way to get it in front of your target audience.
That’s exactly what you’ll learn from this guide.
Marketing is a truly integral part of a successful whitepaper, and today, I aim to enlighten you with proven strategies for whitepaper promotion.
The perfect white paper promotion strategy begins with an eye-catching landing page
Your target audience gets the first look at your landing page. According to various reports, the average attention span of an average human being is around 8 seconds. That’s the time you get to create a positive impression about your landing page. Here’s a great example for you:
As you can see, there are multiple CTAs in the form of a download button as well as the sharing buttons for social media. Bulleted-text makes it really easy for the visitors to go through the content, boosting the UX quotient of this landing page.
Make the landing page uncluttered, design it in an easy-to-navigate manner, and do not ask for too much information from the visitor for the purpose of downloading or viewing the whitepaper. This will only increase the bounce rate of your page and it should be ideally kept at around 25-40%. Anything over 70% is a warning sign that the landing page is not interactive enough.
While you should focus on reducing the bounce rate, the objective should be to increase the number of downloads for the whitepaper.
Here’s another great example of a landing page with just the right amount of content and neat design:
The recipe is simple – add an interesting excerpt about the whitepaper, add social sharing buttons so that people can talk about it on Twitter and Facebook, and testimonials. In short, make your landing page as snazzy yet informative as you can!
Guest blogging- another proven strategy to get more whitepaper downloads.
Helping launch a new whitepaper can be made a lot easier if you write quality posts on popular platforms. Medium, LinkedIn and Quora are platforms where you can reach out to a greater number of people – they are amazing to write on as they are read by a majority of people that you would like your white paper to appeal to.
The best part about these platforms is that you can repurpose content and valuable insights from your whitepaper. For instance, there are many users on Quora who are constantly looking for solutions. If your whitepaper has something that addresses certain problems, secure that opportunity with this method of organic content promotion.
In addition to that, you should also focus on finding blogs that are specific to your industry or niche. While reaching out to these blogs, ensure that you pitch topics that are in and around the same vicinity of topic or area of discussion as the whitepaper, which you can then incorporate in these guest posts through a link or redirect. The quality of your content that you post on these platforms has to be spot on, so get your best writers on the job.
Here’s a helpful tip – begin outreach for the guest post campaign while the whitepaper is being created. By doing this, you can ensure that before the day of the launch, you will have secured enough placements. It helps to generate hype and create even more traction for your whitepaper release. The hype is an important element in marketing, and few people seem to realize it. Make the most of it!
Emailing – the classic marketing ploy that can never go wrong
Email marketing still proves to be one of the most underutilized cost-effective content promotion strategies. Here’s an interesting statistic for you – for every dollar you spend on email marketing, the return on investment is USD 42. That is a huge conversion factor, isn’t it?
Email marketing might seem like a tried, tested and thrown-away marketing strategy, but trust me – it can never go wrong. A huge list of newsletter subscribers can make it even easier to launch a whitepaper since all you need to do is send the final piece to your subscribers.
Let’s say you have a mailing list of 10,000 customers. You send your whitepaper to all of those, and around 1,000 customers end up opening the mail. Out of those, only 100-200 actually download the paper and read what’s inside. Depending on the size of your email list, you’ll be able to get an estimate on the number of downloads that you generate for the whitepaper.,
You can ever inform your readers about your white paper launch a week or two before the release date. This can further boost your traffic! Simple, isn’t it?
Feature insights shared by influencers
This is a great method of getting the right audience to read your whitepaper. Here’s how it works:
Contact reputed influencers in your industry. Ask them for a quote. Add it to the whitepaper. Once the whitepaper is ready to go, share it with them. With a gentle nudge asking them to share it on social media, or even their newsletters.
By doing this, you get an incredible audience for your whitepapers. And because you show an association with these influencers, you might also land a few leads. You never know.
The final word
Great content and creating the perfect whitepaper takes center stage, but without an effective marketing strategy, all the hardwork of your content team is at risk of going to waste. Whitepaper marketing isn’t difficult by any means – all it takes is a little bit of effort, a few brains, and readers will be talking about your paper in no time.
Create a highly-converting landing page, deploy the classic tried and tested email marketing strategy, or write quality guest posts on popular platforms that link back to your whitepaper or go for all three! The choice is yours!
