6 Things to Consider for Your Whitepaper Promotion
By: Rohit Desai
Tags: Deck7, B2b Marketing, B2B, White Papers, Content Marketing

Are you looking to establish thought leadership, generate more leads and perhaps nurture the existing ones until they are ready to buy? When it comes to growing your pipeline and achieving maximum returns, most B2B businesses consider whitepaper to be more effective than videos, blogs, infographics, e-newsletters, etc.

Unlike the sea of content that we often see today, a whitepaper is something that your prospects actually take interest in. A well-written whitepaper always contains valuable information that can help prospects make important business decisions. And nothing makes a bigger impact than an in-depth analysis of an issue that relates to their business big time.

However, promoting whitepaper can be a struggle for marketers since half of them don’t even know where these marketing materials fall in the sales funnel. And as a result of that, this gray area can often leave marketers confused.

To successfully promote your whitepaper, you need to understand its purpose as well as the expectations of your potential and existing customers.

1. Revamp Your Landing Page and A/B Test It

While promoting your whitepaper, the first you thing need to look at is your landing page. Your landing page can either make it or break it and having one that doesn’t convert well can render all your marketing efforts pointless.

While offering your unique value proposition or UVP, make sure to clearly explain why your audiences should give over their details and take their time to read your whitepaper. Make sure your page is easy to navigate through and looks good, and accessible from all kinds of devices.

2. Collaborate with Industry Associates & Conferences

To stay in the mind of potential partners, many conferences rely on content marketing in the form of blog posts, videos, and whitepaper. Marketers should take this opportunity to get their whitepaper in front of a wider audience; through your valuable partnership opportunities, you can reach out to the audience of the participants. Likewise, you can partner up with an industry association for the promotion or research of your whitepaper.

3.Using Facebook to Promote Your Whitepaper

The key to successful content marketing on Facebook is to have promoted page posts to target the specific audience in their news feed. With the help of Facebook’s new cost cap bid strategy, you can easily optimize your advertising budget and keep a tab on your ad spend. Facebook will algorithmically optimize your campaigns by maintaining the consistency of your budget regardless of the different cost factors.

4. Keep Your Download Forms Brief and Clear

Marketers are prone to making these kinds of mistakes, such as asking for too much information, overdoing the presentation, being too vague about the unique value proposition, etc. It’s always good to keep it short, sweet and clear. If all you require is your prospect’s name, email address, and number, then it’s better to leave it at that.

5. Hosting a Webinar

Hosting a webinar can earn you more number of leads which is even better than events. Not only does it eliminate the geographical boundaries, but it also presents the opportunity of interacting with your audience directly. Running a webinar and offering your whitepaper as a gift or a related material can be a good way to drive interest in the download of your whitepaper

6. How to Determine the Success of Your Whitepaper?

Since whitepapers are usually a mid-funnel type of content, their goal is to educate audiences about your brand and position you as an expert in the industry. To measure the success of your whitepaper, it is crucial to look at the mid-funnel content metrics such as bringing previous visitors back to your website and keeping them engaged. You can even have goals that are better aligned with the sales process to measure the success of your whitepaper.

Things to Avoid

Don’t forget to make your whitepaper social media friendly . Content marketing institute reported that there are over 800 million active users on Facebook, 200 million users on Twitter and 100 million users on LinkedIn, which means you could be missing out on a hell lot of opportunities by not marketing your whitepaper on social media platforms. You could prompt the audience to share your piece of content by adding social sharing buttons at the top of your landing page.

. Content marketing institute reported that there are over 800 million active users on Facebook, 200 million users on Twitter and 100 million users on LinkedIn, which means you could be missing out on a hell lot of opportunities by not marketing your whitepaper on social media platforms. You could prompt the audience to share your piece of content by adding social sharing buttons at the top of your landing page. The best way to make a successful sales pitch to not sell yourself, hence, avoid including your company promotions in your whitepaper’s marketing material. If your promotional efforts focus on how your white paper can provide valuable insights, then that will help in earning credibility. That trust will make them want to learn more about your products and services, which is why you must provide the educational value of your white paper first.

Remember to always include white paper in your content strategy. And to ensure its success, develop successful promotion plans and stay focused on a value-based approach. Have you promoted white paper before?