White papers are a great piece of content to use if you want to get people excited about your products, services as well as your company. White papers are most useful for B2B companies, particularly technology companies, as it helps move interest prospects further along in their buying cycle. Why are white papers so important? If for no other reason, it is that B2B buyers seek them out, especially those who are looking to make a technology purchase. But not all white papers are created equal. You need to demonstrate innovative, visionary thinking on a specific topic whether it’s a known topic or whether you are surfacing a topic. In addition to this – the 30,000-foot view, you must also bring the scope down to a personal level and answer their most important question; what is the benefit to them? Therefore, a white paper has to really resonate with the reader, it must show a deep understanding of their issues and concerns, and illustrate how you can help them address these issues. That said, what should a white paper include in order to generate leads? Here are ten steps to publishing white papers that resonate and create an impact with your audience.
Understand Your Audience
In order for your white paper to have an impact, you need to understand your audience. What are some of their concerns and challenges? Much like a doctor listens to what their patient is saying and feeling before prescribing any medication, you need to take their issues into account and understand what it is exactly they are looking for and in what way your offer can be applied to their situation. You must also understand their information preferences. What they are looking for in a white paper? What is their current workflow? How will you improve that? Think about the sort of language they use to describe their pains or their aspirations before writing your value proposition. Because without knowing this, it is impossible to write in a way that is going to engage them.
Gather Information And Research
The second step is to conduct research and interviews. You want to fully explore this topic, this issue from every angle possible. You can start by identifying potential gaps that you can fill with knowledge in your paper. One of the easiest ways to collect this information is in-house. Walk over to your customer service area and ask them for a rundown of the most common inquiries customers are calling to address. Here, you can review these issues, what language the customers used to report the issue, as well as what steps were taken to solve the problem. This is a great way to identify some problems your audience is experiencing, and tying a solution back into your own products and services.
Create A Comprehensive Outline
If you are working on a white paper taking input from members of other teams, then you should write a very comprehensive outline. Or, you have a new product coming out and you want to position yourself as an authority in this area. You need to make sure that all the stakeholders are on board with all the messages that you plan to cover in your paper, and that the flow is as everybody imagines it. So, put out that outline, make sure everybody reviews it and get their feedback because that’s going to save you a lot of trouble down the line.
Plan Ahead Before Promoting Your Paper
Once you have decided a topic for your white paper – whether that is discussing a new product, or you are planning to position yourself in a new market, you need to promote your paper both before and after you produce it. So beforehand, you can start seeding ideas through blog posts and other places – perhaps online articles or social media posts, in order to get your audience thinking about the topic. Once you have produced the paper make sure you put up a landing page if you are using email automation. Ensure all of your outbound emails point people to that landing page, and put analytics in place to monitor the performance of your campaigns in relation to it. In essence, make sure it’s as highly visible as possible to your audience.
Align Your White Papers To The Buying Cycle
Businesses that get the most leads from their white papers put them out in alignment with the buying cycle. Some others, although not many, make sure that they have white papers available for all the roles in that buying cycle. Let’s assume for a moment that you are offering group benefits or related insurance products. You should know that your prospects will be renewing their company’s benefit plan in March. Therefore it is a good idea to create content for them now. This will make it easier for your sales team to initiate the dialogue with prospects when the time to make a decision finally arrives.
Make It Easy To Scan And Digest
You’re busy, I’m busy and almost certainly your prospect is busy. Make sure your paper is easy to scan and digest because we’re all so time constrained these days. Think of your own usage of white papers. Many of us take a quick look at it before we decide to invest our time to read it. You want to highlight key points as much as possible with your headings, with callout boxes and bulleted text. A good way to accomplish this is to outline exactly what they will learn by reading this white paper by summarizing the information on the front page. Further along, you should include tables and charts to help any data stand out, highlight your sidebars to bring attention to key points, play with font sizes or colour, as well as other elements you have available such as icons. Whatever you chose to use, make that it is easy for the reader to identify the gist of your message at a glance.
Use Quotes And Make Them Stand Out
People are genuinely interested in other people. If you can, include a few quotes in your white paper. This can be a quote from your founder, your technology officer, or better yet, a happy client who in their own words briefly explains how adopting your product or solution has benefited them. As above, you can emphasize quotes by using a bigger or different font from the rest of the copy, play with colour schemes or other visual effects. This will draw the readers eyes to the quotes, while also giving your page design more variation visually.
Add A Call To Action
Sure, white papers are great for providing information and introducing yourself to a new audience. But ultimately, the goal of your white paper from a marketing perspective is to get people closer to a purchase. Towards the end of your white paper, add a short statement that elicits an immediate response from the reader. You can ask them to give you a call, book a demo, or ask them to follow you on Social Media. One thing is for certain, if your white paper has no call to action then you are missing out on a massive chunk of business.
Embed Social-Sharing Tools
So, you got your prospect to download the white paper from your site. Job done, right? Not quite. More often than not, there are multiple decision makers involved in the buying process of a technology or software product. More often than not, the decision whether to move forward with a purchase will involve people with a technical background, people from business control units and also the end users themselves. So make sure that your white papers are to share. Add email forwarding and social share buttons to your PDF. With a click, the reader can pass it along to a colleague, their peers or better yet, to a decision maker.
Repurpose The Paper Into Other Standalone Content Assets
Finally, after all the effort put into planning, creating and promoting your white paper, you want to extract maximum value it. Remember that not everyone would be willing to sit down and read a 4 to 8 page document, so consider some ways you can dissect and repurpose your paper. Perhaps you can create blog posts just from a specific topic from your white paper. You can even direct back to the white paper from such a blog post, directing even more earned leads to it. Another good idea is to narrow it down to a checklist, thus creating a one-page standalone document that can be used as a brochure or other marketing collateral. Or maybe you want to go the other way, and use your white paper as a 30-minute webinar, where you can really flesh out your ideas, topics, and solutions. Whatever kind of further content you can get out of your white paper, you will find yourself amazed at the increase in people looking to learn more about you by simply repurposing or as I like to put it “remixing” your content.
Final Thoughts
White papers should offer a unique, well-written and valuable insight on a very specific topic to a defined reader. It should look great, make it simple to digest and also elicit a response. While the information in this post should provide a sufficient guide to creating white papers that generate leads, I understand that there is no end-all, be-all methodology. So, if you have any further questions, or would like a closer look at anything discussed in this article, I would welcome your thoughts in the comments below.
