White Paper Marketing
10 Tips for Promoting B2B White Papers

Knowing how to promote a niche B2B white paper is one of the best ways to generate highly qualified sales leads or educate and up sell existing customers. Here are some tips based on learnings we've experienced with our clients when promoting white papers.

1. Define your objectives
It sounds obvious, but you really need to think about what you are trying to do with a white paper, so that you can measure your success and ROI after the fact. Is your objective;

• To acquire B2B leads and bring in new sales?
• To educate existing customers on a new product/service?
• To obtain research or feedback on an existing offer?

If you are looking to acquire leads, one effective approach is to focus on third party opt-in email list rentals to promote your white paper and illustrate a successful client case study for example. If you are increasing awareness of a new product or doing research among existing customers, then conducting a permission-based internal email campaign could be the most efficient use of your resources.

2. Set expectations
After setting objectives, setting your internal expectations is the next most important step, and too often overlooked. Do you expect to cover all costs within 1 week of promoting your white paper, creative and development costs of optimizing your registration micro-site, writing the white paper internally or hiring a writer, designing it, paying photo rights, developing visuals such as bar graphs and layout as well as typesetting? If so, you may need to be more realistic, especially if you have low product margins. Often acquisition campaigns are longer term strategies that will generate new leads which may need 3 to 12 months to remarket to via email, phone and personal visits before recouping costs.

3. Estimate response
What will my response be? Ah, the $64,000 question! Well, of course response rates always depend on many variables, but mainly 3 things: your offer (e.g. the quality of your white paper content), the creative (how well are you communicating the benefits, not features of your product within your white paper), and the targeting (are you using job title targeting in your email lists?). Web traffic is also very seasonal, and timing during the week for email broadcasts is important - typically Tuesday to Thursday mornings are optimal for maximizing response while people are at their desks reading email. The nice thing about white-papers is that you can offer them anytime, 24 hours a day, vs a live webinar for example.

4. Determine your target cost per lead / white paper download
In our experience with promoting technology hardware or software with white papers to acquire new customers using opt-in email list rentals exclusively, a typical cost per lead (CPL) for a promotion with relevant and timely content, case studies and optimized creative and landing/registration process is around $50 to $100 US (this cost goes down to much less when mining an existing customer database, but this is just an example of the potential cost of acquiring new leads). If for example, you have a profit margin of $300 per sale and close 1 in 3 leads to make a sale, that would give you a cost per acquisition (CPA) of $150 to $300 US.

5. Write good timely content
The most successful white papers I've promoted for clients have included highly targeted content that is timely. For example, a few years ago when their was a spike in the number of web sites being hacked, a security software client promoted a white paper on "Hacking 101 - How to Protect Your Web Site" which did phenomenally well. Recently, an online merchant account client targeting retailers promoted their white paper entitled: "Succeeding In the Retail Business During Economic Stress" with great success. Both of these topics were of huge interest, and very relevant for what clients were currently going through. With the current recession and down economy, clients are looking to get more knowledge on reducing costs, generating revenue and even just surviving in turbulent times. (Tips 6 to 10 next page...)

 

Contact us for a specific opt-in email list recommendation and quote.