White Papers = Sales Leads

One of our favorite marketing sites, MarketingSherpa, recently posted an article entitled “How to Invent & Promote White Papers that Fortune 500 Prospects Find Irresistible.”

The article says that 67% of prospects who like your white paper will pass a copy to colleague. It also states how the viral marketing power of a good white paper can be astonishing, especially when you're trying to educate and influence committees in big companies. The problem, as MarketingSherpa so eloquently states, is that most white papers suck.

The purpose of our Blog posting today is not to tell you how to write killer White Papers – MarketingSherpa’s article can help you out with that – but to show you how to leverage your White Paper via your marketing and PR efforts.

Once the White Paper is complete, we recommend you do the following to ensure maximum exposure with your target audience:
  1. Place the White Paper on your website for free download. To download the White Paper, require the bare minimum of contact information such as Name, email, and phone number. You may also want to ask the prospect to sign up for free email alerts when your company launches new White Papers.
  2. On the download page, place a summary of the White Paper so search engine spiders/crawlers can find and index the page.
  3. Sounds obvious, but on the White Paper itself, make sure you have your standard "About Us" boilerplate language and complete company contact information.
  4. Advertise the White Paper in industry specific eNewsletters. Run the advertisement more than once. To find out which eNewsletters are appropriate in the HR industry, subscribe to www.HRmarketer.com.
  5. Send a press release out to key industry media contacts announcing the availability of the White Paper and including a sneak preview and compelling facts/trends/statistics to make it newsworthy and entice people to download the White Paper. Do not make the release promotional. For HR-related White Papers, you can send those over HRmarketer.com, giving you maximum exposure to media outlets in the human capital space.
  6. Send the press release over a major wire service like HRmarketer.com.
  7. Revise the White Paper into a 800 -1,000 word byline article and submit/publish in a major industry trade magazine that accepts White Papers. Again, you can find out which trade magazines accept byline articles for HR topics by subscribing to HRmarketer.com.
  8. Consider distributing the White Paper through syndication services, like CMP TechWeb, that feed the title into dozens of top tech-related Web news sites.
  9. Introduce a new White Paper each quarter and repeat cycle.
Good luck!

(By the way, did we mention what you can do on HRmarketer.com?)