White Paper Marketing Tips You Need to Know for 2023

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marketing-and-branding

6 min readOct 29, 2022

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Long before we called content marketing “content marketing,” companies were leveraging white papers to generate and nurture leads.

While many new types of content offers have emerged over the past few years, white papers have lost none of their value. Audiences want access to expert advice, and they’re often willing to hand over contact information to get it.

Today, your ability to reap value from white paper driven leads is greater than ever, especially if you view these publications as starting points in your relationships with new prospects and customers.

Is your white paper strategy set up to create and nurture these quality relationships? The following three questions will help you answer that question — and eventually secure a higher, more consistent ROI.

Check out the White Paper Marketing Tips You Need to Know for 2023.

The tips in this article are based on new HTML-5 interactive white papers. If you’re not familiar with them, we recommend checking out how you can create interactive white papers.

1. Are you welcoming readers or putting barriers in their way?

The most popular way to capture leads with your white papers is by gating them, asking readers to enter some contact information before they get access. This can be an effective strategy, but there are also pitfalls to watch out for.

A form, especially one that is unnecessarily long, can deter potential leads from engaging with your content. This is what marketers call friction. In a best-case scenario, the sales process slows down. In the worst case, you’ll lose potential leads entirely.

Gauging your audience’s appetite for forms through testing is essential. If you see lots of traffic on your landing pages but very few conversions, the form could very well be the culprit. In that case, you want to have another option for visitors.

Use social login for your white paper

A significant advantage of using interactive white papers (instead of PDFs) is that you can use social integrations with sites like LinkedIn. Visitors can access your white paper with just one click, and you gain even more information than you would have captured with a form. Another benefit here is that you can be sure the information isn’t fake.

Mid-gate your white paper

Another option that’s increasing in popularity is mid-gating. Make the first few pages of your white paper open access so your readers get a taste of what you’re offering, and then gate the rest. This also has the effect of increasing the quality of your leads because readers will only sign up if what they’ve already read resonates with them.

Add a skip option to your white paper mid-gate

You can also use a form to gate your white paper but include a “skip it” option. You’ll still collect details from visitors with a high degree of interest, but you’ll avoid turning away those unwilling to part with their information.

Think about retargeting white paper traffic

If you choose not to gate your content, interactive white papers still allow you to embed retargeting pixels so you can engage with readers later using relevant offers on other channels.

The bottom line is that you should test prospects’ willingness to share their contact information and change your tactics accordingly. You want to gather data but still make it easy for them to engage with you through your white paper.

2. Personalize your white paper for your readers

You’ll find that when you personalize white papers, your leads will spend more time engaging with your content (22%, on average) and are more likely to share it on social media.

When prospects fill out a form or log in with their LinkedIn profiles, they provide you with all the details you need to personalize their reading experience. Don’t pass up that opportunity.

In addition to addressing visitors by name, you can make strategic editorial choices based on information such as their geographic region or their industry. One way to utilize this information is by filtering your publications so people with a particular profile only see particular pages of your white paper.

Personalization is a powerful way to increase engagement. Many major brands use it to create tailored experiences on their websites — and with interactive white papers, you can use it as well.

3. What are you doing after prospects read your white paper?

From the moment a prospect requests your white paper, they begin a relationship with your brand. At least, that’s how it should work. Too many companies treat a white paper download as an ending, not a beginning.

How you follow up with a lead determines whether or not a relationship develops. If you do it right, you’ll guide him or her further into the funnel and, eventually, take some profitable action.

With traditional PDF white papers, the most you can do is move them to a drip campaign. But with digital white papers, you can decide how to follow up based on how they’ve interacted with your content.

You might use a pixel, for example, to retarget certain readers that spent time on a particular page with a relevant offer on Facebook. If they used their LinkedIn account to access your white paper, you might choose to connect with them there.

By analyzing data from your interactive white paper using our Google Analytics integration, you’ll get an idea of how your readers interacted with your content and, therefore, how aggressively you should follow up. You can see which users were highly engaged and might warrant immediate direct contact with your sales team.

Look at the pages on which users spent the most time and which specific links they clicked. Did a user watch an embedded video all the way to the end? All of this information can inform your nurture strategy.

Conclusion

White papers hold more potential value for marketers than ever. They can introduce you to the prospects you’re most interested in meeting. If you deliver an experience that is both useful and memorable, those introductions will lead to quality customer relationships.

Examining your white paper strategy with the questions we introduce here is the first step to boosting ROI, generating more leads, and building better customer relationships.

Author bio

Ritesh is a digital marketing manager with years of experience in driving growth. He’s currently the director of inbound marketing at Foleon. You can find more about him on his LinkedIn profile.

Resources

Originally published at https://storylab.ai on October 29, 2022.