Proven Strategies to Power Lead Generation with White Paper Marketing

Proven Strategies to Power Lead Generation with White Paper Marketing

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I work for a startup that develops graphic design software, and we don't have a sales team—just a tiny marketing team. We are expanding quickly and have big plans. As you may expect, this puts a lot of pressure on us to provide material that engages and grows our audience.

Our lead generation strategy includes the creation of long-form content, such as webinars, ebooks, and white papers. We have been able to grow our audience and draw in some esteemed partners like Hubspot and SurveyMonkey thanks to it.

Nevertheless, many already time-constrained startups and business owners find it difficult to consistently produce original, engaging content. Furthermore, 34.8% of marketers in a recent survey we conducted stated that creating visual content on a regular basis was their largest challenge. It is particularly true if you are not familiar with basic design concepts.

This post will highlight a certain effective long-form content format that has a track record of producing leads and needs less effort and design know-how than some other lead magnets (whitepapers).

More over half of the respondents (all advertisers), according to Business.com, thought that white papers were a good or very good source of leads.

I'll demonstrate how to make the most of white papers, how to turn well-performing content into a white paper, and how to use white papers to your advantage to forge relationships that can help you grow your company.

That's a question I get asked all the time. Is it a report, please? An electronic book?

A white paper is a comprehensive study that addresses a business issue or provides an explanation of a business concept.

It offers strong justification for why attention should be paid to its explanation or solution. Usually, case examples or fresh research are included. To put it briefly, it provides knowledge supported by solid references and research.

A white paper's lengthy structure is effective since it typically addresses a difficult idea or issue.It is often in PDF format, 8.5 x 11 portrait orientation, and has a minimum of six pages.

If you're not a designer, don't worry. Later in this piece, I'll provide you with some simple white paper design techniques.

White papers provide information to clients, stakeholders, and top-of-funnel traffic. They establish credibility and foster a sense of trust with your audience by positioning you as an authority (and offering examples of real-world applications where your solutions have been put to use).

White papers are excellent sources of leads as well.Anyone who downloads them may be required to complete an additional task, such as subscribing to a newsletter.

Additionally, leads created via whitepapers are more likely to become paying customers because those who download them are typically further along in their buying cycle (actively looking to acquire a product or service like yours, as opposed to passively interested).

Nevertheless, slamming out a white page won't provide the desired outcome. In order to captivate prospects and entice them to invest in your business, your white paper should have an eye-catching layout and include insightful information.

Let's get started by offering helpful material, and we'll get back to the design later.

It takes a colossal amount of effort to research, develop, edit, publish, and promote a white paper from scratch. Coming up with a novel concept that your audience would adore is equally difficult.

For this reason, whether it's for a white paper or something else entirely, content marketers often adore repurposing material. A Curata study found that 29% of top marketers reuse and adapt their current content on a regular basis.

Here's your plan of action: go back a year's worth of blog entries and identify the most popular ones with your readers.

How are you going about this? If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, consult your reliable companion. Seek out content that bring in a lot of traffic, conversions, and social media shares. If using Google Analytics isn't an option, consider Buzzsumo. Use their Content Research tool to enter your domain and discover which content produced the greatest engagement on various platforms.

Their Most Shared report can assist you in deciding where to post your white paper after it reveals which content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest garnered the most traction. Here is some of Venngage's most captivating content from the previous year, for instance:

Our report design blog article comes in second place with 2.1K Facebook engagements, while our poster ideas blog post had a ton of activity on Pinterest.

Are you a new business owner with little experience with existing content? Or is it possible that your material isn't doing very well? It's time to start again and identify a fresh white paper topic by investigating the issues that your target audience faces. Additionally, this will serve as a guide for potential content expansion.

First of all, if you don't even know who your audience is, you can't conduct research on their difficulties. Once more, Google Analytics is a great place to start. Keep track of your website's data to learn more about your audience's demographics.

Examining the statistics from one of your successful email campaigns is another tactic. Check out the campaign's list of people who clicked on a link.

Install the Sales Navigator for Gmail Chrome extension after that. If you enter one of your email addresses into Gmail, rich data from that individual's LinkedIn profile will appear.

Enter the information in your spreadsheet. Attempt to obtain data for a minimum of 100 individuals. You ought to know a lot more about who your target market is by now.

You must locate your audience online, join in on their conversations, and take note of any important phrases or terms they frequently use in order to incorporate them into your white paper. Only then will you be able to genuinely comprehend what problems they are facing.

The easiest way to use this method is if you have a topic in mind for your essay.

For instance, if Google Analytics indicates that our blog article about letterhead templates is receiving the most traffic, I may use that keyword to search Quora and other forums to learn about people's problems with the subject and the phrases they frequently use.

After that, I'll copy and paste this data into a document so I may use it in my white paper copy and choose which subjects to emphasize. Here is an example of study on this topic that I took straight from Quora. The juicy parts are highlighted here:

At Venngage, we routinely send emails and hold user conversations with our most active users to learn more about their preferences and motivations, as well as to establish various buyer personas that help us better understand the issues they are encountering and provide tailored solutions.

To learn more about your list's biggest obstacles, try sending a similar email to everyone on it. If you would like further in-depth input, provide a link to a brief questionnaire.

We also use our customer support chat tool, Helpscout, to search for jobs (marketers) or topics (business reports) in order to identify common problems and objectives of our clients, as well as language they use.

Let's imagine that during your one-on-one calls, customer support chats, and other interactions, your clients consistently bring up making presentations. To locate particular subjects that deal with that pain area, you can make use of some excellent paid and free tools:

It's time to write your white paper now that you have decided on your topic and, ideally, found any previously published material you can utilize.

A white paper that is successful won't be a simple repost of an earlier blog entry. You should have been able to determine the post's focus and areas for expansion based on your study.

Additionally, design is crucial, just like it is with other long-form content like presentations and ebooks.

Of course, it's possible that you lack the funds to commission a designer to make a template for you. However, if you're looking for a budget designer, you can always use services like 99Designs, Upwork, and Fiverr.

Alternatively, you can use a pre-made white paper design to save having to start from scratch. There are many white paper templates available online—some are free, others are not—and a quick Google search will turn up a ton of options.

Your cover page should entice the reader to continue reading by providing a clear indication of what to expect.

To do this, images, icons, or illustrations work well. This illustration previews the steps in this alluring content marketing strategy using icons:

It also includes a catchy headline that makes use of two headline requirements: a number and emotive (captivating) language. I can't suggest Brian Dean's copywriting guide highly enough if you need assistance creating effective headlines that convert.

To make readers want to study your white paper in further detail, include takeaways on the second page. If you want to bring the reader's attention to any subheadings, use a contrasting hue.

In fact, make any text or graphic that you want the reader to focus on stand out by using vibrant colors.

Using a larger font to highlight quotes is another option; this is how it's done in newspapers and magazines. Put this quote in the color that contrasts with it. Alternately, place it inside a text box with color. This white paper uses both examples:

Here's a minor design tip: Visual diversity is essential to creating legible and interesting white papers. Make your white paper more approachable by breaking up your content with icons for bullet points, incorporating data visualization and photographs, and utilizing multiple header sizes.

The most fascinating sections of your white paper material can be succinctly summarized with the use of visuals like charts and pictograms. And by fascinating, I mean responses to important queries that members of your audience regularly pose online and look up on Google.

White papers benefit greatly from the inclusion of visuals because they are impactful, simple to understand, and offer an almost limitless array of alternatives.

They're also a fantastic method to add fresh energy to any information you're recycling, simplify your white paper, and enhance the readability of any data.

Lastly, images offer fantastic nuggets of information that you can use to market your white paper on websites, blogs, email newsletters, webinars, and other platforms. It's also something simple you can forward to any collaborators on your white paper project, enabling them to boost their own marketing efforts.

Let's suppose that if you're recycling highly effective content, your audience is responding to it because it contains insightful information. Make a list of the most intriguing or distinctive parts of your information, then use these bits to create visualizations.

As we did when we transformed the content from our blog post How To Make an Infographic in 5 Steps into an infographic on the same topic (how meta), you may use each point as a stand-alone graphic or combine them into the ultimate infographic.

How can you pick the ideal chart to use in your white paper? The kind of data you have will determine a lot of things. Here are some recommendations:

For individuals who are unfamiliar with data visualization, our blog piece on selecting the ideal chart for your data is the ultimate guide.

At Venngage, we had a 400% growth in site traffic in a single year. This was mostly driven by natural search traffic to our blog. Therefore, it's obvious that we've been doing something right when it comes to creating SEO-friendly blog content.

If you're new to producing content that's optimized for organic search, a fantastic place to start is using Foundr's SEO plan for new startups.

To begin with, you should write a blog post that is only meant to advertise your white paper. It's the easiest way to get your white paper published, and it can work wonders.

Here's a great tip to ensure that your blog post attracts attention: develop backlinks to your blog content in a forceful manner.

At Venngage, outreach is how we accomplish this on a regular basis. We look for related blog content using keywords using Ahrefs Content Explorer. We only search for content that has been online within the previous year and has a Moz domain authority (DA) score of 40 or above.

After that, we export this list and ask our VA to add email addresses to it. This is an example template:

Next, we use Mailshake to send a bulk mailing to these contacts. Five days apart is how we always plan to send at least two follow-up emails.

Using this method, I can receive up to 14 backlinks every week. My trade secret:

(Just so you know, three hours later Summer responded to say she was considering my offer.)

Naturally, in order to turn readers into leads, you should gate your white paper and utilize it as an opt-in offer. The simplest method is to make sure that your blog article includes a (brief!) form that readers can fill out with their names and email addresses. Subsequently, they can choose to receive the white paper by email, download, or both.

You may direct readers of your blog to a form-hosting white paper landing page. These kinds of white paper landing pages are created at Venngage using Instapage. You may ensure that your material converts by using Foundr's advice to landing page copywriting.

It emphasizes that the eBook will supply the reader what they would most want—conversion strategies—and is clear and concise, with only the CTA to click.

Alternatively, you can incorporate an email capture form straight into your blog article by using a program like OptinMonster. Use their tool to add an exit popup to your blog post (or any other related post or page) that requests an email address in exchange for the reader's download. This gets rid of the requirement for a separate signup, but if you're sending readers there from other places, like social media, a dedicated landing page might convert leads more effectively.

If you're working with another business to create and/or market the white paper, you should definitely adopt this strategy so you can benefit from the lead generation success. The section after this one discusses this subject.

Joining forces with a company whose clientele might be interested in your offering is one of the greatest (and least expensive) strategies to market your white paper and get more leads. Collaborations are an effective method of distributing content.

However, selecting a partner is based on more factors than only their clientele or number of email subscribers. I'll offer you a few case studies to demonstrate this.

Venngages's brand alliance with Hubspot was one of its most prosperous ones. Together, we produced a brand style guide that was accessible for download on each of our individual websites.

Hubspot advertised the deal on their social media pages and to their sizable email list. Venngage received over 2,500 leads from this collaboration. We also translated the style guide into Spanish and French, producing an additional 1,500 leads.

After we partnered with Hubspot, other businesses showed a marked increase in interest in collaborating with us.

Additionally, we collaborated with GoToWebinar to create an ebook and webinar on how to create a standout webinar in 2019. Although there were far fewer prospects as a result, the leads we did receive had a greater conversion rate to paying clients.

What should we learn from this? Certain collaborations are beneficial for publicity and for leveraging future collaborations. Some generate leads that convert better than others. Making sure your white paper's topic appeals to your partner's audience directly is one way to achieve that.

An organization's audience may not find much use for a webinar design guide. However, our offer was very appealing to GoToWebinars clients, who truly needed to know how to create interesting webinars.

Your present marketing objectives should be taken into account when selecting a partner to promote your white paper.

Another thing to remember is that you may significantly expand your reach without putting in a lot of extra work by considering translating your white paper into different languages if your product is sold in many marketplaces.

White papers are a very effective way for your small or beginning firm to get leads. Having stated that, you must ensure:

Is producing lengthy content a component of your marketing plan? What are the main obstacles you face when producing content, whether it be long-form or not? Tell me in the comments section below.

Content Marketer Bronwyn Kienapple writes for Torontoist, Brit + Co, Verge Magazine, and other publications. She is employed at Venngage. In addition, she loves to read, travel, and indulge in Mexican street food. Make a LinkedIn connection with her.

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