High-Tech Communicator

Increase Your White Paper ROI

There’s no doubt about it, white papers take considerable time, effort, and money to produce. Luckily, you can get a significant return on that investment if you know how to make the most of your white papers by repurposing them.  

Here are a few ways you can use the white papers themselves or repurpose the content in them:

• Email campaigns—Many B2B companies use white papers as a valuable “offer” for email marketing campaigns. These campaigns might be designed to either generate awareness or nurture leads that are not quite ready to make a purchase. Many B2B buyers are interested in downloading these white-paper offers because they provide valuable information.
• Webinars—Organizations often either base their webinar on the content in their white paper and/or they will provide a white paper as a “Thank You,” providing attendees with a takeaway after the webinar is over.
• Newsletters—Companies often use email newsletters as a way to keep in touch with existing customers to generate add-on sales or to nurture new leads. White papers can be the source of content for newsletter articles. For example, you can condense all or part of the white paper to create a newsletter article and then provide a link to the original.
• Trade journal articles—You can also shorten thought-leadership white papers into articles that can be published in a trade magazine. While the number of these magazines (and often the space in them) is smaller than it has been in years past, trade magazines still exist and continue to provide third-party validation and credibility for your ideas.
• Sales leave-behind—White papers that contain thought leadership or educational content make good leave-behinds for the sales force.
• Website—Because potential customers see white papers as providing valuable information, they’re often willing to register for them on your website, providing you with valuable contact information. (When using this technique, however, it’s advisable to use as short a registration form as possible to avoid annoying people.) 
• Aggregation networks—Many content-aggregation networks, such as the Tech Target Network, provide white papers on specific topics from a large number of vendors. Many potential customers go to these sites during the research stage of their purchase process to gain more information about solutions to their problems. If you want to be found, it would behoove you to go where people actively look for information.
• Blog posts—Use findings from your white paper as the basis for one or more blog posts and then provide links to them.

While white papers can be a substantial investment of time, effort and money, they also pay big dividends in terms of the myriad ways their information can be used and reused.

How do you repurpose your white papers?

Boost Your ROB (Return on Blogging)

Measuring the ROI from blogging is notoriously difficult. Particularly when you’re first starting out, the results can be strictly anecdotal. Nonetheless, blogging can be an extremely valuable marketing tool.

Here are a few first-hand observations on how to get a blog to work and the true value of blogging in building your business:   

· Simply posting to a blog doesn’t do anything. No one is going to miraculously find your blog, even if you use keywords and post it to the various blog-aggregation services. I get some, but very few, hits from these sources.

· Publicizing your blog works. I could definitely do more, but here are a few ways I publicize my blog. I :

o     Post my blog on my LinkedIn profile. Everyone who’s a contact gets LinkedIn updates that include blog updates. Thus, my contacts are reminded of my existence every time I update my blog.  

o      Post my blog as a discussion in my LinkedIn Groups. To avoid angering people on the discussion boards, I’m careful to post only content that will be useful to my readers—I never post blatant pitches about my services.

o     Send links to recent blog posts to my in-house mailing list.

o     Automatically create a Tweet for each new post. 

· Getting someone else to publicize your blog works even better. In several cases, other bloggers found my blog and posted links to it on their site—those third party postings work far better than my own publicity, especially if the blog in question has a bigger readership than mine. For example, when MarketingProfs posted an excerpt of one of my posts along with a link to my site, traffic skyrocketed. Not only that, a number of people tweeted about the post, which further added to my hits.

· Blogs work best at reconnecting with previous customers. People in high tech move around frequently. I may work on several successful projects with someone, and then they’ll stop calling. Inevitably, I find out that my contact has moved on. By publicizing my blog in places where these people are likely to be, I’ve found that they remember me and many of them contact me when they have a new project in my area of expertise. They don’t mention the blog per se, but it’s difficult to believe that it’s mere coincidence that quite a few old contacts reconnected when I started my blog.

· Blogs help turn cold calls into warm calls.  When I am most active on my blog, other sales efforts are far more effective. While no one mentions the blog explicitly, I close much more business more quickly and easily when the blog is active—and conversely, new business is more difficult to close when the blog is not updated regularly (shame on me).

· Inquiries increase. On occasion, new customers that I haven’t approached at all have approached me. I’ve heard that many people do get new business this way, but that seems to be a longer term benefits, say, after six months of blogging, or even longer.

Based on these experiences, the evidence is strong that blogs are effective marketing tools. But blogs only work if you publicize them, and they work best if someone else publicizes them for you. And people only do that if they like your content.   

What business-building experiences have you had with blogs?