How To Generate High-Quality Leads With White Paper Marketing

When it comes to B2B content marketing, white papers provide far more information than other resources like blogs and articles. They’re also extremely versatile, making them an easy inclusion for any B2B demand gen strategy. White paper marketing includes multiple promotional strategies. The most important one out of those is positioning your company as a thought leader to generate quality leads. But, simply developing and publishing a white paper is never going to get you those benefits. Promoting your white papers involves a complex understanding of the market and implementing a mix of strategies to make the most of it.

The best way to do this is to partner with a B2B demand generation company. In this article, we look at 5 ways to generate leads using white paper marketing.

After investing time in developing a white paper and uploading it on your website, how do you generate leads from it? Every B2B company that uses white papers to generate leads, needs a white paper marketing strategy to convert its web traffic into leads.

The most effective way to do this is by creating a landing page. And, here’s why:

Companies that use 10 to 15 landing pages can increase their leads by 55% while those that have 40+ landing pages get up to 12 times more leads.

A landing page can provide details about your white paper. An optimized landing page can provide details about the white paper and showcase its benefits to visitors. It can also serve as a lead-capturing machine for your B2B company. Furthermore, there is evidence that landing pages that feature images, videos, descriptions, and intuitive CTAs generate more leads than those that don’t.

However, not all landing pages will produce the results you desire. Landing pages that feature multiple CTAs have a negative effect. So, make sure you stick to a single form for your white paper landing page.

Here’s an example of a good white paper landing page by Oracle:

When you publish a white paper online, you want it to reach as many people as possible. A good white paper on your site is of no use if your target audience knows nothing about it. So, the more traffic you have on your site, the more leads you are likely to generate.

To drive traffic to your website, you can use a publishing platform or media website. Ideally, the platform should have an audience that’s relevant to your industry. Once you get the right match and decent presence, having a white paper featured on it can do wonders for your generating leads.

But, there’s a caveat. Starting and growing a publishing platform for white paper marketing can take years and dry up resources very quickly. That’s the reason most companies don’t go ahead with this method. But, B2B demand gen companies have access to these publishing platforms with high visitor counts. This helps them drive that existing traffic to relevant white papers. So, if having your own publishing platforms is too much, you can reach out to B2B demand gen companies like UnboundB2B. Our publishing platform Tech Research Online attracts decision-makers from the B2B SaaS and tech industry. Promoting your white paper on it will increase your exposure to the right audience and help you get better leads and conversions.

Relying on the incoming traffic will get you decent results, but that won’t really be enough. You need to work on outbound efforts as well. That’s when a well-crafted newsletter can help you reach decision-makers directly for effective white paper promotion.

Newsletters are great for your white paper strategy when you already have a sizeable email list. The data you have can help you personalize the newsletter content and deliver interesting insights and information to that list. If you can manage to integrate your white papers along with that content, you can turn those subscribers into actual clients.

When you work with a B2B demand gen company, you can reliably execute these newsletter campaigns, thanks to the database they already have.

After marketing your white paper, you need data that tells a story about the leads generated through the campaign. To get that reliable data, you need to track the behavior of prospects. Doing so will enable you to understand your target audience better.

Every interaction your lead has with your content or site indicates the stage they are in on the sales funnel and the buyer’s journey. For instance, if they go to your pricing or contact us page, it means they are at the bottom of your sales funnel and are ready to buy. On the other hand, if they spend more time reading your blogs, they are most likely at the top of the sales funnel.

The best way to track and analyze such user behavior on your white papers is by using marketing automation. Manually tracking a large user base and their actions is not possible. You need to create automation with triggers set for different actions that give different insights.

When you use white papers, you want to know whether your campaign was a success. Having that knowledge can help you create better white paper marketing campaigns for better results. The only way to do this is to measure the effectiveness of the campaign based on specific KPIs you set. Your KPIs need to be specific and insightful.

You can focus on analyzing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and the number of white paper downloads. They should clearly identify parameters that indicate the success of the campaign. This stays true regardless of whether you run the campaigns yourself or reach out to a B2B demand gen company for it.

Creating a white paper marketing strategy that engages your target audience takes effort and time. To maximize this investment, you need to ensure that you place it in front of your target audience in order to generate high-value leads.

The easiest way to do this is to partner with a B2B demand gen company like Unboundb2b. By creating a clean landing page to attract leads, pushing traffic to your white paper, running an email newsletter campaign, and tracking prospects’ behavior, we place your white paper in front of your target audience to ensure you get the high-value leads you are looking for.