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Content marketing is one of the best ways to extend your business’s reach on the Internet, and one of the best B2B marketing ideas you can take advantage of is putting a whitepaper to good use. Whitepapers are excellent for B2B marketing efforts, because they allow you to basically kill multiple marketing birds with a single .pdf:
- They provide information. Your potential buyers tend to be in research mode when they begin looking to purchase a product or service for their own companies, and whitepapers are a great way to easily provide all the information they need.
- They are easy to share. Since there are often multiple people participating in the buying process, a whitepaper in .pdf form is portable and easy to pass around so everyone in the group is on the same page.
- They help establish you as an authority. A well written, informational whitepaper that people can actually get value from will go a long way toward establishing trust with a new client.
- They are content marketing Swiss Army knives. A well written, informational, properly optimized whitepaper is a multi-purpose tool. It’s great for SEO, gives you the opportunity to repurpose it in multiple ways to extend its life and usefulness (excerpting it for a blog post, for example, and giving you fodder for Twitter and Facebook), helps with list building, is great for lead generation and lead nurturing, and more.
- They are the preferred method executives and decision makers prefer to review business information, according to Forbes.
B2B Marketing Ideas: Tips for Whitepapers
To make the most of such a powerful tool, you’ll need to put in a bit of initial effort, but once it’s done, it will be well worth it. Use the following tips next time you are creating a whitepaper to help make it even more successful:
- Make sure there is value. A whitepaper is not a sales sheet or sales letter – don’t make it one long-winded exposition on how awesome your company is. Make sure you are providing value to your reader, because that is the document’s purpose.
- Make sure it’s readable. Brand it with your company logo and spiff it up to make it visually appealing, but don’t go overboard. The information is the star here, so you need to make sure a reader can actually read and absorb it. Typos happen, but you should proofread your paper carefully to get rid of them before you call the project complete, and bullet points (like I’m doing here) are a great way to get across a lot of information in easy-to-digest bites.
- Make sure there is a call to action. Again, a whitepaper is not a sales sheet or sales letter, but you can put a call to action in there that urges the reader to capitalize on all the great stuff they just learned by contacting you for a quote or a consultation or whatever else is appropriate for your business.
- Make sure you’ve included clear contact information. This probably doesn’t need any more explanation than just pointing out that the easier you make it for people to contact you, the more people are going to contact you.
Whitepapers are one of those B2B marketing ideas that has it all, and these are just a few ways to ensure that content marketing with a whitepaper will work well for your B2B marketing efforts.
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