How do you keep the momentum going? How can you take the BtoB white paper’s core content idea and increase its value to your audiences, while extending its value to your company’s top line (thereby stretching your content marketing budget too)?
1. Maximize Current Promotion – Be Sure Your White Paper or E-book is Accessible to All Corners of Your Market
Post on your web site – Make sure the copy and .pdf file properties are optimized for major search engines and relevant niche search engines. Link to it from your sales team’s and other employees’ emails.
- Promote via email newsletters and bulletins going to your audiences. If budget permits, test relevant syndicated sites, directories, and other online properties.
- Put share links on your paper for LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Offer the white paper to select bloggers and see if they would do a few blog posts post-launch.
2. Develop Your Paper into a Webinar or Webcast
Get a competent speaker versed in your content to bring your paper alive in a one-hour webinar. This individual can be a content expert from inside your organization, a high-level executive, or even a prominent thought leader from the industry.
Present live, with opportunities for audience Q&A at the end. Expanding a white paper into a webinar gives you the ability to further explain your ideas and color them with more examples. Importantly, it also lets you offer a verbal and visual dimension to complement the written word.
Following the live webinar offer the webinar on-demand, and promote the heck out of it as you did the white paper. Depending on the subject, and the promotional pace of the on-demand webinar, you may be able to get an additional one or two years of productive lead generation out of a webinar-on-demand.
Most webinars are organized by Powerpoint slides or similar file format. You can turn the webinar slides into a pdf and use them as an informative offer in their own right.
3. Create a Video Based on Your White Paper
Adapting white papers to video can be a tremendous means of advancing your message and engaging more decision makers from your audience. Some busy people may prefer to watch a 5-10 minute video that converts written content into images and visuals than read an extended e-book.
A video white paper is typically different from a webinar. The latter is commonly presented as a lecture aided by narrated slides and images, while a video white paper is usually dominated by the images themselves, with a voice-over narration. However, a wide variety of format possibilities exist.
Offer the video white paper as a video-on-demand, and you can use it to generate leads and engage your audience for a long time.
4. Podcasts
Many decision makers appreciate the opportunity to consume informative content while driving, shopping, or even on the ski lift. Hence podcasts can be another useful adaptation of your white paper or e-book content.
You may create audio overviews of your paper’s key points, or just narrate key passages of the paper. You may even interview an industry thought leader on the paper’s content.
5. Social Media
After your white paper has been in circulation for a while, and you’re starting to see diminishing returns, you can still get value from it in the blogosphere. As time goes by you may use its key takeaways and noteworthy points as conversation-fodder. Use them to spark interest-generating discussions in your favorite LinkedIn Groups and blogs. Link to particular sections of your paper in support of online discussions in which you’re a participant. You may even tweet key takeaways now and then, using the paper itself as supporting material.
The white paper is still the preeminent informative collateral for B2B. Yet every audience has individuals that absorb best through reading, others by listening, and still others from video or an expert content interpreter (webinars). Most people learn best through a combination of these methods, if they can devote the effort.
You have a host of options available to you to capitalize on the human range of content consumption. Start testing them as you are able.
Robert Drew is the Marketing Manager of emedia, a fast-growing BtoB lead generation provider specializing in Cost-per-Lead campaigns for the North American and UK markets. He characterizes his role as “the lead generator for a lead generation firm”. Prior to his current role he developed and launched InStock Fasteners, an ecommerce site for industrial buyers and contractors, and contributed to the growth of several other BtoB ventures.
