There is a lot of effort, time, and expertise that goes into creating an elaborate and definitive brief document called a 'whitepaper', but the work doesn't stop here, you're only halfway through! Whitepapers are an effective tool for content marketing and promotion when it comes to B2B marketers. You need to get down and proceed with a decisive content strategy for promoting your whitepaper or all your digital marketing efforts will go to waste. Downloads, leads, subscriptions, or social media mentions, no matter what your goals are, this blog has you covered. Let's get down to it now, shall we??
Optimize Your Website
As a content marketing agency, start off first and foremost with your website. The whitepaper needs to be stored on a separate page of your website with SEO and navigational ease in mind. From a search engine optimization perspective having a suitable title and meta-description is critical for it to show up on the search pages. Make sure your homepage is promoting your digital content and gently nudge your visitors towards it with a subtle preview on the side or as a pop-up. Optimizing visibility of different content type on your website should be considered an absolute priority. Below is an example of a whitepaper pop-up preview on HubSpot. Notice how it is subtle, less intrusive and quality content goes a long way in terms of being user-friendly.
Social Media
To stay ahead of the curve, your social media outreach needs to be on point. No matter how vast, it should be a part of your content marketing plan. White brief paragraphs highlighting engaging stats or conclusions in your whitepaper and offer that as a preview to the user. Clearly, showcase the advantages of reading your whitepaper to get more engagements. Use compelling tag lines like 'Boost your sales by 20% with these free to use automation tools '. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can be a great outlook to promote your whitepaper.
- Facebook: Set up a promoted post and use Facebook Ads to get your whitepaper to the right audience. The potential to put out valuable content through this platform is huge.
- LinkedIn- For more B2B oriented content ideas and inspiration material, LinkedIn can be a great platform for promoting your whitepaper.
- Twitter- Make use of Twitter's promoted tweets feature and get your whitepaper noticed by the right people. This feature will help you promote your thought leadership ideology among your target audience.
Make sure you always have an image of the white paper in your social media posts to get people to click on the link. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. Using a single distribution channel is not going to suffice your need of promoting your whitepaper among your audience. Promote as many platforms and make your engaging content reach your target audience from all around the globe.
Host a Webinar
Webinars can be a great content marketing medium to put forth your whitepaper to not only your current clients but also to other prospects as well. As a marketer, use this strategy to increase your brand awareness by explaining your potential customer about your product/service. Base your webinar on the topic covered by your whitepaper or offer it as a pre or post download as reference material for your audience. Webinars allow you to connect with people across various countries thus enabling you to promote your whitepaper globally. While there are numerous activities that allow you to reach a global audience, this inbound marketing activity is one of the trending ones.
Email Campaign
Having an automated email system to promote your whitepaper to leads can be a great digital content marketing tactic to build traction for your whitepaper. Leverage your client, sales, subscribers, or newsletter lists to target the right audience through email marketing. Make sure the email subject lines and content are engrossing and provide a preview into the most interesting aspects of your whitepaper. Giving a glimpse of your content asset through emails has become an interesting method of content marketing in recent times.
Blog Posts
Write a blog post to a relating topic for your whitepaper and link it there as reference material. You can create various articles and posts regarding the various topics of the whitepaper and link them all to the whitepaper. This will not only enable you to increase whitepaper downloads but also add to your leads. Having blog content that is interlinked to various content pieces written by you helps you in promoting your whitepaper as well as other articles too. Creating content around a whitepaper is native advertising of modern times.
Video Posts
Having a visual sneak peek of your whitepaper with engaging infographics can go a long way in successfully promoting your whitepaper. The latest buyer persona research reveals that 60% of people are more likely to consume visual content than just regular posts. Also, Google search is leaning towards including more and more video content so; it's a plus from the search engine optimization perspective as well. Get your whitepaper video out there on your website, blog, and social media platforms. A video is a content marketing effort that is perceived to be used more aggressively than ever before due to the recent digital marketing boom.
Press Releases/Syndicate Websites
Get in touch with various syndicate website for your domain and avail their free or pay-per-lead services to promote your whitepaper. Publish a press release and include any testimonials that you can share. Involve industry thought leaders and C-suite executives through Q&As, interviews, and review posts. A few good whitepaper distribution services include CIO Whitepapers, Information Week, and Bit Pipe. When conducting a content audit make sure you have as many content marketing channels and methods used so as to ensure to have enough leads in your marketing funnel.
There are various avenues that you can use to promote your whitepaper, publicize yourself as good content creators, and generate leads. Make sure you go ahead and outline the benefits of reading your whitepaper and highlight the most interesting conclusions as a preview. Measure the success of your content marketing strategies by keeping a track of downloads, leads, clicks, and subscriptions then alter your marketing strategy accordingly. You can use Google Analytics or other tools to get conversion statistics using URL Tagging. Use the tactics mentioned above in your marketing campaign to gain traffic and watch those download numbers rise. Get ahead of traditional marketing and revamp your business methods with all the trending content marketing strategies.