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How to turn a good white paper into a great lead generation piece

Guest post by: Jeff Ogden

Article Overview: B2B marketing content like white papers are a invaluable resource in marketing. But post and pray - along with social marketing - delivers only a trickle of leads. Here we share insights from top B2B marketing experts.

How to turn a good white paper into a great lead generation piece

Do you want a trickle of leads or a flood? Since we're just about to start a new white paper for a top marketing automation software firm, this is a timely post. We've penned three great white papers to date - lead generation - How to Find New Customers (Marketo); b2b sales - Definitive Guide to Making Quota (self) and email marketing - Moving from Transactional to Conversational Email Marketing (Genius.com) - so we know lots about this topic.

To illustrate, let's look at an example of how to turn a nice white paper into a great lead generation program:

Let's say you hire a company like the B2B lead generation company Find New Customers to write a white paper for you.

Why go outside for creation of content? Edelman Trust Factor asked "If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible would that information be?" They found that academics/experts like Find New Customers are the most credible. (70%) Industry analysts are high too, but regular employees are low and even peers are low. Their conclusion: Current media landscape plus increased skepticism requires multiple voices and channels.

We craft a great white paper, like our highly acclaimed white paper on sales lead generation How to Find New Customers, sponsored by Marketo. Then what do you do with it?

How to Find New Customers

You post it. You tweet about it. You blog about it. What happens?

A handful of leads trickle in and you get some decent leads.

Is there a better way? There sure is.

In fact, the company that was awarded the BtoB Marketing Idea of the Year award from Find New Customers uses this best practices approach.

Let's look at the Kinaxis best practices approach. Use your keywords and everything points to the landing page:

Write and post the white paper to a landing page, then

• Video interview of the author (YouTube)
• Audio summary with the author (iTunes)
• Transcript of the video interview (blog articles)
• Slide presentations with audio from the author (SlideShare)
• Small bite-sized summaries, like our new cheat sheet 7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing (Content marketing)
• Post that content everywhere with a call to action for the landing page.

Use this approach with your next white paper and watch that trickle turn into a fast flowing stream of leads.

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Article Tags: b2b lead generation, b2b lead generation strategies, find new customers, lead generation companies, marketing strategies, sales lead generation



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Re: How to Stay Motivated - Staying motivated is definitely hard. Especially when things get overwhelming and there are no immediate results. This is my personal approach. 1) Use a big white dry-erase board / piece of paper. 2) Pen down everything you need to do or in the process of doing. Point forms with dates. No need for excessive details. 3) Schedule a definitive period of time to relax (i.e. for the next hour and a half) 4) Jump back to working starting with number 1 on the white board! The best way is stay motivated to be organized, re-group then jump back in!
Re: Kevin's Case Study #6 - Marketing an information resource? - Hi Sebastien, I'm wondering about two things: 1) What is your current revenue model? 2) Why would franchise owners choose to sign up with you over the lead generation companies? Is there some kind of quality control certification that you could award them to say that they are a World Franchising certified franchise? I'm not clear on what benefits a company seeking to franchise would really get from your site beyond the lead generation component.
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