3 More Reasons Why Consultants Need White Papers

One of the biggest marketing challenges for small and medium-sized companies is standing out from the crowd. Everybody in your niche will speak the same and use the same lingo. And when your competitors have similar prices as you, it’s hard for your company to get an edge and gain any kind of advantage over them.

Consultants want to be seen as trusted advisors and for clients to trust them and listen to them. And no matter the industry, everyone wants to stand out from the crowd. Marketing with a white paper is the exact way to accomplish all of those goals.

Last time, I discussed three reasons why consulting firms should write a white paper. These reasons were differentiating yourself from competitors, earning the trust of prospects, and generating more leads. Today, I’d like to share 3 more reasons why your small and medium-sized consulting firm should write a white paper.

Be Seen as an Authority in the Marketplace

Compared to white papers, no other form of content is as meaty and as substantial, or as well-researched and as thoughtful. According to the 2018 DemandGen Report Preferences Survey, 78% of B2B buyers stated they place a higher emphasis on the trustworthiness of the source compared to the past year. The same survey found that 71% of respondents used white papers during the past 12 months to research B2B purchasing decisions.

Due to its perception as an influential, fact-driven medium, white papers offer a logical and educational approach to information delivery for prospects early in the buyer journey. When you're connecting with prospects, you want to be seen as a trusted advisor and for clients to trust you and listen to you.

An easy way to demonstrate your expertise is to produce a white paper addressing your ideal customer's pain points. If you're a software consulting firm, you might write a paper on key factors to consider when thinking about a software purchase. If you're a hospital contract consultant, you might write a list of questions to consider before signing a contract.

Just about every consultant can benefit from a white paper, even just a numbered list, because it shows prospective buyers who visit your website that you understand some issue or pain point that they are currently dealing with.

Create a Buyer Persona

For consulting firms, even if they have a specific niche like financial services or CRM, they may still be figuring out their ideal customer. Since effective white papers are written for a specific audience, the process of writing a white paper will force you to come up with specific buyer personas to market your services to.

A buyer persona is a character profile of your ideal customer. This includes their demographic information (sex, age, job title, size of company, location of company, etc) and their business needs (challenges, pain points, concerns). By creating this persona, you will have a better idea of who you can best serve and how to direct your marketing strategy.

Once you have a buyer persona to work with, you can brainstorm ways that your services can address this person's problems and how your offering can make their life easier. For example, if you consult businesses on how to outsource work, you might write a white paper discussing common mistakes to avoid when outsourcing.

For small and medium-sized consulting firms, it's important to stretch limited time and a limited budget to accomplish more. Creating a white paper will force you to think deeply about who the right buyer is for your services, which will make it easier to market yourself and to turn interested prospects into new clients.

Influence Decision Makers

Today’s customer journeys are no longer linear paths to purchase, and B2B journeys are particularly complex with multiple touchpoints. Buyers do more research than before, and when they visit websites, they expect informative resources to guide them through the process. If your website lacks relevant content compared to your competitors, these prospective buyers will be taking their business elsewhere.

When you can help prospects address their problems, you are more likely to forge a relationship with them. According to Forrester Consulting's 2016 survey, How B2B Sellers Win In The Age Of The Customer, 74% of business buyers are inclined to buy from sellers that provide a new insight about the customer’s business and actionable steps to capitalize on that vision.

When people come across reports that they find useful, they email these reports to other people in their company. They may only send a snippet of a white paper, but they will pass it around to everyone on the buying committee. A white paper can easily sum up a vendor’s best thinking and best argument and their best case against their competitors.

This post is an excerpt from a longer white paper. To download the whole paper and learn more, click here.