5 White Paper Goals for Your B2B Business

For B2B businesses, a white paper can be a cost-effective marketing tool that continually generates interest and work—even years after you publish it. Compared to other forms of content, such as blog posts and case studies, white papers are the king of the heap.

Still, a white paper is not a blanket solution for your marketing needs, as each white paper must be approached differently. Depending on what marketing objective you are trying to accomplish, you will need to adopt a different white paper strategy. The white paper strategy you choose will affect the length, the content, and even the design of the white paper.

Whether your objective is to generate leads, attract attention, nurture prospects, cast fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) on competitors, or influence a buying committee, a white paper is the exact way to accomplish all of those goals.

This post will explain how white papers can help your B2B business accomplish common marketing goals—from attracting the attention of a prospect to turning them into a happy customer.

Attract Attention

One of the biggest marketing challenges facing B2B businesses is standing out from the crowd. Everybody in your niche will use the same lingo and speak in a similar manner. 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.

When used correctly, a white paper can be an excellent PR tool. Not only can a white paper be used to demonstrate forward thinking and cement your company into a leadership position in the eyes of readers, but it can also be used as marketing collateral to achieve other objectives.

For instance, a white paper can educate potential customers about your product or service, educate your sales force or channel partners, and educate the media about your industry or offering.

Also, you can send a white paper to a trade publication or website and garner the attention of visitors. If your company will be attending a trade show or a sales conference, you can bring along physical copies of your white paper to hand out. When you go into a meeting and place a printed white paper on the table, it gets people's attention and makes you stand out from the crowd.

Generate Leads

If you’re looking to produce a white paper aimed at generating more leads, there are a few key things you should know. For one, this type of white paper is typically used early in the sales cycle, focusing on business challenges and benefits. These papers will discuss topics on a more general level, as prospects at this stage are only beginning to realize that they have some problem or issue that needs solving.

Because the point of contact with buyers comes later today, companies need to present their value to potential customers much earlier and articulate it in a straightforward manner. White papers allow B2B organizations of any size to provide an excellent customer service to prospects, nurturing them with useful content until they become customers.

By hosting a white paper on your website, your make it possible for new prospects to discover your business as they do research. When you nurture prospects with relevant content, they are more likely to become a paying customer. Also, your website will also rank higher on search engines as prospects search for solutions to the challenges they are facing.

Nurture Prospects

A white paper can be an effective way to nurture prospects through a long and complex sales cycle. With this goal in mind, this type of white paper is used late in the sales cycle and will focus on the technical details and processes.

As the B2B sales process have changed due to the rise of the Internet, so too have the habits of B2B buyers. According to the 2016 survey by Forrester Consulting, 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 a clear path to capitalize on that vision.

The same survey found more than half (59%) of buyers say they prefer not to interact with sales reps as their primary source of research, while 53% believe that gathering their own information online—via sellers’ and third-party websites, social media, ratings and reviews, etc.—is superior to talking to sellers. Because of this, a white paper allows you to deliver an excellent customer experience to prospects, even if you’re not speaking to them directly.

Cast FUD on Competitors

Another white paper strategy is to target prospects in the middle of the sales funnel, when they are deciding between several similar products. Here, you can use a white paper to cast fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) on a competitor's offering, ideally bumping them off the buyer's shortlist.

After the initial researching phase, a prospect should have heard of your company and engaged with you in some way. Maybe they downloaded your white paper. Or maybe they read your blog post and checked you out on social media.

At this stage, the prospect probably has a shortlist of possible vendors of two or three companies. A white paper can be an effective tool that makes your competitors seem a less attractive option, darkening their brand and bumping you up the buyer's shortlist of vendors.

For example, if your B2B company offers some Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), you might produce a white paper called "7 Things You Should Know About SaaS." By appealing to a buyer's fear of embarrassment/failure, uncertainty about a lesser-known business, or doubt about the claims made by competitors, you can disqualify your competitors in a buyer's eyes with this type of white paper.

Influence a Buying Committee

Before you can convert an interested prospect into a happy buyer, you have to first earn their trust. This is especially relevant when you’re trying to convince a selection committee why your offering should be preferred. According to the 2018 DemandGen Report Preferences Survey, 71% of respondents stated they used white papers during the past 12 months to research B2B purchasing decisions.

If you want to sway a buying committee, a white paper provides them insight about a topic while building goodwill. Remember, these decision makers will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. They have to do some serious reading and thinking and talking to make the wisest collective decision. You can make their decision easier with a thoughtful paper that eases addresses their concerns.

When someone on that buying committee comes across a report 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 committee.

Conclusion

Today's prospective customers spend more time researching and planning before reaching out to a salesperson. Because the point of contact comes later, companies must present their value story to potential customers much earlier and articulate it in a straightforward manner.

Well-written and visually engaging white papers are proven prospect magnets, as they can travel across the desks of dozens of people and multiple departments in a single company, educating and persuading along the way.

For companies that market a B2B product or service, white papers have become a valuable awareness-building and lead-generating tool.

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