Your customers are now more knowledgeable than ever, and they want to dive deeper than a blog post or briefing will allow. White papers give them that in-depth information, and they also serve a host of useful purposes for you. By giving your audience more meaningful content, you establish your industry authority, gather essential data about prospects, and educate your prospective customers about solutions to their problems. If you need another reason to add white papers to your content marketing program, how’s this: Your competitors may not know how useful they are yet.
With a marketing automation system that offers behavioral data gathering and lead scoring processes, white papers are even more critical to marketing success.
Building Trust
White papers do more than inform your audience. They also send a strong signal that you understand their problem in depth and can offer equally comprehensive solutions. By delivering a lengthy analysis that drills deeper into a topic to find meaningful answers, you’re demonstrating to your leads that you’ve put in the work to merit their business. Industry authority carries more weight than ever in the information age, and white papers establish your bona fides as a problem-solver. Marketing automation technology can’t yet measure authority and audience trust directly, but it can measure vital metrics that give indications about your leads’ perceptions of your brand.
Expanding on Solutions
The problems B2B buyers face are complex and require multiple layers of decision-making. An account-based marketing approach that takes a more holistic view of clients’ positions within their organization is sensitive to decision-making power and provides a wealth of information leads can take back to others who are part of buying decisions. Your white paper could be the topic of conversation at a prospect’s next board meeting, so arm interested leads with the information they need to succeed.
Nurturing Leads
You may find a few of those unicorn customers who come to you at 100 percent sales readiness, but the overwhelming majority of your leads need to know more before they invest in you. Once they move on from top-of-funnel content such as entry-level overviews and briefs, where do they go? If you don’t have a way to nurture these leads with a stream of increasingly in-depth content that carries them closer to a buying decision, they’re bouncing out of your sales funnel entirely. .
Gathering Data
Marketers aren’t the only people who have a keen understanding of data’s value. Prospective customers also know their personal and professional data has worth, and they only exchange this digital currency when they find something worth buying. White papers have a clear value that’s great enough to convince leads to buy in with their names, email addresses, and some company information. Marketing automation technology allows you to set up forms for gated access to white papers that can then give you data around which you can build detailed prospect records.
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