A good blog with some great content which can be shared on any social media platform is what is required today but for that you need a good marketing material like white paper.
White paper is different from blogs and other content as they have wee bits of direct marketing messages in them. Most of the white paper consists of content, but a small part of it consists of marketing material. A blog usually is strong and educative, but it would normally take you some time (around 6 months) before you start generating leads. This is where white papers come in. They shorten the gestation period of lead generation in content marketing. They can speedup lead generation through their educative and persuasive nature and shorten the time taken by blogs etc to generate leads. Some main features of white paper are:
- To generate leads – As we discussed above it may take on an average around 6 months for a blog to generating leads. A white paper on the other hand can help you do this in a quick and efficient manner. A white paper’s educative and persuasive nature can enlighten your readers, get their trust and convince them to buy your product or use the services you are offering. In this way you can have marketing messages in your white papers and refrain from using them on your blog.
- Get more likes on social media – A social media platform like a facebook page should always be part of your content marketing strategy. The “likes” on this page can help you generate curiosity among targeted audience and lead. Getting liked on these social media platforms can seem a difficult task but with the help of white paper you can easily get a huge number of likes for your page and increase the traffic for your blog. For this the first thing you will need to do is to add a fan gate to your fan page. This is the second step for your facebook page. Fans who like your page will be directed to this page.
On the first page you can ask the readers to like your page and let them know that they can get access the specific blog or article only after they like your page. After people like your page they will be directed to your fan only landing page. Here you can place the link to your white paper or the sign up for your white paper. This technique helps you not only to get many facebook “Likes,” but will also get readers for your content.
- Refresh old blog posts – this is another useful tip and can help a lot. In your white papers you can insert links to your days old blog posts. These blog posts can help to explain complicated and difficult terms for the common man or provide more information about a particular topic to make things easier to understand and comprehend. These links in the white paper will help to increase the traffic your old posts receive and make them more popular.
- Increase newsletter signups –while starting a business blog one should remember it not to make it look too cluttered as it can confuse the client about the purpose of the blog. Avoid any direct marketing messages and here comes in need for newsletters. You can send your messages through newsletters. Newsletters also help you to keep in constant contact with your readers. Newsletter helps you to share your latest updates like latest posts, news, offers, etc. Newsletters, sign ups require the persuasive and educative format of white papers and this is where they can be used perfectly. Thus using white papers can help you to increase your newsletter sign ups and you can now send out your newsletters to your readers, build relationships with them, increase your blog traffic and generate leads.
Thus we can say that using white paper as a part of the content marketing strategy is a really great and useful tool and it can help to persuade and educate readers to like the content or blog you are posting thus creating traffic for it and generating leads. Well researched and written white paper tools are a really great help today.