13 Ways To Promote One Whitepaper

I haven’t done a list post in awhile and I know we all love lists. More than that, we all love new ideas on how to use just one piece of content. For all the work that goes into writing, constructing, designing and building a whitepaper, I thought I would start here.

As an Inbound Marketer, whitepapers are something I use constantly to drive prospects to my company. While I am not the one that is necessarily writing them, I work closely with the team to consider concepts and topics that may be of interest and then build a strategy on how to get the paper into the hands of the people we think would get the most use out of it.

So here is your list of 13 ways to use and promote just one whitepaper:

1. Feature it on your homepage. Seems obvious but I see so many brands that don’t do this. They are churning out content like there is no tomorrow and don’t often think to just update the homepage. This is just one page on your site that you can set aside some real estate and simply swap out the latest and greatest each week/month/quarter.

2. Put it in the newsletter. Your newsletter doesn’t have to be just news. It doesn’t need to be links to articles you collected from all over the web. It can contain video links from your YouTube page, perhaps an interview with a colleague and it should feature your newest whitepaper. Take it a step further and use the topic of your whitepaper to create a theme for your newsletter for that particular month.

3. Promote it through third parties. Find out who your target audience reads and what they subscribe to. Is it CMO.com or perhaps Mobile Marketer or maybe MarketingProfs? Learn what opportunities there are to promote you content to their audience (I have found great success in third party email campaigns. It comes from them but points people back to you. A win win).

4. Launch a pay per click campaign. We often want to use Google AdWords to send people straight to our product but what we often miss is the opportunity to pay very little for long tail keywords that drive people to our content.

5. Start a LinkedIn discussion. Don’t just post a link to a form for your whitepaper. Ask a question about the topic to a group that is relevant. Then post a link ‘in case they are interested’.

6. Share it on Twitter. Of course this is ONLY if your audience is on Twitter. Doesn’t make much sense to me to setup all these tweets promoting something that your audience will never see.

7. Use it as leverage to gain registrants for a relevant webinar. Not only should you use this as bait to get people to register and attend your webinar (if you register, you get this fabulous whitepaper), you can use it as a basis to create your webinar content.

8. Print it out and use it as a leave behind in sales calls. You are probably thinking that print materials are outdated but wouldn’t it be just great to see your whitepaper all printed out on the desk of a prospect? Printing it out also makes it easier for them to pass it along.

9. Have your sales team send out a PDF version. Your sales team is sending emails constantly either as a follow-up, check in or to get down to business. Why not encourage them to send out the whitepaper. (keep in mind that your sales team may not actually read the whitepaper, so provide them with an overview and a couple sentences to share about it in an email to help them sound good)

10. Write a blog post or series of blog posts about it. This has been a no-brainer for me. I may even take just a simple excerpt from the paper, add a beginning and an ending and voila blog post! (link to the post in the end too J )

11. Write an advertorial. These are often paid but it allows you as a brand to get a topic in front of your target readers. The bonus is that readers don’t often realize these are advertorials since they look like articles in the magazine. Take an excerpt and turn it into an advertorial.

12. Issue a press release. Like your newsletters, you don’t need to be announcing a new product, a new leader or the latest innovation to issue a press release. You can issue one about your latest whitepaper and the point of view of it.

13. Use it to nurture leads. Last but finally not least is that you have an awesome, new whitepaper so this needs to be incorporated into your nurturing process – stat! Define who the ideal audience is and where that fits into your nurturing flow. Create the email, landing page, etc. and start using it to turn leads into converted opportunities.

I have a few more ideas but hopefully that gets the juices flowing! How do you promote and use whitepapers? Love to hear all your ideas!!