How can you use whitepapers to improve your B2B content marketing ROI?

Whitepapers are long-form, authoritative, and informative documents that provide in-depth insights and solutions to a specific problem or topic relevant to your B2B audience. They are one of the most effective content marketing tools to generate leads, educate prospects, and demonstrate your expertise and credibility. However, creating a whitepaper is not enough to boost your content marketing ROI. You also need to have a clear strategy to promote, distribute, and measure your whitepaper's performance and impact. In this article, you will learn how to use whitepapers to improve your B2B content marketing ROI in four steps.

1 Define your goals and metrics

Before you start writing your whitepaper, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it and how you will measure your success. Depending on your content marketing objectives, you may want to use your whitepaper to generate more leads, increase brand awareness, educate your audience, or position yourself as a thought leader. To track your progress and results, you need to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your goals, such as downloads, conversions, shares, engagement, or revenue.

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Mike Vannelli

Creative Director @ thinkenvy.com
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Using whitepapers to boost B2B ROI takes strategic purpose over pure paperwork, like crafting a targeted book report. Identify customer challenges and questions to address. Summarize key takeaways upfront before diving into analysis. Keep tone conversational, not academic. Promote gated access in exchange for contact info. Repurpose excerpts across platforms. With compelling relevance, your whitepapers become coveted thought leadership. Now get researching and drafting to smartly showcase your B2B insights! 📚

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2 Research your audience and topic

To create a whitepaper that resonates with your B2B audience and provides value to them, you need to conduct thorough research on both your target market and your chosen topic. You need to understand who your ideal buyer personas are, what their pain points and challenges are, what information they are looking for, and what stage of the buyer's journey they are in. You also need to identify a specific problem or topic that is relevant, timely, and interesting to your audience, and that showcases your unique perspective and solution.

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Vanhishikha Bhargava

12+ years in B2B SaaS Content Marketing | SEO | GTM - Ex- Shopify, Hootsuite
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Instead of using 'whitepapers' as just another format, go deeper into what it 'should deliver' to your audience. Look into the existing content formats and the information they offer to your audience; then do your research to identify a topic that is valuable enough to be a whitepaper in the first place! If your whitepaper is just a recreated copy of your blog, you're actually lowering your authority in the industry everytime someone downloads it.

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3 Write and design your whitepaper

Once you have done your research, you can start writing and designing your whitepaper. You need to follow a clear structure that includes an introduction, a problem statement, a solution overview, a detailed explanation of your solution, a conclusion, and a call to action. You need to use a professional, authoritative, and engaging tone that reflects your brand voice and values. You also need to use credible sources, data, and examples to support your claims and arguments. Additionally, you need to design your whitepaper in a way that makes it easy to read, scan, and share. You need to use headings, subheadings, bullet points, charts, graphs, images, and white space to break up the text and highlight the key points.

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Vanhishikha Bhargava

12+ years in B2B SaaS Content Marketing | SEO | GTM - Ex- Shopify, Hootsuite
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Content-led design; ensure you don't give design so much preference that your whitepaper content gets sidelined and cut all too short for it to be able to deliver value. I typically also recommend focusing on the formatting and structuring of the whitepaper as a part of the content design.

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Jason Patterson

Founder of Jewel Content Marketing Agency | Truths & Memes | Content Strategy, Thought Leadership, Copywriting, Social Media 'n' Stuff for B2B & Tech
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If a whitepaper is just going to be an infodump of statistics that the audience probably already knows, you'll need a consultancy's name on it in order to convince audiences to read it. If a whitepaper covers something more original, or perhaps contains some surprises, a consultancy's name is still nice but less necessary.

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4 Promote and distribute your whitepaper

The final step to improve your B2B content marketing ROI with whitepapers is to promote and distribute your whitepaper effectively. You need to create a landing page for your whitepaper that captures the attention and interest of your visitors and encourages them to download it in exchange for their contact information. You also need to use various channels and platforms to drive traffic to your landing page, such as email marketing, social media, blog posts, webinars, podcasts, or paid ads. You need to tailor your promotion strategy to your audience's preferences and behavior, and use compelling headlines, copy, and visuals to entice them to click and download your whitepaper.

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Jason Patterson

Founder of Jewel Content Marketing Agency | Truths & Memes | Content Strategy, Thought Leadership, Copywriting, Social Media 'n' Stuff for B2B & Tech
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If your whitepaper would be broadly appealing to a big audience of current buyers and non-buyers alike, don't gate it. If interest would be largely confined to current or soon-to-be buyers, gate it.

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5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Ajay Nimbalkar

Product Marketing | B2B SaaS
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Design your whitepaper for readability. So many fall into the trap of just adding images and pages of content with no substance. Use headings, subheadings, bullet points, and images to break up the text and make it easy to scan.

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How can you use whitepapers to improve your B2B content marketing ROI?

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1 Define your goals and metrics

2 Research your audience and topic

3 Write and design your whitepaper

4 Promote and distribute your whitepaper

5 Here’s what else to consider

Content Marketing

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How can you use whitepapers to improve your B2B content marketing ROI?

1

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3

4

5

1 Define your goals and metrics

2 Research your audience and topic

3 Write and design your whitepaper

4 Promote and distribute your whitepaper

5 Here’s what else to consider

Content Marketing

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