How to Make Your B2B White Paper More Effective

Some of the most efficient ways to acquire the clickthroughs you need in a B2B email marketing campaign is to devise whitepapers. Whitepapers are also known as guides or reports, and can perform many functions like stimulating high click-through rates (CTRs), capturing essential company and contact information, and resulting in successful lead generation. But with the amount of whitepapers going around, how do you make yours stand out from the rest? Here’s is how you can make an eye-catching white paper that acts as a valuable B2B proposition.

It should look great

It is important that a whitepaper looks as good as the content that comprises it. You may want to use your whitepaper to generate leads, or to brand your business as a force to contend with, either way it is critical that you dedicate enough resources, time, effort and energy into designing a white paper that you would a print campaign. Assume your whitepaper to be a magazine that you are creating. You should use ample of images, flowcharts, diagrams to illustrate your point and should also use colour for text headings and graphics. Pulled quotes are another great way of drawing attention to important statements.

The logo of your business should be displayed in an eye-catching manner in your whitepaper and it is a great place to reinforce your website design. Most readers tend to just skim through a white paper and not hold on to every single word written there. If it doesn’t catch your reader’s eye as soon as possible, chances are that it will be trashed. Your whitepaper is a substantive piece of product collateral that should be assumed so.

Make sure that it is easy to read

When a whitepaper is easy to read, it is more likely to fulfil its goal. Your whitepaper should be simple, crisp and concise and usually be between 10 and 15 pages. A long and tedious text-heavy whitepaper has very little chance of being read from cover to cover, because people just don’t have the kind of time to do that. Your message should be delivered in billet points, and your copy should be divided in paragraphs and sub-sections to break the monotony. Readers tend to skim through whitepapers, and not read every single word. The title of a whitepapers is another very important component. A great title works just as effectively as a great subject line in a message. That is why your title should ideally be a call to action or a teaser.

Offer content that is relevant

There is a delicate balance that needs to be struck when it comes to the content of a whitepaper. You need to be able to establish yourself as an expert or an authority in your field, but yet not oversell your product. Readers look to whitepapers to solve an existing problem. If the content of your whitepaper provides them with the information they need in the most relevant manner, it is fulfilling its purpose. Your solution to their problem must be both broad and specific so that your reader can gain additional knowledge.