White Paper Marketing and Thought Leadership
May 8, 2008
I read a recent article that was pointed to from a Blog that I read regularly -
Jill Konrath’s Selling to Big Companies Blog. In her current blog post One Sales Strategy That Really Works, she points to a good video that describes the use of White Paper marketing and how it can help your organization succeed.
Jill writes:
“Michael Stelzner used it to get 60,234 leads over a five year period. He’s a small business owner … a regular guy who stumbled onto this strategy that:
- Brought him high quality prospects virtually overnight.
- Established him as a thought leader in his market space.
- Kept on generating leads for years.
Using educational marketing, his company landed accounts such as Microsoft, FedEx and Dow Jones. Not too shabby a client base!
Today Michael is launching a series of videos on how he used these educational techniques to transform his business. ”
My current company uses this pretty effectively. By having people in the organization that are respected in the local community as well as from Microsoft (our services are all based on Microsoft), we are able to leverage their status and knowledge in writing good quality, high value white papers that attract attention. These papers in turn establish our firm as a thought leader on topics that are directly related to services that we offer our clients. While we have only done this twice, since I have been with the firm, we still get hits, reads and consequently leads from these papers. We need to do more of these!
The real interesting part, and an area where we miss the boat, is leveraging these papers in a Nurture Marketing Campaign. While we do other nurture marketing activities to stay close to our prospects, we don’t leverage our White Papers to do this. We don’t require registration to download the white papers, and we don’t track who is downloading. This is more of an IT issue than anything else – not having the infrastructure to support the functionality. However it is something we should really think about getting in place.
I highly recommend using White Papers and event to establish your firm as a thought leader in your space. As a result your company will become a go-to partner and vendor, rather than “just another vendor” in the eyes of your prospects. IT will take time to establish this, but with a little effort, and some organization you should see results!
I welcome your comments on this topic!
ITSalesPro -.-
Entry Filed under: Blogroll, Business Development, Computer Sales, IT Sales, selling. Tags: Business Development, IT Sales, IT Selling, Lead Generation, Nurture Marketing, White Paper Marketing.
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