White Paper Marketing: Headed for the Trash Bin?

We hear lots of complaints these days about white papers – how long they take to produce, how much they cost, and (more important) how little client interest most of them generate.   Marketers at several consulting and IT service firms have told us they wonder if their self-published articles are having much, if any, impact.  Yet they continue to churn out them out, not knowing a better alternative.

There is a good reason that it’s harder to have impact with white papers:  There are just too many of them.  While we haven’t found any estimates on the number of business white papers produced every year, there are signs that the number has been rising.  One of them is the huge increase in Google search results on the terms “white paper” or “white papers” – from about 1 million in 2001 (according to white paper blogger Michael Stelzner, see here) to about 360 million today.  An explosion in white papers means that getting executives to read yours is far more difficult today.  

But we don’t think you should give up on white papers.   In fact, a great white paper posted online can have a long and useful marketing life.  But to have such white papers, marketers need to do two things.  First, they need white papers with much better content – especially ones with truly novel points of view and case studies of companies that have followed the authors’ prescriptions and benefited mightily.   Second, they need to distribute them very differently.  They should focus far less on mailing them to clients and prospects, and far more on getting credible sources in the online world to endorse and link to them – popular bloggers, social networks, online publications hungry for good content, and others. 

We’ve taken our own medicine on this second point and have found a marked difference in readership – i.e., many more coming to our two latest white papers after reading about them in their favorite blog, social network or other online influencer, than readers we generated by distributing them directly.  

In fact, these two white papers are on the very topic of white papers. You can read them here.