Are white papers and ebooks among your content offerings for generating leads? If not, then they probably should be. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2013 Benchmarks for Content Marketing Report, 61% of B2B companies utilize white papers and 32% are using ebooks. Furthermore, in the B2B Content Marketing Trends study conducted by the B2B Technology Community, marketers indicated that white papers were one of their top offerings, 73% of whom claimed it to be an effective tactic.
If you’ve never used a white paper or ebook in your marketing mix, then consider several advantages they offer: They are perfect top-funnel content, have a longer shelf life than other content, and establish your credibility as a thought leader—all good stuff. And what are the differences between the two? There’s some wiggle room in the answer to this question, but generally ebooks are longer (15 – 200 pages) and focus on introducing the reader to a problem (one your company solves ideally), while white papers are shorter (2 – 10 pages) and more industry-related or technical in nature.
When creating white papers and ebooks there are a few aspects to consider such as your target audience, the visual design, and the distribution avenues. Another of these considerations is optimizing this content to maximize SEO performance. Some times this item gets overlooked or overshadowed with all the energy being placed on actually creating the content; however, if you take into account optimizing the content beforehand, your white papers and ebooks will contain an added feature that will help increase reach to potential clients.