B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine » Try adding a call to action to the end of your white papers

Try adding a call to action to the end of your white papers

December 23rd, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

In our recent post, “To register or not, revisited”, we discussed the virtues of voluntary – or even no – registration in front of your thought-leadership conversion bait (usually white papers). And we suggested also placing your registration request at the end of your downloadable material.

Now along comes Jim Logan, posting on his blog with a more fleshed-out version of what that might look like; and in his view, it should even look more like a real call to action. Jim’s white papers give his visitors three choices…

Ask the visitor to pass the document to someone they know. Not only do you get the person to take a concrete action with/for you, you also stand to get a bit of a snowball effect going among that person’s contact base.
Ask the reader to register for or subscribe to something. It could be your email newsletter (in which case it’s much like the voluntary registration they may have passed up in getting to this document); or it could be a next-stage item (in terms of your usual sales cycle), such as a webinar or e-course.
Ask the reader to contact you for a discussion. Note: that’s a discussion of the issues in the white paper, not a sales pitch; your teaser should make that clear, and the actual phone call should be consistent with that. When he gets a nibble with this, Jim sends a brief questionnaire to the person ahead of the scheduled call; that way he’s armed with enough background information to jumpstart the conversation. Chances are you end up having started a long-term relationship, which can bear other fruit even if no sale eventually happens.

Really, you should probably do this even if you require registration first. If your visitor cared enough about your content to download and actually read a significant-length document, it would be a serious missed opportunity not to attempt to get them to take some next step with your company.