B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

White Papers or Webcasts? (Your Prospects’ Choice May Surprise You.)

March 28th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

If you’re like most B2B marketers, you probably would choose webcasts almost every time as the preferred means to influence your prospects; they’re visual and provide a richer, quasi-personal means of communicating your message to your prospects. Chances are, you do white papers – if at all – primarily because your competitors do, or as a means of giving your developers a place to expound on topics that you secretly believe only they really care about.

Problem is, that perspective is not shared by the people you most want to influence; in fact, your prospects would choose white papers almost every time …certainly while they’re still in research mode. While we’ve suspected this for some time, there’s now some solid evidence…

In their recent Connecting Through Content: How Technology Marketers Meet Buyers’ Appetite for Content – a mammoth study involving nearly 4,000 marketers and client/customer respondents (no, it’s not free, but well worth the price for those serious about online marketing) – KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa report that white papers are “frequently” read by the largest share of prospective buyers: 71%. They also top the list of content types shared with others in prospects’ organizations, with a 57% pass-along rate (the only vehicle that’s shared by more than half).

The disconnect on webcasts
On the other hand, webcasts rank quite low among prospective buyers as a content-delivery vehicle: only a third “frequently” seek them out, whereas 63% of marketers use or sponsor them. Webcasts outranked only online video, podcasts and blogs with buyers.

Most marketers realize how unwise it is to fight the market. When prospects clearly indicate that they prefer white papers (and to a somewhat lesser extent, case studies, product literature, analyst reports and industry articles), it’s marketing’s responsibility to give them white papers …not to push webcasts and hope they’ll work just as well.

Getting down to it with white papers
Well-written and educational white papers, behind a simple registration process, are one of the most effective vehicles you can deploy …especially for the early phases of your prospects’ research into new products or services. If you’re having trouble putting a good set of white papers together, there could be a couple of underlying problems:

• Uncertainty over what makes a good white paper. There are numerous sources that provide good pointers; a great place to start is Michael Stelzner’s blog, Writing White Papers (or check out his book of the same name).
• Lack of a good writer on staff …with the necessary cycles available, of course. Hire one, if you possibly can; if not, your Web marketing consultancy may offer appropriate writing services (as does eMagine, for example).

Whatever your roadblocks, it will be well worthwhile to remove them; you don’t want to disappoint your prospects by not giving them what they’re most looking for.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Engaging Visitors, Internet Marketing