White Papers as a Marketing Tool for your Small Business

Last week SMEketing launched a white paper campaign for a local IT company here in Hampshire. Wikipedia defines a white paper as: “An authoritative report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions.”

If the product you sell is expensive, sophisticated, technical and/or involves a complex buying process, or if your company sells to other businesses (B2B), then the use of white papers is definitely a marketing method you should be employing. A well written white paper should be a few pages long, and should state your company’s position on how a problem should be solved. The white paper isn’t a sales tool however – you are not pushing or selling your product or solution. What you are doing is identifying a problem, and writing about the best way to solve it. Feel free to mention your product as an example of the type of product that can solve the problem you are writing about, but be factual about it, rather than pushy and salesy.

So why are white papers such great marketing tools? Firstly, the people who read them have an active interest in what the paper is about. So for example, if you sell an IT solution that improves the efficiency of organisations telephone system and write a paper focusing on how businesses should manage the problem of missing too many telephone calls, the people who read your white paper are those who have a problem with their telephone system, and could probably do with a solution like yours. The leads generated from a white paper should be very high quality and targetted to a specific product or solution.

Secondly, by uploading the white paper to your website, and promoting it online, you’ll help to improve and maintain your rankings in the top search engines. Search engines, like Google, love websites that constantly add new material. A white paper would be classed as new content – and because it is written about your product or solution, it will be jam-packed-full of those all important key terms.

The key to a successful white paper is the promotion and follow up. There’s no point having a well written, good looking white paper on your website if no one knows it’s there.

What SMEketing did for our client was to create a press release and submit that to relevant press as well as uploading it to newswires online. We also created dedicated eblasts (tailored to match their stage in the buying process, or based on the level of contact which our client had already had with them), which were sent using the SMEketing Email Marketing Tool to their contact and prospect lists. We also created a new Google Adword campaign for them – advertising their white paper and driving relevant traffic to their dedicated white paper landing page.

We only released the white paper for our client late last week, but the results are already impressive. The dedicated landing page we created included a simple form which requested just the name, email address, company and telephone number, as well as a drop down box asking people to say where they heard about the white paper. Keeping this form simple and quick has meant that the our client has already had a huge number of people filling in the form and downloading the white paper.

These contact details from the online form will then be passed onto their sales team to be followed up.

The press releases that were submitted online are now starting to be published and are creating links to their website – again, adding another boost to their search engine rankings.

So you can see that the benefits of a white paper are multiple. By creating a white paper that has been optimised to contain relevant key terms, repurposing it into a press release and eblast, and promoting online and offline, our client has not only gained many high quality new business leads, but will also improved their rank in Google for the key term that the paper was about.

If you want to promote your product or solutions using white papers, but need some help, please get in touch. SMEketing is a full service marketing agency based in Hampshire, that can manage either the entire campaign for you, or just the parts you need help with. Services can include writing the paper, creating the promotional tools and designing the online landing page, as well as the promotion and marketing of the paper itself.

Otherwise, I hope this blog post has given you an idea about how to write a white paper, and what to do with it once you’ve created it!

Leave a Comment May 19, 2009

Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here:

1. How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a logo created yet…in which case, get in touch, we’d love to help!)
2. Great, number 2, how many of you know the difference between your logo and your corporate identity? (From our experience, approximately 60-70% of people reading will know) 
3. And finally, how many of you understand the difference between your corporate identity and your brand? (this is the biggy – and I’m assuming that some of you might not be 100% sure of the answer here…)

It is really is important for your small business, that you understand not only the differences between these key elements, but also how they work together to form the overall impression of who your company (or personal brand) is… So here’s a quick and easy guide to the differences and how they all work together:

Logo: It is rare that a company, even the smallest of small businesses, doesn’t have a logo, even if it’s a simple word, mark or symbol that someone internally has created to serve as your identifier. A logo can be made up of a different parts, which may or may not always be used together; the word mark, a logo symbol, a tagline.

Corporate Identity: These are the elements of your small business’s graphic/identity/visual language, and are usually, but not always, devised from the elements that make up your logo. If you have worked with an marketing agency (such as SMEketing) to develop your corporate identity, you must ensure that they provide you with a manual, commonly known as the Brand Guidelines  (also called a brand manual) as part of the package. This will guide you, your team and suppliers, as to how to correctly utilise your corporate identity. It safeguards your investment in your brand and prevents it from being diluted.

Your corporate identity is made up of symbols, textures, colours, images, photography style and fonts. If you’d like to see an example of some brand guidelines get in touch with us and we can send you some examples of ones we’ve created for past clients.

And all of these elements come together visually in your marketing material (business cards, stationery, website, brochures, forms, email marketing, signage, advertisements, vehicles, etc) to express your corporate identity. A strong corporate identity is one that maintains a consistent use of the elements to achieve quick recognition by a potential client when they come in contact with a marketing piece.

Brand: A lot of people will tell you that your brand IS your corporate identity, however it is much much more than that. A Brand is the sum of ALL parts that make up a company. It includes your logo, your corporate identity, and any and all of the follow elements:

• your company name
• your company culture
• what customers have come to expect from an interaction experience with your company
• team uniforms
• company policies
• tone of how your written content is delivered
• corporate identity
• logo
• tagline
• word of mouth advertising (how your current clients & suppliers talk about you when they refer you)
• partner relationships
• sponsorships
• the space you work in
• and many more..

To summarise, your brand is what people come to expect from your company, whether it be from seeing an advert in a magazine, to ordering a product online, to interacting with a team member over the phone or in person, and so on. And with any great brand these elements are always consistent and congruent.

Developing and maintaining a corporate brand is essential in modern business. SMEketing can work with you and your small business to develop your brand and carry it through all your marketing efforts.

Speak to us about logo design, company stationary, website design, copywriting and more. See our Services page for a full list of marketing solutions we provide.

Our small business marketing agency is based in Hampshire and service all of Hampshire, as well as Wiltshire, Dorset and Surrey, Sussex and Berkshire (and of course the Isle of Wight – in fact it’s so lovely over there we’d welcome the excuse to visit!).

2 Comments April 6, 2009