10 Steps to an Intent-Driven White Paper Campaign

As a marketer, I enjoy working on white paper campaigns. White papers are one of my favorite types of marketing collateral because they involve every aspect of content marketing. The first step in your intent-driven marketing campaign begins with strategizing the goal of the asset within the campaign.

White papers can be used to:

• Strengthen your position as a thought leader;
• Present useful and persuasive research and information about your products and services;
• Generate leads.

After you’ve selected your main goal, you need to understand the needs of your audience and the content gaps among competing articles. A process that was once arduous and time consuming, now simple and easy once you’ve developed your target account definition.

Next, you need to write something that’s worth your consumers’ time — persuasive and informative with visuals that represent the information on the topic while simultaneously keeping the readers interest. If your content doesn’t add value and fill a gap, it’s not going to perform well.

When the creative work is done, you need a distribution strategy. Are you gating your content completely, not at all, or are you semi gating it? You must ensure your analytics are tracking correctly and your follow-up strategy is solid. Think about how leads are coming in, predict how your buyer’s level of intent influences your follow-up, and what can you do to automate these processes and make them more efficient.

Before you put pen to paper (or, rather, hand to key), it’s good to walk through the 10 steps of a white paper campaign and make important choices in advance.

This infographic will walk you through each step of everything you need to know in order to make white paper marketing a formidable addition to your content marketing strategy.

Daan Reijnders is the co-founder and CEO of Foleon.