What is a White Paper and why your Product, SaaS and Service-Based business needs one

Every new product, service or Software as a Service (SaaS) launched in the market is accompanied by a full-fledged and informational document, also known as a Whitepaper or White paper. These documents are intended to highlight the initial problem in hand and the best solution being offered in the form of a service or product. Whitepapers are issued by an organization ideally to promote their products, services and solutions. More typically, whitepapers are framed in the form of marketing and sales documentation to motivate and convince potential customers to purchase the services and products.

Before getting into the details of how whitepapers work, let us quickly go through a more simplified definition of a whitepaper!

What is a Whitepaper?

A whitepaper is a formal guide or an authoritative document, which is designed to inform the intended audience or customer base about any existing problem, along with a descriptive solution, service, product or methodology to solve the problem. A whitepaper should help the readers to relate to the problem, choose and understand the solution and make a decision.

Benefits of Whitepaper

If you the owner of a business, here are a few ways in which a whitepaper can help shoot up your sales through the roof!

Whitepapers are written in academic style, which comes across as a more serious and persuasive method of driving people to consider your products, services or solutions as more effective as compared to their counterparts.
Whitepapers usually do not have a definitive sales pitch, which makes it easier for businesses to directly drill down to the core topics of interest.
Whitepapers help in assimilating trust and reliability among potential customers. A well-written document reflects that your business is reliable and that you have experience and information that will be useful in meeting their requirements.
Buyers prefer to purchase services from reliable businesses and delivering a highly functioning whitepaper can boost up your sales by many folds.
Whitepapers help in lead generation. It is a favorite tool among survey respondents and people usually share their interests and information willingly for a whitepaper.

Here’s a detailed report on how you can use Whitepapers to generate leads for your business!

How Exactly Whitepapers Help in Lead Generation?

Whitepapers are an integral component in Business-to-Business Marketing. One of the important requirements of a whitepaper is to build a favorable case for the business and services being offered. To achieve this, whitepapers gather all the facts and arguments, solely implicated on the basis of logic and sponsorship for the company. These documents, in turn, generate sales leads. These sales leads can be turned into successful business deals through consistent persuasion and selling capability of the business analysts and leadership.

In short, whitepapers, when combined with effective sales pitch, results in the generation of leads. This is also called Brand Awareness among business analysts and other stakeholders.

Effective Distribution of Whitepapers

While distributing whitepapers among potential customers, it is very important to reduce any possibility of friction. Asking for more information than required often creates friction and in the long run, can decline the rate of customer retention.

Asking customers to login using their social media platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, is an effective way of gathering more information including their work history, location, skills, hobbies, personal interests and much more! Through ethical and effective means of whitepaper distribution, you can deepen your business’s relationship with the customer base. Social logins also help you in getting onboard with any demographical changes in your customer base, for example, location change, skill enhancement or job switch.

Now that you have learned about generating long-term leads for your business, let us see how you can manage your leads and keep them engaged in the long run.

Engaging Your Leads

Once you capture relevant leads for your whitepaper, you must keep them engaged. To ensure that all your leads are converted to paying customers, you must keep a track of their journey on your business website. The information collected from this can be used to figure out which stage they are in!

Ideally, once a customer enters and engages on your website, they can be in any of these three stages: Awareness > Consideration > Decision. Based on the patterns observed over time for different customers, you will be able to come up with remediation plans and strategies.

Google Analytics is one very effective method of achieving this. Using Google Analytics to Recognize Visitor Groups on Your Business Website

Based on the data collected, you can also follow up with the hot leads, who you think are close to making a purchase of the service you are offering.

With regular interaction and nurturing, you can develop a cordial relationship with your leads and hence create a favorable sell-purchase ecosystem for your business. Effective Ways of Maintaining Leads

What Does an Effective Whitepaper Look Like?

Guidelines for writing an effective whitepaper are listed below:

Typically, a whitepaper should be 4-8 pages long, or about 2500-2700 words in length.
Follow the academic writing style to sound more professional and experienced.
Begin your whitepaper with a disclaimer or legal notice. Any or all business restrictions/notifications should be mentioned in this part before beginning with the actual facts and information.
Include an Introduction section, to make it look more authentic for all potential customers.
Cite your problem statement and list down the benefits of going through the rest of your whitepaper. Also cover the customer’s expectations in the form of charts, graphics and tables.
Include a Table of Contents section to make navigation easy and straight-forward.
Add a Glossary section in the beginning to cover important terms and definitions, if any.
Then, deep-dive into the services/products you are offering.
Use actual facts, figures and information collected in the due course of designing your whitepaper. The information depicted in this section should be relatable and convincing, because this works as the foundation of lead generation.
If relevant to your project, also include a roadmap to showcase the in-depth strategy and work plan for your business. Tell the customers how you intend to shape your services in the coming months or years.

Whitepaper Templates for Beginners

Expersight Whitepaper Writing and Marketing Service

Let us take a look at how the Expersight Whitepaper Writing and Marketing Service can help you in creating a dynamic whitepaper portfolio for your business!

Owned by Esthan Media Pvt. Ltd, Expersight is a Business Intelligence firm, which specializes in market research for businesses. They provide highly-functional and detailed analysis of all topics related to technology, research and business among many others.

How can Businesses Benefit from Expersight?

With a team of more than 250+ market experts and business analysts, Expersight helps in curating effective reports and whitepapers for businesses. What makes Expersight reliable among customers is their team of executives, all ranging from founders of large startups to working executives from many Fortune 500 companies. With a panel this extraordinary and qualified in their respective fields, you can be assured that your businesses are in safe and experiences hands!

Another reason to choose Expersight is that they not only contribute to the inception of whitepapers that portray you as the pioneers in a particular problem-solving area, rather they also publish them across their official website, leading publications, social media channels and newsletters.

All in all, Expersight makes sure that your business reaches new heights in the times to come!