2012 Saas Marketing Trends

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the January 20, 2012 @ 1:20 pm

In 2011 Xander Marketing lent its expertise to a range of Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses, working on large projects with 4 different SaaS businesses, as well as on smaller projects with several others. In addition, we also produced helpful resources like our SaaS marketing guides (here and here) that any SaaS business should find useful in developing their marketing strategy.
As we move into 2012 we look ahead to marketing predictions for SaaS businesses this year:

1. Conversion rate testing

A SaaS business’s website is usually central to its marketing activities, and with sophisticated A/B testing and analytical tools now accessible to any business, it’s possible to see exactly how people are interacting with your site. From there, a business can see which aspects of its site are effective, and which aspects require improvement. It’s generally cheaper and easier to double your conversion rate than it is to double your traffic. Split testing should also be an ongoing optimisation process, as even small percentage increases, when accumulated every month, can add up to a significant improvement over a whole year.

2. Creative use of AdWords

It should be important for any business to try to get as much value as possible out of its marketing budget. Particularly online, where the clever use of analytics tools to discover how people find your site and what turns them into conversions can be used to focus your marketing efforts. These tools can also be used to analyse which keywords and/or negative keywords you should be concentrating on. Google Remarketing (also known as retargeting), in which tracking cookies follow customers’ online behaviour and display advertisements relevant to them has been shown to increase engagement, and is an area in which we expect to see rapid growth in 2012.

3. Providing value in content

As we’ve discussed in previous blog articles, it’s no longer enough to simply generate content arbitrarily and hope that people like it. With so many other businesses and organisations out there generating content of their own, it’s important to focus on creating content that your customers will want to engage with and share with one another.

4. Strategy over tactics

A strategy involves taking a holistic approach to marketing up front, taking account of all aspects of your business and the potential interactions between them. Tactics are how the strategy is delivered, and the successful use of them in business relies on having an overarching strategy guiding their implementation, providing overall direction and aiding decision-making at all levels.

5. Decline in traditional advertising

With the growth of online advertising, fewer people are engaging with traditional print media advertising channels, particularly in the SaaS sector. SaaS businesses are also increasingly using their website as the hub of their marketing strategy, and to that end it’s far easier to drive clicks towards it from other online channels such as advertising on websites or social media than it is to get potential customers to type in a website address from a print advert. These clicks can also be measured and analysed, providing you with quantifiable indicators of the effectiveness of your online marketing strategies.

6. Transparency is ever more important

As a SaaS business, customers and prospects will only take your products seriously if they believe that you know what you’re talking about. This means demonstrating your knowledge and sharing expertise, as well as providing as much detail about the product as you can so that customers can make an informed choice. Offering free trials are a proven method for SaaS businesses to turn leads into conversions. It is also important to convey to your customers why your business does certain things the way it does, such as your pricing strategy. Credibility with your customers can only be earned through being honest with them.

7. More competition

SaaS is a rapidly growing business model . Not every business can be the next Google, but the technology giants are acquiring smaller SaaS businesses all the time. As such, everybody is after a piece of the pie, which is why it’s important to distinguish your business from others offering similar products, and make sure that your customers choose you over your competitors. Many businesses decide after using outsourced SaaS to develop their own in-house solutions. How are you going to ensure that they continue to use your services in the future?

8. Adapting to new technology

Information technology is evolving at an ever increasing rate. Near Field Communication (NFC), mobile apps and cloud computing are just some of the relatively recent developments that could potentially have huge ramifications for entire industries. Businesses that struggle to adapt invariably struggle to survive, which is why your business should be looking at how it will adapt to future developments, for example by offering a mobile app or support for collaborative remote working.

9. Privacy and security are still big issues

Despite allegedly being at the top of the agenda for many businesses for years now, it still seems to take a catastrophic breach of security or hacking attack to get companies really thinking about what they’re doing. However these seem to be occurring with more and more frequency, and customers are realising that they shouldn’t hand over their data unless they can trust you with it. As well as having robust security protocols, it’s important to emphasise in your marketing strategy the fact that customers can trust both your business and your products.

10. Social media use will increase

As mentioned above, social media can be a powerful marketing tool for any business. However companies that use SaaS solutions engage with the internet on a daily basis. In addition to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, professional networking sites like LinkedIn allow businesses to build their brand, increase their customer base and interact with professional contacts on a personal level.

Tags: saas marketing

2012 marketing trends for SMEs

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the December 12, 2011 @ 6:07 pm

At the end of each year at Xander Marketing we make some predictions for what we think is going to be big in the following year. As you can see from some of our recent posts, we were pretty much spot on in 2011, let’s see if we can keep that up for 2012.

1. Social media will become more personal

When the early social networks like MySpace and Faceparty first took off, the only information they had about you was the information you’d given them, and even then it was usually nothing more complex than hobbies and starsigns. That has all changed, and Facebook in particular has realised that the more they know about people, the more they can target them with advertising. This is why they’re trying to build a complete picture of each individual user based on likes and dislikes gleaned from their online profiles. With tracking cookies also looking at your browsing habits, we’re expecting advertisers to invest heavily in personalised advertising in the coming year.

2. Mobile marketing

As we recently discussed, nearly a million smartphones are being activated each day, and more than a billion apps are downloaded every month on Android alone. That’s a huge potential audience, and with these numbers only likely to increase, advertisers will want to take advantage. Apps, casual games, QR codes and location-specific marketing are all areas that we think will see significant growth in 2012.

3. Providing value in content

On an average day on the internet, 210 billion emails are sent, 3 million images are uploaded to Flickr, 43 million gigabytes of data are sent across mobile phones, 45 million statuses are updated, and 900,000 blog articles are written. How can you make yourself heard above the background noise? By providing quality content that your audience will want to consume and share. It’s no longer enough to simply generate content; it has to be relevant and engaging.

4. Conversion rate testing

In the past, when a website went live it was merely a case of sitting back and waiting for the visitors to roll in. That’s no longer the case with the accessibility of A/B testing tools and sophisticated analytics software nowadays. With the ability to look at conversion rates and see exactly how people are interacting with your site, website optimisation is set to become a continuous process in the future.

5. Siri challenging traditional search

Siri is Apple’s virtual voice assistant, and is available on its latest iPhones. By speaking directly to your phone and asking it to search for things that you’d ordinarily have had to type in, you’re cutting out the middle-man. Worryingly for Google, this also means that Siri is cutting out some of its advertising opportunities. With a new iPhone likely to be released in 2012, we think that by the end of 2012 Siri might begin to cause Google some real problems, which is no doubt precisely what Apple has in mind.

6. Google will become more personal

It’s becoming more and more apparent with each tweak or new service released by Google that it’s all part of a wider strategy. Ultimately it’ll be looking to completely integrate their social operations with their information operations, combining services like search, maps and YouTube with Google+ and their +1 button to provide a complete personal web experience.

7. Outsourcing

We think that outsourcing aspects of your operations will become more and more popular in the next year, not just in marketing but in other sectors too. Businesses are having to tighten their belts, and for many of them it might be more efficient to utilise the knowledge and expertise of a dedicated marketing agency, as well as benefiting from their economies of scale.

Is your in-house marketing not getting you the results you’d like? Why not get in touch with Xander Marketing on 0118 321 7620 to discuss how outsourcing your marketing could be a solution for your organisation.

Did our 2011 marketing predictions come true?

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the December 9, 2011 @ 10:18 am

Last year we made 6 marketing trend predictions for SMEs in 2011. It’s time to look back and see if we were right.

1. “Social media will be even bigger”

Hardly an outrageous prediction, but we expected social media and its implementation as part of a wider marketing sphere to grow and grow in 2011. We were largely right; Facebook has grown to over 800 million users whilst Twitter is approaching the 400 million mark with 460,000 new sign-ups a day. We specifically mentioned Foursquare as one to watch out for in 2011, and whilst its 15 million users may pale in comparison to the bigger networks, it has actually tripled in growth this year and looks set to continue into the next. With the arrival of Google+ and over 50 million users on this network already social media continues to grow.

2. “Mobile marketing will take off”

We definitely got this right. Google recently claimed that over a billion apps are downloaded for Android mobile devices every month. Over 18 billion have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store in the last 3 years. Nearly a million smartphones are activated every day, and with these figures growing all the time, marketers have clearly seen the potential in the medium. With the advent of location-specific marketing and new innovations like QR codes, this is a sector that is likely to explode in the coming year. We also said that SMS marketing was unlikely to catch on, and whilst it has its advantages, the emphasis is generally moving towards browser and app-based mobile advertising.

3. “Marketing will become more personal”

It’s difficult to find current statistics on this, but there is no doubt that the main social networks realised a while ago that marketing can be more effective when geared to a user’s interests based on information gleaned from their online profiles. We’re also seeing an increase in the use of tracking cookies, which look at a user’s browsing habits and provide targeted advertising on web pages (known as retargeting). It’s well known that the more personal an advert, the higher the response rate is, which is why the use of retargeting by advertisers increased over 2010 from 17% to 22%, and eCommerce spending subsequently experienced its biggest jump in growth this year (14% in Q2) since 2007.

4. “Relevant engagement with target audiences will be key”

Businesses are now recognising the importance of engaging their audience. It’s not enough to sit back and wait for the customers to come to you; in order to turn leads into conversions you have to go out and find them. Social media is one way of doing this, and as analytics tools become more powerful and more accessible it’s now possible to see how customers are interacting with your website and therefore how to engage them further with inbound marketing. This can include writing white papers, guides and blogs for B2B, or offering games and social media engagement for B2C. Businesses that focus on inbound marketing have a lower cost per lead of 62%, and with the recent improvements to Google Analytics we’re already seeing the potential for growth beginning to be realised in this sector.

5. “Google will remain king”

Google has continued to adapt and improve this year, with the implementation of Google+ and Google Panda, two of the biggest improvements they’ve made. They’ve been rewarded with sustained growth in their search operations, and continue to hold around two thirds of the search market with 65.6% as of October, up from both September and August. Whilst Yahoo and Bing are attempting to keep up and shouldn’t therefore be ignored, they’re still quite a way off the pace.

6. “Your competition will spend more”

Again it’s difficult to find current statistics for this as few SMEs are willing to divulge their spends for the current year, but research published in March 2011 suggested that marketing spend for SMEs was expected to rise by 4.5%. More interestingly, online advertising spend was expected to increase by 29%. However, a separate study revealed that 62% of SMEs didn’t set a marketing budget, suggesting that their approaches were more reactive than proactive.

A proactive marketing strategy can keep you a step ahead of the competition in 2012. Get in touch with Xander Marketing on 0118 321 7620 to find out more about how we can help to make your marketing work for you.

Win a Marketing Strategy

This post was last edited by Xander Marketing, on the December 6, 2011 @ 9:23 am

Get your 2012 marketing off to the best possible start with a free bespoke marketing strategy (usually worth £1,000).

Win new business, generate leads, drive more traffic to your website and build your brand.

Marketing is vital to business success. But all too often marketing can get overlooked or furthermore be an afterthought resulting in ad-hoc campaigns that don’t get results. We believe the best way to move forward with your marketing is to implement a Marketing Strategy specifically developed for your business. To support you with your marketing in 2012, Xander Marketing is offering one business a completely free, bespoke Marketing Strategy written for them (usually worth £1,000).

The free Marketing Strategy is for businesses that:

• Believe in the value of marketing
• Have a lack of time, resource or know how to implement marketing
• Want new marketing ideas and a fresh approach to marketing
• Have a marketing budget to execute the strategy of at least £1,000/month

The Marketing Strategy will consist of:

• An initial meeting to enable us to really understand your business
• Setting marketing objectives for 2012
• Analysis into your marketplace and competition
• Definition of your target market, profiling, segmentation and analysis
• Defining your unique selling proposition
• Exploring the different marketing tactics available to your business with specific recommendations
• Development of creative marketing messages and campaign ideas
• A strategy to implement the marketing tactics including a month by month marketing plan for the next 12 months
• Ongoing marketing support if required

To be in with a chance to win a free Marketing Strategy simply fill in the form below on or before the 12th January 2012:

Terms

• Xander Marketing is a full service agency that works with businesses that don’t have the time, resource or know how to undertake their own marketing
• The winner will be chosen by Xander Marketing and announced on the 13th January 2012
• The winner should have the Marketing Strategy on their desk before the end of January
• This competition is for new customers only and not valid for current customers or businesses that currently have a proposal outstanding or we are currently in discussions with
• The winner will have no obligation to undertake any further marketing with Xander Marketing
• If you are not interested in this offer but are interested in other services find out more about what we offer here

What marketing you may have missed in 2011 and why it will be even bigger in 2012

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the December 1, 2011 @ 11:51 am

In a recent blog we covered some of the things to think about for your marketing strategy in 2012, and whilst now is certainly a good time to be doing so, 2011 isn’t yet over and there’s still plenty to learn from it. Here are some areas that might have been overlooked in the past year, as well as why they’re only likely to become more important in the next.

1. Location based social networks

Whilst these have yet to really take off, social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla have grown steadily in popularity with businesses and consumers alike, offering location-specific offers and advertisements to users’ mobiles depending on their geographical location. The fact that the surface has barely been scratched with regard to the potential of these is why they’ll most definitely be something to look out for in 2012. As well as vouchers and deals, there’s considerable potential for paperless ordering and ticketing, business and professional geo-networking, and much more.

2. Group buying

Group buying sites like Groupon and Living Social have really taken off in the UK in 2011, most people who have already used them rate them enormously highly. They work on the principle of offering huge discounts that change on a daily basis, on the condition that a minimum number of buyers commit to purchasing. Consumers enjoy great savings, and businesses benefit from getting more trade in through the door that they can use to grow their customer base.

3. QR Codes

QR, short for Quick Response, codes are small, square 2D barcodes that can be decoded at high speed using a smartphone camera. They can contain pictures, URL links, email addresses, Facebook pages and more, and can be printed on pretty much any flat surface. You may have already seen them on posters and print advertisements as well as online, but many people don’t yet realise how easy they are to create and implement. With more people owning smartphones than ever, these will only grow in popularity in the coming year and further integrate offline and online marketing.

4. Google+

Google+ was launched earlier this year amid much fanfare as a social network rival to Facebook and Twitter. Whilst it already has a rapidly growing user base, it’s set to explode next year with the recent unveiling of Google+ Pages, which allow businesses and organisations to maintain a presence on the network, and target customers using innovative new features like Circles and Hangouts. Google’s real trump card will be the integration of Google+ with existing tools like Google Docs, YouTube and Gmail, as well as their search engine, making it a marketing opportunity not to be missed.

5. Google Panda

Not so much an opportunity as something to be aware of, this year Google released a radical update to their search algorithms, calling it Google Panda. It made a mockery of certain existing aspects of SEO practice, shifting the emphasis away from keywords clumsily shoehorned into web pages, and more towards quality content and functionality. Subsequent updates are likely to follow this trend, as are algorithmic updates to rival search engines like Bing and Yahoo. The SEO industry is still trying to catch up, with many companies discovering that their previously high-ranking websites are now ranking lower. Ensuring that your business isn’t one of them should be a priority for 2012.

6. Infographics

Infographics are are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. Whilst they are nothing new, but they’ve become far more accessible in recent years with the advent of increasingly powerful desktop publishing software. They’re also becoming more and more ubiquitous in analytics software, conveying complex information in a simplified form. Whilst they’re not suitable for every occasion, a well put together infographic can be a great way to capture attention and explain concepts with clarity. A good infographic will also get shared, increasing traffic to your website and it’s search engine credibility.

7. App-based internet browsing

The internet is such a sprawling mass of information that it’s difficult to keep up at the best of times. Aggregator apps that pull together multiple web sources into a single application are likely to become more and more popular in the coming year. It doesn’t stop there though; apps, and specifically in-app purchasing can simplify the transaction process for businesses and customers alike. With the smartphone market increasing all the time, this is likely to be a huge growth market in 2012.

Which of these tactics have you implemented in your marketing in 2011? What are you going to add going forwards into 2012?

How to get started on Twitter

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the November 25, 2011 @ 12:20 pm

Twitter has been mainstream for over three years now, and yet despite it being one of the simplest social networks to get to grips with, many businesses still aren’t on it. Here we discuss some of the Twitter basics, as well as what benefits it might have to offer for your business.

What is it?

Twitter is fundamentally a real-time online message client that allows you to broadcast 140-character messages, commonly known as “tweets”, for anyone to potentially read. It’s also possible to send tweets to other users individually. You can “follow” people to receive their tweets in your timeline, and likewise people can follow you to receive your tweets in theirs. In recent years Twitter has enjoyed a huge amount of growth, with recent reports suggesting that upwards of 300 million users are on Twitter.

Twitter Lingo

In getting your head round Twitter there are a few terms and concepts that it’s worth knowing the meaning of before you get started.

• Timeline: your personal Twitter homepage. This is where tweets from you and people you follow will show up the moment they’re tweeted.
• Followers: other Twitter users who subscribe to receive your tweets in their timeline. You can follow or unfollow as many users as you like.
• Retweet: if you spot a tweet from someone else that you’d like your own followers to see, you can retweet it with one click of a button.
• Mentions: you can mention people by including their Twitter username prefixed by “@” in a tweet (for instance @XanderMarketing). This means that your tweet will show up in their timeline whether they follow you or not.
• Hashtags: by putting a “#” at the beginning of a word you’ve used in a tweet, it becomes a hashtag, which makes it more likely to appear when people search for that word.
• Trends: the most popular words and phrases that people are talking about on Twitter at any given time.

The benefits of Twitter

Whilst Twitter isn’t necessarily for everyone, it does have some excellent practical applications, particularly in marketing and customer service. Its ease of use and the immediacy with which you can tweet from anywhere at any time about anything makes it a great way of quickly conveying information to your followers, be it special offers, relevant links or content you’ve created. For organisations, it can provide a useful informal mailing list through which you can communicate with customers either individually or as a group, helping to establish a valuable two-way dialogue.

If you’re taking your first steps into social media and need advice, or want someone to take some of it off your hands, then get in touch with us on 0118 321 7620. Make sure you follow @XanderMarketing on Twitter too.

5 quick marketing ideas you can start today

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the November 21, 2011 @ 2:40 pm

Marketing can be a time consuming endeavour, but these simple suggestions can be quickly implemented for an effective boost to your strategy. None of them should take more than 5 minutes each, and all of them are proven techniques for expanding your marketing reach.

1. Add one (more) call to action to your website homepage

It can be as simple as adding a link to say ‘Click here to find out more about X’, although there are many more imaginative ways of getting your customers to interact on your website. More clicks means more page impressions and more time spent reading your content, but it’s also an opportunity to use such pages to engage your customers further. Calls to actions could include: request a demo, request a call back, download a free report, book a free consultation.

2. Change your submit button text

Semantics play a larger role than you might think on the web. It might seem to be the done thing to have ’submit’ as the button at the end of a form, but studies have shown that the word ’submit’ implies a degree of finality that can subconsciously make people apprehensive towards clicking. Try changing it to ‘Click here’, ’Next step’ or even ‘Download your free guide’ for increased clickthroughs.

3. Add a call to action to blog posts

If someone is reading your blog article then you’ve already got their attention, so make the most of this by including a relevant call to action. Providing a next step for the reader by inviting them to get in touch for a free report or consultation is a great way of bringing your leads to you. Offering free downloads and additional reading will keep your audience’s attention for longer, giving you further opportunities to engage them. Have a look at the end of this blog post for an example of this.

4. Retweet 5 tweets from target customers

Everyone likes being followed on Twitter, and as well as giving them a warm fuzzy feeling inside, retweeting tweets from people you follow will demonstrate to others that you’re not only listening to them but wish to actively engage them in a dialogue. It should take no time at all to find 5 funny, interesting or relevant tweets from your timeline and share them with your followers. This is particularly effective for people who don’t have many followers themselves, and so getting retweeted might be something of a novelty for them.

5. Share your content

If you’re not sharing your content, then you should be. What’s the point of spending time and effort creating good content if no one knows about it? Your customers won’t necessarily be connected to you on any one single social media platform, so spread the word on all of them. LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, as well as article sharing sites like eZine Articles and Zimbio are all good places to start. Whilst content can include everything from white papers and blog articles to updates on what’s going on that day in the office, it doesn’t have to be limited to just words. Photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube can provide other effective and diverse channels for sharing your content.

10 things to think about in your 2012 marketing strategy

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the November 1, 2011 @ 9:01 am

The end of 2011 is fast approaching, and now is a great time to assess your marketing strategy for 2012. Here are a few areas you might like to consider:

1. Social networks: Nearly every major company has a presence on them, but being on every new network for the sake of it isn’t necessarily worthwhile. Consider how you wish to engage with your customers, and therefore which social networks you need to be prioritising. Clearly establish how you wish to be seen by your audience, and therefore how to conduct yourself on them to achieve this. Look out for new up and coming social networks like Google+ and Tumblr and establish if it’s worth having an early presence there
2. QR codes: These are barcodes that can be printed pretty much anywhere, and read by a camera phone to provide encoded information like pictures, special offers or URLs to websites where you can provide additional content. Think about how best you can utilise them to integrate your offline and online campaigns, as well as how to make it worthwhile for your customers to decode them.
3. Search: Personal online searching based on location metrics and interests is the next big thing. How can your online strategy reflect this? Are you utilising tracking cookies and analytics to gain information about your customers?
4. Content: It’s still king. What knowledge are you providing and how? Do you have a marketing communications plan? Are you keeping up with developments in your industry? By planning for all eventualities and setting out where you want to be in the future, your marketing strategy will have a clear focus and keep you a step ahead at all times.
5. The media: Bloggers, journalists and early adopters are crucial to success in some industries. Who’s who in yours, and how can you get them on your side?
6. Website: What is its function for your business? Is it just a landing page, or is it a way to actively generate leads? Who maintains it and are they doing a good enough job? Is there potential for growth that you’re missing out on? Think about your audience, what they’re currently getting out of your website, what you’re getting out of your audience, and what more you can do to engage customers online.
7. Dialogue: How are you communicating information to your customers? How valuable is that information to them? Is there a more effective way to engage your customers? Are you listening to what they have to say to you, and are there feedback channels for them to do so? Consider how your customers interact with you, and what you can do to remove the barriers.
8. Innovation: What are you not doing that you could or should be doing? What new marketing channels could you utilise? How can you reach your customers in a way that hasn’t been done before? Think about what your competitors are doing, and how you can get an edge on them.
9. Strategy: Do you have a plan going forward? Where do you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? Does your marketing strategy reflect this? Is it futureproof?
10. Learning from 2011: Twitter has continued to explode, deal-of-the-day group discount websites are in, ‘checking in’ and location specific marketing is getting bigger. Google+ and LinkedIn are soaring in popularity, as well as Facebook introducing new features. How have you adapted to this in 2011? And what are you going to do in 2012?

There’s still plenty of time to review your strategy before the end of the year, but equally you don’t want to leave it too late and spend all of 2012 playing catch-up. Get in touch with Xander Marketing on 0118 321 7620 to find out more about how to make 2012 your year.

The importance of a content marketing strategy

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the October 28, 2011 @ 8:53 am

What is content marketing?

Content or educational marketing is the idea of educating your target market with valuable content. By creating ‘thought leadership’ which will support your target market and/or customer with the current challenges they face, as well as making their lives easier, it can position your business more advantageously compared to one that just sells a product or service.

Content marketing focuses on marketing ‘expertise’, educating customers and prospects and giving away free information that can build a customer’s trust in your business, add perceived value and generate new business. Content marketing opens up a range of new marketing channels.

Types of content marketing

The following are types of marketing that can be used as content marketing:

• White papers/guides
• Blog
• Case studies
• Video
• Webinar
• Seminar
• eBooks
• Podcasts

Using content marketing

Content marketing can be used within your website, landing pages and email marketing, as well as being shared across social media and by your sales team.

The benefits of content marketing

Content marketing has the following benefits:

• Generating leads: guides and white papers could include forms in which people provide their contact details in exchange for the free information. This is a way to generate leads in addition to leads that come through from the website. Leads can then be nurtured over time through autoresponder emails until they’re ready to buy
• Higher search engine rankings: generating more high quality content for your website and utilising ‘long tail keywords’ within articles
• Content can harness more diverse marketing channels
• Providing a reason to contact customers/prospects through email marketing
• Content can be shared with others, encouraging word of mouth
• Positioning the business as experts with an informative view on the industry, rather than simply selling products or services

Getting started

To get started think of topics that are of interest to your target market…what are their burning issues? What are they unsure of?

What content can you write or produce yourself? Are you better at writing or do you want to get your face in front of a video? Also ask yourself how much time you have. If you need to outsource it there are agencies that can do this for you too.

How to write a white paper

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on the October 27, 2011 @ 4:05 pm

You may have heard of ‘white papers’ in the realms of government, and they’re generally used to articulate policy on everything from health to education. However, they also serve a useful purpose in the sphere of sales and marketing. A white paper, in commercial terms, is used to outline the benefits of your product or service, and effectively make a logical case for what you can offer as a business.

Whilst we use the term ‘white paper’ in this blog, these documents could be referred to as ‘guide’, ‘report’ or something more creative like ‘Marketing Viewpoints’.

Why are white papers important?

A white paper isn’t so much about emotive platitudes and sales clichés; it’s more about establishing the effectiveness of your product, or your expertise on a subject, and how they can be applied to the wider world. The important thing is to educate your customers and potential customers, giving an impartial analysis of how your business can provide solutions and why they’re needed. By communicating your knowledge and understanding of your target market, as well as your ability to achieve success in it, your customers will hopefully feel sufficiently informed and impressed that they want to find out more.

What should you write about?

A well-written white paper should be:

• Informative: leave the reader knowing more about your subject than they did before they picked it up.
• Original: make your business stand out against your competitors. Try to work an angle that the customer hadn’t necessarily considered, as otherwise you won’t be telling them anything they didn’t already know.
• Structured: clearly set out the issues, how your business can help solve them, and why a customer should want you to, even if they weren’t aware that they faced these issues in the first place.
• Engaging: academic research and statistical analyses are a great way of lending an air of authority to your white paper, but if it’s too dry you run the risk of losing the reader’s interest.
• Accurate: this is supposed to be a factual document; don’t make anything up, or make promises you can’t necessarily keep.

Remember that the idea is not to overwhelm or scaremonger. Ideally you should be looking to subtly plant a seed in the customer’s mind, backed up with evidence that will hopefully result in leads for your business.

What NOT to write about

As mentioned before, a white paper isn’t about sales and marketing spiel. It’s about demonstrating your knowledge, and putting forward a compelling argument for a customer requiring your services. Ideally this should be done discreetly, so that your customers feel that you’re trying to convey helpful knowledge to them, and more importantly that there’s more helpful knowledge where that came from. As opposed to just conspicuously promoting your brand, which won’t necessarily tell the customer anything, and could even turn them away. By all means have a paragraph on your business at the end of the paper, but otherwise keep the sales messages to a minimum.

Conclusion

So there we are. As part of a wider marketing strategy, a white paper is an excellent way to engage your customers and offer them an insight into your services and why they’re necessary. It should be helpful, engaging and impart useful knowledge, ultimately persuading the customer to place their business with your company.

Did you know Xander Marketing writes white papers for businesses of all shapes and sizes? Find out more here or give us a call on 0118 321 7620.