How to Use White Papers to Market Your Small Business

By Rieva Lesonsky

Does your business sell services or expertise? Maybe you’re an accountant, consultant or IT expert. If you’re looking for a way to gain exposure as an industry expert while also educating clients and potential clients about what your business can do, consider marketing your business with white papers.

A white paper might sound like something that you’d only find in a college course, but in reality, it’s not that academic. A white paper is an informational report, typically 4 to 10 pages in length, that is provided to users for free and focuses on one specific aspect of a problem. They may spotlight research, interesting data or the results of a survey.

For instance, if you own a marketing company that helps businesses improve their social media profiles, you might do a white paper on how using Facebook can help businesses increase awareness of their brand, customers and sales. If you have a website design company, you could write a white paper about how to convert website browsers to buyers and focus on some tactics that you use in design.

White papers have a twofold purpose: to educate readers, but also to promote your business. So be sure your topic ties in to the areas your business specializes in and promotes you as an authority. In addition, the white paper must provide some reason why people need what you sell. (For instance, the marketing company in the prior example would want to show that companies that hire a marketing service get better results from Facebook.) For that reason, make sure you include plenty of ways to contact your business (email, address, phone, website) at the end of the white paper.

You’ll also need to determine who would benefit from your white paper and how to distribute it. For sure, you’ll want to put it on your business website and Facebook page. Then let people know about it by promoting it wherever you can—in your email signature, using social media, in your email newsletters, and in any descriptions or bios of you that appear online.

As you develop more white papers, you’ll find more uses for them—such as putting them into print booklet form as a giveaway in situations where downloading isn’t practical, or gathering several into an ebook. Use it right and you’ll discover that a white paper can be one of your simplest and most effective marketing tools.

Image Courtesy: Karen Axelton

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Marketing, small business, Thought Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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