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White Paper Marketing Case Study: Social Networking
By Michael Stelzner
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-10-30
Can you leverage social media to generate leads with white papers?
Business intelligence company Information Builders did just that. A recent MarketingSherpa report reveals how they did it.
Here are the highlights:
Information Builders leveraged a B2B social networking site to distribute a series of white papers. But there's more to this story.
Chris Boylan, Information Builders director of Internet marketing wanted to generate leads without making his company feel like an intruder on the site.
First, they spent an entire year sponsoring an email discussion group. They monitored the type of people involved in the discussions.
Then, they created a series of white papers that were high level educational pieces. "There has to be a blend between thought pieces and other pieces that show we have the expertise to bring this in to deploy it at your site and make it successful," Boylan says. The company promoted the white papers using an RSS feed related to business intelligent, in the weekly email newsletters of the social networking site and on blogs and discussion groups.
The Results
The social network audience responded positively. Information Builders exceeded their lead generation goals by 42 percent and had a 750% return on investment.
The thought leadership papers brought in the most leads with titles such as "Establishing a Culture of Measurement: A Practical Guide to Business Intelligence."
Boylan explained: "With these high-level pieces, we're being seen as a thought leader. So, when people come to point of identifying a short list of vendors for their own BI implementation, they'll hopefully look at us as the ones who helped them come up with their whole project plan." What are your thoughts about this study?
Comments
About the Author:
Visit http://www.writingwhitepapers.com/blog/ for extensive resources on crafting compelling white papers and applying creative marketing tactics.
Michael A. Stelzner is the author of the new book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged and has written nearly 100 white papers for companies such as Microsoft, FedEx, Motorola, Monster and SAP.
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