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BtoB marketing professionals answer the question, "What is your biggest challenge in connecting with the IT buyer?"
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June 2008, Issue 52 |
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The Video White Paper: The Best of Both Worlds
By Amy Bills, Senior Manager of Field Marketing, Bulldog Solutions
Like Biscuits and Gravy, a Match Made in Heaven
As a marketing tool with muscle, the white paper will never go out of style. But it's getting an upgrade. Enter the "video white paper," an increasingly interesting way to blend the depth of information offered in a white paper with the engaging element of video.
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The video white paper takes a big step toward that goal.
White Papers = Depth of Information
Experts such as ITToolbox and Enquiro Research point to white papers as a key decision driver for purchases, particularly IT purchases. No kidding: From a marketing perspective there's a lot to recommend them:
- The white paper format allows your subject matter experts plenty of room to expand on a topic. (If they're like our subject matter experts here at Bulldog, they appreciate the room to stretch.)
- White papers are easy for your prospects to download, print, forward. (Summer cold season is upon us, so I hesitate to use the cliché "viral.")
- While they take a lot of resources to do well, once they're done, white papers are easy to repurpose into additional content. They can feed blog posts, Webinar content, podcasts, presentations. For marketers pressed for time and resources, this is a goldmine. More on the topic of repurposing here.
And of course, there's also a lot to recommend video as a BtoB marketing tactic. eMarketer expects online video advertising to rise from $775 million in 2007 to $2.9 billion in 2010. Video has become a standard for communication in our personal lives (Exhibit A: Google's $1.7 billion acquisition of YouTube) and that bleeds over to our professional lives.
This very newsletter you're reading is a perfect example. A year ago, we started experimenting with the short video intro you now see in every Management Note for Marketing Watchdog Journal. We'd done a three-month reader survey and one of the key findings was our respondents requesting rich media.
So we added a video, and in subsequent issues, we experimented with format, content and messaging. Opens and clickthroughs—two of the metrics we use to measure newsletter traction—rose, and the Management Note video from our CEO, Rob Solomon, was consistently among the highest clickthroughs. We got positive feedback from readers, and just as important, continued to use this asset as an in-house "R&D lab" for video development.
White Paper + Video = Client-Centric Education
This all brings me back to the video white paper, where the benefits of a white paper and video come together. This tactic can take a lot of forms. Here's a basic example, where a short video complements a longer, much more involved white paper. The user can skip the video and go straight to the printed piece, or watch the video to decide if they want more.
More involved versions might include a short video for each chapter, to allow the user to select only certain chapters. Again: The video isn't a replacement. It's a complementary mode of communication.
Ann Roskey, VP of Marketing & Audience Development for Accela Communications, noted the natural fit between the two tactics in an article for Accela's Rich Media Report.
"It's natural to think of ways to convert print content for online use," she wrote in a case study of Biomni's use of a video white paper.
"For online users, being told a story is easier, more appealing and entertaining, which also means there is a lower barrier to get started. By converting a textual white paper to video, Biomni essentially widened the funnel of prospects that would be introduced to their solution, and they gave prospects more than one option for how they could consume their content," she noted.
Great content, and more than one option to access it. That's what it's all about.
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Amy Bills is senior manager of Field Marketing at Bulldog Solutions, the lead-generation optimization and management company. Visit www.bulldogsolutions.com to learn more.
Know colleagues who would be interested in this topic? Send them this newsletter, and if they subscribe, you'll be entered into a drawing to win an iPod nano.
Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.
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