B2B Lead Generation: Great content or a great lead generation tool. What's the difference?

Jonathan Kantor of White Paper Source also blogged about this.

Do you want a trickle of leads or a flood? Since we're just about to start a new white paper for a top marketing automation software firm, this is a timely post.

We've penned three great white papers to date - lead generation - How to Find New Customers (Marketo); b2b sales - Definitive Guide to Making Quota (self) and email marketing - Moving from Transactional to Conversational Email Marketing (Genius.com) - so we know lots about this topic.

To illustrate, let's look at an example of how to turn a nice white paper into a great lead generation program:

Let's say you hire a company like the B2B demand generation company Find New Customers to write a white paper for you.

Why go outside for creation of content? Outside experts have far more credibility.

Edelman Trust Factor asked "If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible would that information be?" They found that academics/experts like Find New Customers are the most credible. (70%) Industry analysts are high too, but regular employees are low and even peers are low.

Their conclusion: Current media landscape plus increased skepticism requires multiple voices and channels.

This is frankly why one leading marketing automation software company is turning to Find New Customers - currently all of their marketing content is created in house.

We craft a great white paper, like our highly acclaimed white paper on sales lead generation How to Find New Customers, sponsored by Marketo. Then what do you do with it?

How to Find New Customers

You post it. You tweet about it. You blog about it. What happens?

A handful of leads trickle in and you get some decent leads.

Is there a better way? There sure is.

In fact, the company that was awarded the BtoB Marketing Idea of the Year award from Find New Customers uses this best practices approach.

Let's look at the Kinaxis best practices approach. Use your keywords and everything points to the landing page:

Write and post the white paper to a landing page, then

• Video interview of the author (YouTube)
• Audio summary with the author (iTunes)
• Transcript of the video interview (blog articles)
• Slide presentations with audio from the author (SlideShare)
• Small bite-sized summaries, like our new cheat sheet 7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing (Content marketing)

Post that content everywhere with a call to action for the landing page.

Use this approach with your next white paper and watch that trickle turn into a fast flowing stream of leads.

What do you think is the best way to market a white paper?