75% of IT Pros Won’t Register for White Papers
I just read an interesting post by Stephanie Tilton at Savvy B2B Marketing titled IT Pros Don’t Want to Register for Your White Paper. It dovetails into a recent post I wrote about the decreasing value of white papers as they become more ubiquitous. White papers still remain popular because they are a great source of information, they are just becoming less powerful as a lead conversion tool. As you read the article summary, ask yourself if price papers could augment white papers for B2B lead conversion.
Stephanie interviewed Jay Hallberg, VP of Marketing of Spiceworks. Spiceworks surveyed some of their 800,000 Small-Medium Business Information Technology users and found the following:
- 75% don’t sign up for white papers that require registration.
- Those that do share their information obviously don’t mind doing so, but they DO mind a pesky vendor that calls them 10 times over the next 30 days.
- IT pros want to reach out to the vendor on their terms via their preferred channel, e.g. phone, email, or chat.
For those vendors that persist in using white papers as a lead generation tool, the article suggests:
- Write objective, educational papers, not product pitches.
- Show your expertise.
- Let people comment on your white papers, provide feedback, and rate them. This will help you produce better material of more value to the prospect.
- Integrate social media and let your authors and product experts have a conversation with prospects. In other words, create a conversation as opposed to using white papers as a way to bait and hook people. The white paper should be part of an integrated approach that helps start a conversation, move it along, or close it.
As resistance to white paper registration increases, it will be interesting to see how B2B marketers adapt to boost lead conversion.
I have long thought having to register to download or read a white paper is a big mistake and missed opportunity.
I believe the better approach is to offer the download without registration and add a call to action at the end of the white paper to engage — offering a few ways to continue the conversation. I’ve done this time-and-again with repeated success.
And I’ve never registered for a download
Interestingly, most white papers I’ve read don’t offer a call to action whatsoever. They merely end with a one page bio of the company — blah, blah, blah. Another missed opportunity to engage with a reader at the time of interest.
If white papers are losing their value as “lead generation bait,” it isn’t because white papers are any less valuable–it’s because social media has changed the game.
Readers are less willing to trade their contact information for content that is becoming freely available. To adapt, B2B marketers need to rethink white papers a little–and lead generation tactics a lot.
The white paper now becomes a vehicle of thought leadership. Our white paper, “Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?” explains how the uses of content are changing–and there’s no registration for the download.
http://www.contentfactor.com/library/content/anybody-following-your-thought-leadership
Dale; Thanks for posting this - an interesting tale indeed.
I too read the post over at Savvy B2B Marketing and was motivated to dig into our stats to see if they fell into the same category. They didn’t: our dropoff rate is 51.8% as opposed to 75%.
But the post and its conclusions which you mirror are in my humble opinion wrong. I have written my own post to explain my logic and you can read all about it here: http://bit.ly/d2o4YO.
I do however agree with the recommendations which were made concerning white papers and how best to create and use them.
And to Jim I would say this:
1) Did you keep track of the stats your downloads generated? In other words, how do you know you did better without any form of registration than with it? Getting people to download more things in and of itself means nothing - the key is did you sell them something or achieve your conversion goal? I ask this question as when you remove the gates in front of people downloading your content, you give up on the idea of the quality of a lead. Sure hardware cycles and disk storage are so cheap that handling leads who may never buy from you is not expensive, but isn’t it always better to deal with people who will buy from you than people who are not interested enough to tell you who they are?
2) You say you have never registered to download anything. Okay - your choice and presumably you have downloaded information and gone back to get more and perhaps even bought something. But when you are dealing with B2B companies (which you may not have been given your stance), you and the company must form a relationship before any sales take place. And forming relationships begins with exchanging names and contact details. I’m sure you hand out your business card to relative strangers, to me this is the same thing.
Direct marketing is all about the numbers. 75% may never download a white paper. But 25% will. Those 25% want the info enough to register for it. That means they are “qualified” prospects and that’s what B2B direct marketing is all about, generating qualified leads.
Hi,
i believe that the key word at this research is IT pros, they are usually people who are well aware of what is going around in terms of technology and their ego is much higher than the average business exec. It would be interesting to see the same research but asking only NON IT pros, who are not familiar with the IT developements at a great extend. I believe results would be way different.
Elias