Enterprise Management 360 is proud to be one of the UK’s top whitepaper resources for the tech community with hundreds of whitepapers available to download on our website. We are now proud to offer an exciting new product to replace the traditional PDF: The Interactive Whitepaper.
Simply put: A whitepaper is a persuasive authoritative, in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution.
How are Whitepapers used in marketing?
They are not a sales pitch, but are well researched and impartial enough to appeal to people on their buying journey. They are also an effective asset as part of a awareness or marketing campaign because they are usually ‘gated’ requiring an email address for download.
As whitepapers are more serious in tone than an ebook or a blog and are ‘problem solvers’ they also tend to be quite hard to read and sometimes fail to hold the reader’s attention. The problem is that although we still need whitepapers in the industry, the format desperately needs an update. This is where Interactive Whitepapers come in.
What is an Interactive Whitepaper?
An interactive whitepaper takes a passive reading experience of a PDF and transforms it into an engaging and dynamic user journey.
Interactive elements such as assessments, infographics and polls can be embedded to provide a customised journey through the content – helping the user to arrive at a more relevant conclusion or solution based on the input provided throughout the experience.
For example, if we take a complex topic that has many different solutions depending on the user’s criteria, a branch tree diagram can be used to construct a user journey with multiple outcomes. Prompts and questions are used to carve a unique path that skips all the unnecessary information and gives the reader a solution that is unique to their problem.
In short, an Interactive Whitepaper, actively involves the reader in the education process of your whitepapers message, cutting out all the irrelevant information and allowing the reader to get straight to the point and gather the information needed to assist their buying decision.
We have found that Interactive whitepapers have proven to be a lot more effective in generating qualified leads than traditional whitepapers, for our own campaigns we have seen an average increase of 150 – 200% more leads, with an added benefit to gather more closely targeted prospects by extracting more information from the asset.
By adding interactive content to your marketing mix, you can increase prospect engagement by as much as 50% click rates, 80% content completion rates and lead form conversion above 45%.
An interactive whitepaper is an effective asset as part of a lead gen campaign, and has shown that the extra level of engagement produces results.
Content Marketing Institute (CMI) conducted a survey from their B2B content marketeer audience of 20,000 in 2016 and produced the following results to support the rise of interactive content: