White Paper Pundit

For most white paper marketers, giving away a free white paper has been one well-established tactic used to generate highly qualified business leads. The hope is that by giving away a free white paper, the paper will go ‘viral’ via social media resulting in thousands of email addresses or additional followers that can be used support of a future marketing activity such as newsletter subscriptions or the promotion of a paid event.

One online marketer has taken a different route with the concept of giving away free white papers. Ad Age, the well recognized media source for the advertising industry has leveraged their free white papers to support of a new revenue stream, their ‘fee-based’ white papers.

Starting last year in November 2009, Ad Age released a free white paper called, “The New Female Consumer: The Rise of the Real Mom”. The white paper was heavily promoted on Social Media sites such as Twitter, and because of its free status, the white paper quickly went viral resulting in hundreds of reTweets, blog posts, and industry articles.

This success was quickly followed by another free white paper released in March 2010 called, “Shiny New Things”, a fairly detailed white paper providing an in-depth analysis about early adopters in the digital product life cycle. Again this white paper quickly went viral in a similar fashion as the Female Consumer white paper, further increasing Ad Age’s exposure as a provider of high quality, marketing-oriented white papers.

Now with two successful white papers under their belt, Ad Age leveraged this new found exposure from their free white papers to introduce six ‘fee-based’ white papers charging from $99 to $249 for each copy. While these papers did not see the same viral response as their free counterparts, nonetheless the white papers were widely promoted via Twitter.

Ad Age recently released another free white paper this month called, “The Reality of the Working Woman“. Again the paper saw another rapid viral response with hundreds of reTweets via Twitter in addition to a wide discussion across several leading B2B blogs.

Now Ad Age’s current fee-based white paper is called, “World’s Hottest Brands” a 70+ page tome with a $695 price tag for the digital version and $795 for the digital and print version. Again, while not as large a viral response as their free papers, this white paper has been heavily promoted on Twitter. It’s too early to see whether this paper will experience the same response as their free white papers or whether it will translate into a large volume of sales at this price.

The question that white paper marketers must ask is, “does the ‘free then fee’ strategy work and could this be a new way to defray some of the costs associated with white paper development and marketing”?

My opinion is that while this strategy may work for a leading industry analyst, spokesperson, or brand, such a strategy probably won’t be as successful for a typical commercial enterprise or niche business. Unless there was a substantial amount of high quality industry research, any business that would execute such a strategy would see marginal returns on their investment.

In this particular case, Ad Age is leveraging their well-established brand and industry recognition to offer valuable industry research to their readership base by charging a fee for their white papers in the hope of generating a substantial return on their investment. In fact, the price tag on these ‘fee-based’ white papers actually enhances its perceived value. Something we get for free is not perceived as valuable as something that we will pay dearly for.

But credit should go to Ad Age for the innovative ‘free then fee’ strategy. By giving away free white papers and promoting them via Social Media each year, they have created an periodic viral awareness campaign for their white papers.

The Ad Age white paper library page also provides the date each paper was released in addition to a free preview of each of their fee-based white papers. Go check it out.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 4:47 am and is filed under Industry Insights, Social Media, Twitter, WP Examples, WP Marketing, WP Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.