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Eliminating Registration Forms?? Possible Paradigm Shift

By Michael Stelzner

Want your white paper to go viral? Yet you still need to collect that lead??

What is a marketer to do?

My friend, David Meerman Scott, is a big proponent of letting your white paper (or ebook) live unrestricted, not bound by registration forms.

However, many marketing and sales folks need leads. Their argument: If you let the paper go you never get the lead.

Is it possible to accomplish both? You might be surprised…

While speaking at MarketingProf’s B2B convention a few weeks ago, I got a chance to chat with the CEO of Vitrium Systems, Peter Nieforth. Peter’s company has an exciting new product called Docmetrics.

In my discussions with Peter, he explained that Docmetrics was specifically designed for white papers.

At WhitePaperSource, we did a review of Docmetrics.

In a nutshell, this new software enhances PDF files with registration forms OR polls that can show up on any page of a PDF file.

For example, you could embed a registration form on page 3 of your PDF. This would allow you to let your white paper go free and still ensure the lead is captured.

If you want to learn more, check out Paul Dunay’s podcast with Peter.

I want to hear from you. What do you think?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:06 am and is filed under Lead Generation, Marketing, Writing White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • David you are entirely right, I even can add nothing. White paper functions as the informative tool for our customers
  • Hey David;

    Good comments.

    White papers are most frequently used when you do *not* know who is reading.

    For example in lead generation programs.

    You might want to check out some of these stats:
    http://www.writingwhitepapers.com/blog/category/statistics/

    Mike
  • David Danielson
    This is an interesting discussion because we have to consider where a white paper fits in the sales cycle. Most often I find my customers want white papers during the evaluation stage, since this is often the case - you already know the person and he knows you.

    The real question is after a your customer reads your white paper, what do you want him to do next. Collecting statistics on this area is much more productive because now you have an interested and motivated friend.

    I think that the function of a white paper is often ignored which is to help our customers learn something they don't already know. If you are the trusted source, customers keep coming back.
  • Rick you are right, its all in the statistics. It would also be based on the various target audiences, the calibre of the clients. I would say that there needs to be both.
  • Rick
    Ideally, one would like to the results of an A/B split test -- leads generated from a web-based registration form for a white paper versus the same lead info collected via Docmetrics using the same white paper.
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