You've done it! This is the last lesson in your short course on White Papers. Imagine your White Paper has been planned, researched, written, and launched. Now you need to know how well it’s working, and how your investment in this core resource is paying off.
In this lesson we will cover:
Let’s make your White Paper earn its keep.
When you’re using channels like your website, social media, and email to distribute your White Paper, it’s easy to get hard data that tells you how well it’s working.
These are a few standard measures you can track, using readily available tools.
Website: For your White Paper landing page (see Lesson 4), you can measure the:
Remember to do this for any blogs or other content you’ve built from your White Paper.
Social media: Hopefully, you’re promoting your White Paper and its spin-offs on social media. You can measure:
Email: You can also monitor how well your White Paper is doing in an email campaign, by measuring:
The best result of all is when a potential customer replies to your email with a question, or even to request a demo or call.
There’s a lot of emphasis on hard data in digital marketing, but qualitative data gives you additional, deeper insights. This is about asking individuals for their thoughts on your content. You can gauge this by:
This kind of information will help you continuously improve your content.
This might be the trickiest question to answer. There’s a simple way to calculate return on investment (ROI) for marketing content. It looks like this:
ROI = ((Sales from content - Cost of content) / Cost of content) × 100
You'll get a result as a percentage. This might be too simplistic, though.
It might be difficult to tie a single piece of content to a sale, because it's a long game that follows your audience across the customer journey from awareness, to engagement, to decision.
That's why ROI is best monitored over time and across an entire marketing campaign. You can also think about it in terms of customer lifetime value (CLTV), which considers how much you're earning from repeat customers - the very best kind.
1. What goals did you set for your White Paper at the beginning?
2. How can you tie those goals to some solid metrics?
3. What tools can you find to track your metrics? (Hint: your website host and social media site might have some tools that are already built-in)
4. Numbers are loud but words also give you information. What are people saying about your White Paper?
You can download the lessons for future reference, and there are general White Paper FAQs here. If you want to commission a White Paper for healthcare or related sectors, I’m here to do the heavy lifting. Get in touch any time.
Gibson, Kate. 7 Marketing KPI's You Should Know and How to Use Them. Harvard Business School Online. February 1, 2024. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/marketing-kpis
Hall, John. How To Measure the Success of Your Marketing Campaigns. Forbes. December 25, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhall/2022/12/25/how-to-measure-the-success-of-your-marketing-campaigns/
Heinrich, Ally. How to Measure Marketing Effectiveness: Six Key Strategies for Success. Harvard Business School Online. February 6, 2025. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/how-to-measure-marketing-effectiveness
Jacobson, Ben. Content Marketing ROI: How to Measure Your Success. Semrush. May 15, 2023. https://www.semrush.com/blog/measure-content-marketing-success/
Wentley, Suzanne. Top 10 Marketing KPI Metrics You Should Track. Constant Contact. February 1, 2025. https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/measure-digital-marketing-impact/