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    • White Paper Lesson 1
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  • Home
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  • White Paper Lesson 1
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  • White Paper Lesson 4
  • White Paper Lesson 5

Lesson 5: Measure Your Success

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:


  • Quantitative metrics for digital marketing (hard numbers)
  • Qualitative feedback in marketing (how people feel)
  • The bottom line (financial metrics)
  • Questions to think about


Let’s make your White Paper earn its keep. 

Quantitative metrics for your White Paper

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:

 

  • Number of visits to the page
  • Time on page (how long people stay there)
  • Bounce rate (how many people leave without taking any action)
  • Conversion (how many people download your White Paper, or follow your call to action (CTA, see Lesson 3)


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:


  • Impressions (how many people see your post)
  • Engagements (how many people like, comment, share or follow)
  • Click-through rate (CTR, how many people follow the link to your White Paper landing page)


Email: You can also monitor how well your White Paper is doing in an email campaign, by measuring:


  • Deliverability rate (how many emails got to the inbox)
  • Click through rate (as above)
  • Conversion rate (as above)
  • Unsubscribe rate  


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.

Qualitative feedback is valuable, too

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:


  • Collecting comments from social media and customer communications
  • Asking for testimonials
  • Following up with a very short survey. Use only one or two questions that allow a free-text response
  • Talking to your sales team
  • Talking to customers at live events
  • Running a simple focus group


This kind of information will help you continuously improve your content. 

Is your White Paper paying off?

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.  

Questions to think about

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? 

Are you ready to start 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. 

References and further reading

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/

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