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Does this sound familiar to you? You’ve put together a tremendous white paper on the academic merits of your fund. You’ve poured countless hours into gathering research, crafting elegant prose, tracking down sources, editing, revising, and designing the final product. When it’s completely finished and every one has signed off, you post it to your website and wait for the new leads to roll in.
The problem is, they don’t. The handful of friends you’ve passed it around to tell you it’s compelling and well-written. Your colleagues rave about it over lunch the next day, but no one else comes knocking: no new investors, no leads, no reporters looking for a quote. The fact of the matter is, you’ve got a distribution problem. So what are you to do? Get started on another research paper?
The reality is you’ve already got all you need right in front of you: your white paper. Those 15-20 pages of dense, technical prose can be repurposed, massaged, and bent into shape to suit a number of mediums and gather eyeballs to your content , your firm, and attract new investments in the process.
To improve your company website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you might start by breaking your white paper up into logical chunks, altering the language as necessary, and posting it as a series of blog articles. Each blog on its own won’t give away every nuance of your research paper, but it will undoubtedly draw more visitors because the information will be in bite-sized chunks.
You may also consider editing a portion of your research paper (or shortening the whole piece) for consideration as a submission article . Carefully consider what slice of readers and investors might be interested in the subject matter you’ve written about. Is your piece more retail-focused, or is it more of an institutionally-oriented article? This will determine what outlets you approach as potential publishers of your submission piece.
Related: If Content Is King, Video is Emperor
Then the problem becomes: how to draw visitors to those blog articles or submission pieces? Now, this next piece of the distribution puzzle may vary depending on your firm’s comfort with social media , but it can be very helpful indeed to leverage the power of this distribution channel in this next step. Social media messages are by their very nature short, pithy, to the point. They are designed to provoke a need to click the headline—in other words, “click bait.” If the title of your headline or social media post is purely informative, it’s not doing its job. You need to leave out a key piece of information to create a truly click-bait-worthy post. You’ve seen posts and ads like this all the time around the internet: “This one weird trick helps factor investors boost returns” “Are you prepared for the next bear market? Factor investing might be the answer.” And so on. Different platforms will dictate different approaches to headline and post writing: Twitter and LinkedIn each have their nuances that are better left for another blog post. Another avenue you may explore if you want to further boost engagement is paid social media posts.
For now, just remember, if you have a wealth of long-form content, it’s a simple matter to gather more eyeballs to it by repurposing it for other mediums.