One of the 10 commandments of B2B marketing - handed down over, well, a couple of years at least - is that you should give away free reports and guides. This, apparently, is a way of capturing potential clients or something.

The idea is this: offer a free guide/report - capture a name and email address - follow up with, um, stuff - convert that person into a client. Something like that, anyway.

And you still see bunches of sites with PPC landing pages that are geared around getting a prospect to download a ‘free, impartial’ guide. And, hey, I’m sure their download numbers are great.

It’s just a shame that these free reports and guides are very, very far from impartial. In fact, they can often be damaging to the credibility of the company that produces them.

That presumes, of course, that the person downloading the report ever reads the damn thing.

My view is that - more often than not - this kind of stuff is a pretty poor way to engage a potential client.

OK. I accept that the B2B sales process can be a long one. But I certainly don’t see giving away ‘free’ guides and reports as an effective method of communicating with prospects in the 21st Century.

After all, if you endeavour to produce a genuinely impartial guide, then you are not going to be able to pitch the unique values of your company properly. Conversely, if you produce an guide that is really designed to promote your services, then people will see through it in a flash.

We’re all media and marketing savvy these days. Such transparent ploys as ‘free reports’ and ‘free guides’ should be left back in the last century where they belong.

Instead, you should persuade visitors that you can help at each stage of the buying cycle. At the very least, your visitors should feel that you will give your expert advice freely and with no obligation. However, that requires more than just allowing visitors to download some PDF report that may - or, more likely, not - address their specific needs.

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