White papers, properly executed, are the gold standard for a specific type of marketing in which you convince prospects that they should do business with you because you know so much. Professional white paper writers abound in Silicon Valley and other tech-heavy territories and they typically charge $10,000 and up to write a document that ends up as 10 or more dense 8 ½ x 11 inch pages. But the rest of us may be called upon to write a white paper as part of a larger assignment for a client, and today’s tips are for the writer in that scenario. These tips are also for you if you are a marketer who would like to produce a white paper internally.
1. A white paper is not a selling document. If your insights are really just a bunch of sales points, that’s not a white paper and positioning them as such will do you more harm than good. Save the product benefits for the product brochures. Your white paper should describe a problem that people in your prospect’s situation might face, or a new business or technological development they need to know about, that just happens to be relevant to your product. It’s ok to put a tie-in summary section at the end but not really necessary; your reader will connect the dots.
A good example is a white paper I wrote for EMC called “When Content Matters”. Content is structured information inside a database, which is managed by EMC’s Documentum product. Microsoft had just come out with a light version of content management in its latest version of Office, and our job was to convince the reader that their content was so important it should never be trusted to such a “basic” solution. Documentum was hardly mentioned until the end. Instead, the paper built a case for the complexity and diversity of content so that the reader became concerned and disoriented and was yearning for an escape from Microsoft—which we eventually provided.
2. A white paper is not an academic document. Some of my readers may be old enough to remember “white papers” that used to be trotted out by American presidents and politicians to support a war or other untenable proposition. They were supposed to be authoritative because they appeared scholarly, and the same goes for marketing-driven white papers today. But never forget that you are actually selling something, behind the scenes. In fact, some of the most effective papers I’ve seen are documents that take actual research (complete with the footnotes and raw interviews or statistics) and summarize it in a way that is understandable to a lay reader; along the way, you can politely steer them into the appropriate point of view.
3. A white paper is written for a specific audience. Academic studies often begin with the desire of the researcher to solve a specific problem which can be of very narrow interest. You, the marketer, need to begin with the audience and figure out what is important to them. Often the same information can be presented in different ways to different audiences. For example, I did two papers to educate physicians about electronic health records (EHR). One was sponsored by a peer association and focused on how EHR was going to help them practice better medicine. The other was for a medical billing company and focused on how EHR was going to increase profitability and help them get paid faster by Medicare.
4. A white paper should capitalize on the expert knowledge within your client’s organization. Every company is full of subject matter experts, and this is your/their opportunity to turn that knowledge base into something fungible. Product managers, for example, spend their lives explaining technical features in a non-technical way. Sales managers understand the pain points that move prospects to a buying decision. Customer service people know the problems that cause the most headaches in the daily lives of your customers. Interview a few of these subject matter experts and the white paper may start to write itself.
5. You can create a sort of “poor man’s white paper” by mining existing resources. These might include third party analysis or reprints which you have permission to use, combined with a few sales documents which are meaty instead of full of fluff. You might even consider including a product quick-start guide if it’s well written. The combination of resources becomes your “fact kit” or “info kit” which, appropriately presented, can become much more than the sum of its parts.
And if you don’t have the budget to pay for reprints, an alternative is to put the info kit on a web page (the fulfillment page after the prospect has registered on a landing page) with brief descriptions and links to the source documents. Presto, now you’ve created a white paper without actually writing for one and without paying anybody. Wait, don’t do that. Hire a starving copywriter instead.
Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.