White Papers For Dummies
Overview
A fast and easy way to write winning white papers!
Whether you’re a marketing manager seeking to use white papers to promote your business, or a copywriter keen to break into this well-paying field, White Papers For Dummies gives you a wealth of practical, hands-on advice from one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The fact-based documents known as white papers have been called the “king of content.” No other B2B marketing piece can do more to generate leads, nurture prospects, and build mindshare.
Where white papers were once used only by technology firms, they are becoming “must-have” items in the marketing toolkit for almost any B2B firm. Practically every startup must produce a white paper as part of its business planning.
But writing effective white papers is a big challenge. Now you can benefit from the experience of a
white paper specialist who’s done more than 200 projects for clients from Silicon Valley to Finland, from mighty Google to tiny startups. Author Gordon Graham—also known as That White Paper Guy—provides dozens of tips and tricks to help your project come together faster and easier.
White Papers For Dummies will help you to:
- Quickly determine if your B2B firm could benefit from a white paper
- Master the three phases of every white paper project:
planning, production, and promotion - Understand when and how to use the three main types of white paper
- Decide which elements to include and which to leave out
- Learn the best practices of seasoned white paper researchers and writers
- Choose from 40 different promotional tactics to get the word out
- Avoid common mistakes that many beginners make
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About The Author
Gordon Graham — also known as That White Paper Guy — is an award-winning writer who has created more than 200 B2B white papers for clients from New York to Australia. Gordon has written white papers on everything from choosing enterprise software to designing virtual worlds for kids, and for everyone from tiny start-ups to Google.
Sample Chapters
white papers for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
White papers are the “king of content” that can help any B2B company build mindshare, generate leads, engage prospects, and undercut competitors. But to get powerful results, you need to use white papers effectively. Make sure to provide useful information that can help a business person understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.
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Nothing undermines a good white paper faster than poor design. No matter how compelling and persuasive the text may be, if people can’t read it because of a poor design, they’ll quickly move on. Then all your effort and expense are for nothing.Here are ten down-to-earth tips for anyone designing a white paper.
Your white paper title can make or break it. B2B buyers scan pages of search results to find useful information. Your white paper title is often all that prospects have to go on to make their decision about whether to download or read your white paper. If your title falls flat, they’ll skip right past it, meaning that all the effort you put into creating that document was a waste.
Marketing
A marketing team may know what a white paper looks like, they can create a mess if they don’t have experience developing effective content. Many white papers don’t turn out well, often because they weren’t planned properly from the start.
Your white paper has no call to action
The final sentence of your conclusions should be your call to action, where you outline what you want your readers to do after they finish reading.
Use the right type of white paper for the right challenge: either a backgrounder, a numbered list, or a problem/solution. The following table outlines the features of each type of white paper and gives you an idea of when to use each one.
Characteristic
Backgrounder
Numbered List
Problem/Solution
Definition
A
Your white paper title is often all that prospects have to go on to make their decision about whether to download or read your white paper. If your title falls flat, they’ll skip right past it. Anything you can do to make your title more compelling to your target audience can have a dramatic effect on your white paper’s success.
No effective white paper can be written without research because every white paper must be based on facts and logic, not fluff and hot air. The client assembles all the helpful background he can easily put his hands on and then passes it to the writer. The writer can expect to do some research to support the document he’s writing, likely for several days.
Marketing
A kickoff conference call is one of the magic bullets in a successful white paper project. This can save weeks of stress, communication breakdowns, wasted effort, scrap, and rework. Holding a kickoff conference call creates shared expectations among everyone on the project, promotes harmony on a team, and dramatically reduces one of the most common problems writers report: changes in direction partway through a white paper.
White paper writers work either in-house or as independent freelancers, most often called copywriters. Unfortunately, labor statistics don’t break out this full-time job as a separate profession; it’s even lumped in with screenwriters and poets, who obviously work on quite different projects from white paper writers.
Many white papers are started, but not all are finished, for many reasons — priorities change, new products emerge, people come and go, executives lose interest. Explaining a product in detail can turn up flaws that nobody wants to admit or conflicting opinions that can’t be resolved. How can you dodge these potential problems?
A white paper team includes as few as two people — the client and the writer — and as many as a dozen, if many subject matter experts and reviewers are involved. Choosing the correct people for the team increases the chances of producing a successful white paper.
Step
Who
What
1.1
Client
Identifies need for white paper
1.
Marketing
Just about every white paper needs a few references to back up its arguments and showcase the research behind it. For the writer, keeping sources straight can be challenging. But not doing so defeats the point of finding them in the first place. And if the client is queried later and can’t produce any sources, it detracts from the company’s credibility.
Marketing
The first step in producing a white paper is to create the first-draft text and graphics. Writers, illustrators, designers, and business people understand this step well. This step groups together text and graphics instead of keeping them separate or parallel processes. The visuals in a white paper are vital; in some ways, they’re the most important part.
Marketing
One white paper mash-up that can be quite successful is a backgrounder with a numbered list. The lightness of the numbered list can make a backgrounder more appealing to a wider audience at the middle of the sales funnel, not just the bottom.
When to use this white paper combination
Try this combo when you want to lighten up and extend the reach of a backgrounder with the appeal of a numbered list or to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) on all the competing offerings — and when you can’t spare the time, money, or attention to do two separate white papers.
Marketing
A combined white paper that can work well is a problem/solution with a numbered list. The lightness of the numbered list can undercut the seriousness of the problem/solution and broaden its reach with the promise of a quick read. This mash-up can also appeal to prospects at the middle of the sales funnel, not just the top.
Marketing
When all the reviews come in, the writer can see whether the white paper is a hit or miss and prepare for the second draft. This gives the writer another chance to make it good by incorporating comments from reviewers. This step requires a little patience and tact from the writer, who must recognize that reviewers aren’t professional writers or editors; reviewers are business people doing an editorial task.
Beyond picking the best type of white paper to achieve your purpose and reach your target audience, you need an engaging topic. Likely, you already have some inkling of a good topic or perhaps a set of topics that you can develop into white papers. Identify your purpose, your audience, their sector, and begin from there.
Marketing
This step is a well-understood part of any publishing process. After the writer creates a first draft of the white paper and the illustrator creates the graphics, the reviewers need to comment. And the client has to manage the reviews to make sure they happen in a timely and constructive way. This process must be handled with patience, tact, and sometimes a dash of good-natured humor from everyone.
Your white paper title can make or break it. As the first thing a reader will see, consider this your opportunity to make a first impression; something you can’t do twice.
Stress the benefits of your white paper to readers
Why not tell your readers explicitly what they’ll gain from reading your white paper, right in your title?
As you become more adept at developing white papers, you’ll naturally tend to look for ways to make them more persuasive and memorable. Many of these tips combine both structure and content; you must include a certain element at the proper place in the proper type of white paper (structure) and you must word it correctly to get the best possible results (content).
Marketing
After doing the research, it’s time for the writer to start drafting a six- or eight-page white paper, right? Wrong. An executive summary should come next. Without a direction blessed by the client, much of what the writer drafts could end up discarded. Instead, the writer should provide a short deliverable so the client and reviewers can confirm the proposed direction, usually no more than one page long.
Don’t hurry through preparing your final white paper document, or you may have some embarrassing mistakes to deal with later. In this penultimate step, everyone gets involved — the writer, illustrator (if any), designer (if any), and client.
The writer makes any final changes in the text, while the illustrator makes any last tweaks to the graphics.
Marketing
Most companies don’t have researchers available to help out white paper writers. Some independent writers do hire researchers to do the grunt work of finding the perfect quotes, stats, and factoids to sprinkle through a white paper. And probably more writers should give this a try. This arrangement can be a marriage made in heaven or the exact opposite.
Tomorrow’s white papers will likely incorporate new media beyond text and graphics; they may even move beyond the paradigm of a fixed document into a flexible cluster of information accessed via the web or a mobile app.
No one can predict the exact timetable for this evolution. It will probably occur in fits and starts, with most companies making cautious forays into new territory, while a few plunge ahead to break new ground.
It’s difficult to narrow down what the actual standards are or a white paper. Unfortunately, anyone can call anything a white paper. And people do. No laws or regulations can stop them. For instance, consider the length. Today’s typical white paper is six to eight pages long, a little shorter than in past years.
Few people will read a text-only white paper. You can provide visual relief by using at least one of these text enhancements on every page:
Bullets: Use a small amount of text after each bullet; avoid lists of 20 or more bullets or several paragraphs of text after each bullet.
Headings: Use two sets of headings, big and bold; write active headings to help people skim, scan, and skip.
Marketing
Modern technology certainly isn’t foolproof. One morning, your computer may refuse to boot. Or as you’re cleaning up your hard drive, you mistakenly delete the wrong files. And here it comes, that sickening feeling that you’ve just lost hours or even days of hard work. You need to protect yourself against that.
When clients hire an advertising agency, the client often prepares a creative brief. A creative brief comes closer than anything to a white paper plan and is essentially a document that spells out the terms of reference for this kind of content marketing project.
A creative brief spells out many details to incorporate in that campaign, such as the purpose, audience, main take-aways, key competitive advantages, and any standard corporate messages, color palettes, logos, and the like.
To get your target audience to notice your new white paper, you need to unveil it like a mini-product launch. Try different promotional tactics and repeat as long as they keep working. Don’t abandon promotions too soon, and use all these must-do tactics:
Create a landing page with an abstract
Feature the w
To stay engaging and relevant for audiences of the future, white papers must encompass these new elements and evolve to Generation 3.0. Paper will fade away, and newer materials will be designed for reading and interacting on-screen. Retaining text but adding multimedia and interaction should help engage audiences of all ages.
Marketing
Any real writer can work with paper and pencil, if he has to, or scrawl words on the wall with the end of a shoelace dipped in soot. But everyone uses computers now. So if you ever wonder, “What software should I use for writing? Graphics? Publishing?” the short answer is that you can’t go too far wrong with Microsoft Word.
You know you need convincing evidence for your white paper. But, what exactly does it look like? B2B marketing can be a little more rigorous than those college English essays you wrote; after all, millions of dollars can be at stake.
Use indisputable facts in your white paper
A fact is a concrete and provable reality, as opposed to an opinion, theory, or claim.
Marketing
B2B marketing teams generate all sorts of content to get the word out about their products or services, including white papers, blog posts, brochures, case studies, and e-books. Not everyone knows what sets each type apart from all the rest or when to choose one over another.
White papers vs. blog posts
Most people can tell the difference between a white paper and a blog post.
You may work as a marketing manager and wonder whether your B2B company should be using white papers. Or you may be a white paper writer sizing up a possible client and wondering whether it could benefit from a white paper or two. Here are three simple questions that give you the answer:
Does the company sell something new?
A backgrounder is a very useful type of white paper. It’s a reliable choice and provides straight-forward information. A backgrounder can be the best white paper to in three specific situations:
To promote an undisputed leader
To support a technical evaluation
To supplement a new product launch
White papers promote an undisputed leader
Is your company an undisputed leader in your field?
A numbered list white paper really shines when you need some quick content to promote in a blog, e-newsletter, or magazine — or to meet some commitment in your marketing calendar. Numbered lists, in fact, are the quickest and easiest type of white paper to create. They can present an almost random set of points without demanding any deep logical explanation that connects all the dots.
The problem/solution white paper is gaining popularity all the time as more marketing people realize how effective this format can be. Using one makes sense for any B2B company seeking to build recognition and attract as many prospects as possible. If you have the time and the resources to pour into developing a problem/solution, it can really pay off in a big way.
No matter how many times you check your white paper, you can always miss something. Any mistakes that happen during the design steps can be especially tough to spot. When you get the final PDF of the white paper, arrange to have two or three team members who’ve never seen it before give it a careful proofing on hard copy.
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Many white papers don’t turn out well, often because they’re missing some key structural elements or they weren’t planned properly from the start. Fortunately, if you identify these issues in time, you can save your white paper from being passed over by any prospects.
Boring, nondescript white paper titles
Many potential B2B buyers first encounter your white paper as a short snippet in a list of search results with only its title to go by.
White papers are the “king of content” that can help any B2B company build mindshare, generate leads, engage prospects, and undercut competitors. But to get powerful results, you need to use white papers effectively. Make sure to provide useful information that can help a business person understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.
Here comes perhaps the most fundamental question of all: Why bother with writing a white paper? When done well, white papers are effective instruments for boosting sales and getting through to your target audience.
Why do companies publish white papers?
In general, vendors publish white papers for three key reasons: to generate leads, to nurture prospects, or to help close sales.
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