How to Make Sure Your White Paper Meets Your Expectations

When I speak with marketing managers at companies who are looking to hire a new writer for a sizeable project like a white paper, most are rightly concerned about whether or not the resulting paper will meet their expectations. After all, many have experienced situations where it hasn’t.

What practices can reduce your risk?

The best way to ensure that the first draft comes as close as possible to meeting expectations is for the writer to produce a detailed outline of the paper. This gives marketing managers and the writer a reality check before the process is too far along while it’s still easy to make changes.

It also improves the overall quality of the paper. When the writer gets feedback on content and flow that’s separate from the actual writing, the writer can better concentrate on the writing itself when producing the first draft. 

What should the outline include? Clearly, there are different outlines for papers designed for different aspects of the sales cycle.

However, one high-level outline I often use for educational/thought-leadership white papers, solution briefs, and many other pieces includes the following:

1.    Executive summary—This is a brief summary about what’s included in the paper so the reader can quickly determine whether it’s something they’re interested in reading.

2.    Challenge—What business challenge is the paper addressing and for what audience.

3.    Why can’t they meet the challenge now—What’s the audience doing now to address that problem and why isn’t that working. You don’t necessarily have to go into great detail here since customers already know their problems and don’t need extensive reminders.

4.    Alternative solutions—Not all papers need to include this section. It is important when you’re introducing a new solution in a market where few good established solutions exist. Areas where I’ve written this type of paper include ones looking at solutions for Intranet security, distributed denial of service attacks, and security for mobile devices.

5.    What’s required in a solution—In a thought-leadership piece designed to generate awareness for a product, it’s best to describe the solution generically, rather than talking specifically about the product. In this way, you put the material in a format that can be used to inform an RFP and point to your product’s capabilities at the same time.

6.    Benefits—The three to five key benefits of the solution and a summary of how you deliver them.

7.    Conclusion/Call to Action--This section should summarize the paper and describe what you want readers to do as a result of reading this paper—whether that’s calling a sales rep, downloading additional resources, or something else.

By producing an outline, a writer can demonstrate relatively early on that the project is going according to plan and is likely to meet your objectives. You also gain a better product because once the content is thoroughly mapped out, the writer can more easily work on ensuring that the writing is the highest quality possible.

What have been your experiences with outlines?

Comments

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