My Annual Tirade: The White Paper that Wouldn’t Go to Bed on Time

 

My 14-year-old daughter has bedtime issues. She puts off her homework for hours and then insists she has to do it or her GPA will suffer. Then there’s the sneaking off the check Facebook and email. Then she needs to wash her face for 15 minutes. Then she needs to pick out corn kernels from her pet rabbit’s food for another 15 minutes. Then she’s thirsty. Then she forgot to give me a field trip form. After all this, maybe she’ll get to bed by 11 p.m. on a good day.

The same is true for some white paper projects. Out of the dozens of white papers I write every year, there’s always one or two projects that simply refuse to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Usually, it works like this:

· First the client takes one direction with one set of messages.

· Then they take another direction with another set of messages.

· Then they take a third direction.

· Maybe the general direction gets set by the fourth try.

The Cause of the Problem

One cause is very articulate people who nevertheless haven’t thought through their messages before they started the project. They think they have their messages. They sound like they have their messages. But when they see them brought to a logical conclusion on the printed page, they realize that that wasn’t what they wanted to say after all. Another cause is when different people or groups in the company have different ideas about what the message should be.

Here’s where my tirade comes in. A professional writer can help shape a company’s message, sharpen the edges, and make it clearer. But ultimately the message has to come from the client and the client has to own the message. The most important prerequisite for any white paper project is that everyone at the company producing the white paper must agree on the 30,000 foot view of what they want to say.

Thinking Through the Issues

To avoid embarking on a project that will not go to bed, you must think through four key issues before you get started. These issues are:  

1.    Audience. Your product can have many audiences. But your white paper can only have one.  That audience can be people with a particular role within a client company, such as a line of business manager or a finance director. It could be a vertical industry. Or it could be a particular buyer profile or persona. But you have to know who exactly you’re talking to or you’ll never be able to define the appropriate message.

2.    Challenge. Your audience will only read your paper if there’s something in it for them. Usually people reading white papers are looking to solve a particular problem. Your white paper needs to be very clear on what problem you’re going to help them solve or no one will read it.  

3.    One key message.  Sixty to seventy percent of the time, companies run into trouble with their white papers because they haven’t truly defined the one message they want to get across with their paper.  Even if your paper is a thought-leadership piece that does not directly discuss your product, your main message will undoubtedly point to your product’s key differentiator for the paper’s audience. If you haven’t defined a differentiator, your white paper will run into trouble because there’s not much of a story to tell.

4.    Three to five key benefits.  The other thirty to forty percent of the time, a paper doesn’t work out because people haven’t defined the three to five benefits they want to discuss in this paper. Sometimes, a product has a very broad range of capabilities—this is a big problem for ERP and related products—and the company is afraid to narrow down the discussion for fear of missing a benefit that will appeal to a particular reader. Other times, the company has established messaging and they haven’t figured out how to tweak that messaging to apply to a particular target market. Whatever the cause of the problem, it’s critical to remember that readers can only absorb so much information. You want to give them only the information that’s most relevant to them.

So, the next time you want to get your white paper to bed at a reasonable hour, start by nailing down the answers to these four questions before you start the project.

How do you get your white papers to bed on time?

Comments

[Robyn Gray]

Great article Cheryl, Thank you
Robyn Gray

[David Perry]

Hello,

We're growing our blog and I came across yours while looking at "what else is out there." I enjoy what I've read so far, as we write for a number of technical clients. Keep up the good work and useful info.

Dave