High-Tech Communicator

Developing a B2B White Paper Strategy

From time to time, someone will call and say, “I need a white paper. We don’t have any and I have nothing to give people.”

Unfortunately, simply creating a white paper for the sake of having one isn’t an effective use of the time, effort and money. To get the greatest bang for your buck, it’s best to develop a strategy that matches the papers you create to the information requirements your customers have at different stages of their buying cycle. (Of course, other types of content will also be appropriate at different stages of the sales cycle, but I want to focus on white papers here).

The following are four commonly used types of papers that will help your customers through their buying cycle:

Generate awareness

Today, potential B2B customers start their purchase process by doing a web search for information that will educate them about possible solutions to business problems they may face. As a result, it’s a good idea to create a white paper designed to meet this customer need for information. These white papers are typically thought-leadership pieces that describe the particular customer problem and the benefits of solving it using a specific type of solution. 

Because companies may target the same product to different industries or different roles within a particular company and each of these target markets may have different concerns, companies often create different variations of papers for the same product targeting these different audiences. The key is to carefully define these key audiences and their business challenges that you can address, and then educate these audiences about the benefits of the type of solution you offer to their particular role or industry at a business (not technical) level.

Another way to educate your readers at the awareness stage of the buying cycle is to perform primary research and publish the results. Such research often documents the magnitude of a particular business problem, why customers are having difficulties addressing the problem, describing best practices for solving the problem and finding out how many companies follow these best practices.

Often complex products, such as ERP software, address multiple customer problems. In this case, you might want to address key problems one at a time rather than describe all the problems the solution addresses at once. For example, an ERP software vendor might do a series of educational papers talking about how ERP solutions can address different business issues—such as how it improves productivity, enhances business intelligence, improves financial returns and increases collaboration.

Describe the product

Once the customer becomes interested in your particular solution and is comparing yours to other solutions, you’ll need a white paper that describes your actual product. Such a paper should briefly summarize the problem the product addresses, possibly describe the pros and cons of alternative solutions and technologies, then describe your specific differentiators, key benefits and the key features that provide those benefits. Generally, because companies generally provide data sheets to describe the features and benefits of a particular product at a high level, a white paper will tend to describe more technical details for a more technical audience or describe the product in greater depth than a brochure.

Address common questions

During the sales process, certain questions will arise repeatedly. You can create white papers to address these frequently asked questions. For example, one common issue that companies address with white papers is how the product addresses compliance with a particular new regulation or how it fits in with a new technology category. Again, these white papers are typically used when the potential customer is actively involved with the salesforce.

Validation white papers

Finally, toward the end of the sales process, you’ll want papers to reassure your customers that your products actually do what they say they’re going to do and that give customers quantifiable information they can take to their boss as they make their final decision. Papers that are useful support for this part of the sales process might document the total cost of ownership, especially for products like virtualization hardware that promise to dramatically reduce a company’s operational costs. Another variation on this theme is a paper that describes how a customer can measure the return on investment. Such papers look not only costs but also the top line benefits of implementing the solution. Often these papers can be paired with an ROI tool that companies can use to measure the ROI they can expect from implementing the solution in their own environment. Still another variation gives three to five examples of how customers have benefitted from the solution.

These four categories of white papers form the basis of a white paper strategy that will enable you to start meeting potential customers’ information requirements throughout all phases of the sales cycle.

What’s your white paper strategy?

Increase Your White Paper ROI

There’s no doubt about it, white papers take considerable time, effort, and money to produce. Luckily, you can get a significant return on that investment if you know how to make the most of your white papers by repurposing them.  

Here are a few ways you can use the white papers themselves or repurpose the content in them:

• Email campaigns—Many B2B companies use white papers as a valuable “offer” for email marketing campaigns. These campaigns might be designed to either generate awareness or nurture leads that are not quite ready to make a purchase. Many B2B buyers are interested in downloading these white-paper offers because they provide valuable information.
• Webinars—Organizations often either base their webinar on the content in their white paper and/or they will provide a white paper as a “Thank You,” providing attendees with a takeaway after the webinar is over.
• Newsletters—Companies often use email newsletters as a way to keep in touch with existing customers to generate add-on sales or to nurture new leads. White papers can be the source of content for newsletter articles. For example, you can condense all or part of the white paper to create a newsletter article and then provide a link to the original.
• Trade journal articles—You can also shorten thought-leadership white papers into articles that can be published in a trade magazine. While the number of these magazines (and often the space in them) is smaller than it has been in years past, trade magazines still exist and continue to provide third-party validation and credibility for your ideas.
• Sales leave-behind—White papers that contain thought leadership or educational content make good leave-behinds for the sales force.
• Website—Because potential customers see white papers as providing valuable information, they’re often willing to register for them on your website, providing you with valuable contact information. (When using this technique, however, it’s advisable to use as short a registration form as possible to avoid annoying people.) 
• Aggregation networks—Many content-aggregation networks, such as the Tech Target Network, provide white papers on specific topics from a large number of vendors. Many potential customers go to these sites during the research stage of their purchase process to gain more information about solutions to their problems. If you want to be found, it would behoove you to go where people actively look for information.
• Blog posts—Use findings from your white paper as the basis for one or more blog posts and then provide links to them.

While white papers can be a substantial investment of time, effort and money, they also pay big dividends in terms of the myriad ways their information can be used and reused.

How do you repurpose your white papers?

How Do You Define Thought Leadership?

Clients ask me to write thought-leadership articles and white papers all the time. The majority of these pieces define a business challenge and talk about a solution to that challenge that’s basically a generic description of the vendors’ current solution. But recently, I ran into an exception.

I was asked to write about an emerging market segment for a technology vendor. This particular segment is undergoing major, rapid change as a result of new federal guidelines and regulations—as well as a general perception that this industry needs to improve quality and reduce costs.

President Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste—and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you didn’t think you could before.” IT vendors in this space are certainly taking this advice to heart.

A number of vendors are racing to introduce technology solutions to address the issues in the aforementioned industry. However, it takes time to build brand new solutions. The vendor faced the dilemma of whether to write about the capabilities of existing solutions vs. writing about what a long term solution should look like (and keep its fingers crossed that the solution it brings to market matches somewhat with its early thought leadership).

Ultimately, my client decided to produce true thought leadership, a future-looking view of what a solution should look like, rather than sticking to a description of their current solutions. In this way, this company is helping their customers make their decisions based on a long-term view of what could be, rather than limiting their solutions simply to “what is” and what they can sell customers today. To this I say, “Bravo!”

How have you defined thought leadership?

What Makes Content Spread Virally?

B2B marketers increasingly understand that in the early stages of the buying process, customers today find them through internet searches. Vendors realize that they can be found by providing content that addresses customers’ business challenges. And the brass ring for vendors who provide this content is for their content to go viral—and then be passed along from reader to reader so that readership grows exponentially without any effort on the part of the vendor. The question is: Can you control whether something goes viral?

I once worked with an editor who seemed to know the secret. Whenever he wrote his column, he always got tons of reader response. When I asked him his secret, he said he made sure to write controversial opinions—even if he didn’t necessarily believe what he wrote.

Now, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, both assistant professors at the Wharton School, have come up with research that puts some science behind what this editor instinctively understood. In conducting research specifically on what makes content spread virally, they found that after controlling for all other variables, “Content that evokes emotions characterized by high arousal (i.e. awe, anger, and anxiety) is more viral.” While other factors also influence how viral a piece of content becomes, this effect enhances virality even after you take these other factors into effect.

Furthermore, Berger and Milkman found that “The most powerful predictor of virality…is how much anger an article evokes.” After all, the emotion of anger motivates people to act. Clearly, it invoked the readers of the columns from the editor I mentioned. Politicians and cable TV pundits have also long understood the impact of evoking anger both in the polls and in the ratings.

But, of course, anger is probably not the emotion marketers are likely to want to evoke to make content go viral.

So what’s a marketer to do?

Luckily, the Wharton study, which looked at which articles from the New York Times were most likely to be passed along, and then tested these findings with experiments of their own, found that other factors also caused articles to go viral. Some of these are more likely to prove useful to marketers, including:

• Information that invokes awe—invoking a strong, positive emotion can both make something go viral and reflect positively on your product.
• Informative articles that are useful—this validates many arguments that content marketers make about the need to provide informative content.
• Surprising articles—marketers can easily capitalize on this finding if they can find an angle for their content that’s unexpected.
• Placement of the article—while in the New York Times, this refers to an article that appears on the front page or one that’s the lead article in its section. For a marketer, this could refer to high profile placement on a popular content aggregation site, blog or online magazine, or even on their own website.
• Longer articles—the authors of the Wharton study assumed that longer articles are more viral because they contain more useful information. This is in interesting finding and appears to contradict the belief among many marketers that people are looking for shorter content.  
• Articles by more famous authors.
• Articles written by women.

Overall, content that evokes strong positive emotions, as well as anger and anxiety are most likely prompt people to pass along content virally. However, you can also provoke virality by creating content that’s useful or surprising and making sure to place it prominently.

What have been the characteristics of your most viral content?

What to Put Into—and Leave Out Of—a White Paper

In my last post, I talked about why it takes so long to write a white paper. Specifically, I discussed the need to provide context in order to get readers interested in the white paper. In this post, I’ll talk about what you need to put on the page in order to make all this research and context compelling to a reader.

I’ll start with a story. I just finished editing a white paper about the future of business application software over the next decade. The author was an industry expert. The paper contained tons of industry background (in other words, lots of the great context I described in my last post). Every section included a wealth of background references. And yet, as I read through the draft, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the paper was trying to say. While interviews with the author indicated that he had clearly thought about what he was writing and why he was writing it, none of that knowledge made it onto the page.

(Note: I don’t mean to pick on this particular paper or author. I see this problem repeatedly when editing papers written by content experts who are not professional writers.)

This takes us to the second time-consuming aspect of writing white papers. You need to be able to assemble that contextual information in a way that makes sense for the reader and compels them to read further. Here’s what it takes to make sure your paper incorporates the context in a manner that does this:

1. Tell a coherent story. You can’t just include blobs of content. People want to read a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. Usually for thought-leadership papers that educate potential customers at the awareness phase of the sales cycle, the story will need to include the following:

• A beginning that describes a problem that our fearless reader needs to solve. In a white paper, this is usually a business condition that the customer must overcome if he or she is to succeed in meeting business goals. For example, the business challenge might be an uncertain economy that is leading the CFO to clamp down on IT budgets.  
• The middle will often describe obstacles in the way of our fearless reader solving that problem. For example, say your paper is on tape-backup consolidation. Here’s where you can talk about why current tape-backup systems contribute to inefficiency in the business.
• The end is where the reader is introduced to a solution to their problem. Here’s where you talk about all the ways tape-backup consolidation improves efficiency. 

2. Tell the reader why you’ve included each section of the paper. Not only must the paper attempt to tell a story, it must make the different parts of the story obvious. You need to include an executive summary telling readers up front what the paper will be about (so they can decide whether or not they want to read it). You need to come out and introduce each section. As I draft the rough versions of my papers, I often use subheads that state the purpose of each section—problem, obstacles, solution, benefits etc.—so I keep them clear in my own mind as I’m writing. Only when the draft is 95% complete do I change the subheads to more clearly represent the actual content of the paper. I might change a section called “The Challenge” to one called, “The Need to Improve Efficiency.” (I may employ more elegant phrasing but you get the idea).

3. Eliminate anything that does not contribute to the story. One risk of doing a lot of research is that while you’ll gather a great deal of information that’s important as background, but that won’t necessarily apply to the topic at hand. When you go to write the paper, however, you need to be ruthless about cutting anything out that doesn’t directly contribute to your story or the reader will get confused. For example, in my white paper-editing example, a key topic was the future of business intelligence. Yet, in many places, the paper wandered into a discussion of the Internet. While it’s fine in this context to talk about how the proliferation of Internet use will impact business intelligence, I cut out all references to how the Internet impacts telephony.

To summarize, the reason white papers can be time consuming to write is that you must do your homework to get the context necessary to explain the issues thoroughly and then you need to craft a single, coherent story that includes only relevant information.

How do you structure your white papers?

 

Why Does It Take So Long to Write a White Paper?

A while back, I was looking for ways to partner with other writers and asked several potential candidates how long it takes them to write a white paper. I was shocked when they said it would take a couple of days to produce a full-fledged first draft. After all, I have more than 25 years of experience writing articles and white papers, and it still takes me 40 to 60 hours. My process works for me and I’m not about to change it, but this did get me thinking what goes into writing a successful white paper—and why it can take so long.    

There are two parts to the answer, which I’ll cover in this blog post and the next. The first is that a good paper requires considerable research (or deep subject matter expertise) to provide context and the second is that the writer must tells a cohesive story.

The Need for Research

Whenever I start a white paper, I interview the client to get basic information, including the audience, the goals of the project, the one key message the client wants readers to remember, and the key supporting messages (which usually relate to the benefits of the solution being described).    

My job as the writer is to flesh out these high-level messages into something that leads the reader to understand why the problem is important and what steps can be taken to solve it. This involves the following:

Providing context. People don’t know what they don’t know. To get them to read more, you need to start where they are. Describe some issue that they can relate to, and then lead them into a discussion of something they hadn’t considered related to that issue.

For a white paper, this usually means starting with a description of a key strategic issue that the target audience faces. For the past several years, for example, technology companies have addressed the Great Recession and subsequent shaky recovery their customers face. Other papers might address a new regulation that has an industry quaking in its boots.

For example, I recently wrote a white paper for a company that helps hospitals comply with audits from Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance companies. Targeting hospital audit managers, operations managers and CFOs, this paper documented the prospect of an exponentially increasing number of audits that are arising due to the success of Medicaid Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) audits. This particular paper quoted the rising number of audits faced by one medical center. In many other cases, I use quotes from high-profile industry analysis, such as the Gartner Group or Forrester Research to document a trend.  

Opening the knowledge gap. Once you’ve described a problem the reader already knows they have, you can describe a new area where they have a gap in their knowledge. In a white paper that talks about a technology solution, this often means describing what’s missing in existing solutions that customers/readers may already be using. Again, this can require considerable research to adequately describe these problems.

Providing context around the solutions. Once you give people a clear idea of the problems they face and why existing solutions don’t truly address those problems, you can then begin to introduce your take on the solution. And yet, as you discuss different aspects of the solution, you still need to provide enough context so they can understand you.

For example, if I’m writing a white paper on how an ERP solution improves productivity, I might discuss how it centralizes data from throughout the organization and how it automates business processes. I would need to provide the additional context to explain how data was not stored centrally before and what problems that caused (i.e. the need to constantly rekey information into multiple systems, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process).

Providing context is time consuming. Even though I have an extensive background in many types of hardware and application software, it’s important to include the most up-to-date information, including the very latest trends as they apply to a particular industry, role or buyer persona. That can take considerable time sifting through trade-industry articles and interviews to understand the full story. Finding proof points from industry analysis can be time consuming—again because not only must the research be on topic, it also must be timely.  

Even providing context about the individual benefits of a relatively generic solution can take a fair amount of effort. I like to find several sources to ensure that I understand each issue completely and can describe it fully to my readers.

When someone tells me it takes just a few days to write a white paper, it means one of several things. Either they’re an analyst that writes about a very narrow area that they study day in or day out. In this case, it’s easily possible to write a paper quickly. Alternatively, they’re relying on the client to provide all the background, which can be burdensome to the client. Or they’re writing a white paper that does not provide any context—and without context, it’s difficult for readers to know enough to care about your paper.

What do you think it takes to create a good white paper?

Appeal to Different Learning Styles with White Papers

Different people absorb different information in different ways. Some people are highly visual and absorb information through the written word. Some people do better aurally.  

Until recently, marketers used different tactics to reach people with different learning styles. They’d create a white paper for those who prefer to learn by reading, a podcast for those who learn best by listening, or a webinar for those who prefer multimedia and graphics. 

Now, there’s an emerging trend where companies are seeking to address different learning styles in the same piece of marketing collateral by including multiple types of media, such as more graphics, podcasts and multimedia.   

More Graphics

One trend is to make white papers more visually appealing. Jonathan Kanter refers to this as “White Paper 2.0.” The idea is to move white papers away from their traditional boring, term-paper-like presentation to include more visual elements and graphics. The idea is to have interesting information “tidbits” that readers can scan, and that will draw them into the text. Even if readers don’t read the entire text, they will gain valuable information.

Examples of these visual elements include:

• Pull quotes—a sentence or so of interesting text pulled from the document.
• Quotes—these might be quotes from a customer, company representative, or industry analyst that relates to or expands on a theme in the document, but may not be pulled word for word from it.
• Data—You can highlight information that provides data from actual studies illustrating a trend discussed in the main text. For example, in a paper on current challenges in the logistics industry, the paper itself spoke about how new regulations could create a driver shortage while the graphical information provided actual statistics supporting that argument.
• Graphs—You might include charts or graphs that illustrate a point that you make in your text.
• Tables—In one case, a paper spoke about different types of situations where customers could benefit from using the vendor’s software. We included a table that summarized how three different scenarios would play out step-by-step with the vendors’ software compared to how they would have played out without it.
• Slides—often people will pull existing slides from presentations and include them in white papers.
• Illustrations of processes—often graphics will be used to illustrate steps in business processes and how an application can simplify those processes.

Multimedia and More

Another trend, documented in the Eccolo Media 2010 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report is to include links to video, podcasts, webinars or other related multimedia presentations that relate to the topic within an electronic version of the paper. These techniques are proving to be highly effective: 93% of respondents to the Eccolo survey clicked through to these files; and 80% viewed them either “very positively” or “positively.”

So as you develop white papers, think not only of the content, but how you can use visual, audio and multimedia elements to appeal to different types of users and improve the overall effectiveness of your paper. 

How have you used new media to improve your white papers?

Use Stories to Turbo Charge Your Marketing Materials

Once upon a time, there was a multi-billion dollar software company that developed and sold products that manage the IT infrastructure for large companies. This company typically sold its products to IT types using old-school marketing. In other words, its marketing touted features and functions.

One day, a VP came into the company that wanted to experiment with the new-fangled concept (to the company) of marketing and selling not product features, but solutions for vertical industries.

Now this VP of Industry Solution Sales knew that his reputation was on the line. His approach had to work or he’d be out of a job.

So when one of the VPs of Marketing hired me to write one of the company’s first industry-specific marketing pieces, for the financial services industry, the VP of Industry Solution Sales immediately jumped on the phone to call me and make sure I got it right.   

Over the course of a two-hour conversation, not only did this VP of solution sales go over the messaging he wanted to convey, he told me stories to illustrate each message and why it could help customers in that industry. They weren’t long stories, but they helped me understand each point clearly. I was able to turn around and use the stories to convey the material in the piece in an easy-to-understand manner.   

The piece went on to become a smashing success and others in the company used it as the model for many subsequent, successful pieces.  

Why Stories?

Not only was the introduction to this blog about stories, it was itself a story. Stories can be extremely powerful tools when used in marketing materials. Marketing is all about getting people to take action—whether that action is to get more information about your product or to actually purchase it. And stories are a powerful tool for inspiring people to take action.   

The book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Dan Health and Chip Heath offers some fascinating observations about how stories get people to act. The book discusses how stories can provide both the knowledge people need about how to act and the motivation to do so.  

Informing people how to act—By showing step-by-step how someone else dealt with a particular situation or challenge, stories give people enough information so that they can mentally test how they would’ve handled the situation.

When we hear a story, we’re not being passively entertained. We simulate it in our heads. Mental simulation works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. For example, brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, the activate tactile areas of the brain.

Mental simulation helps with problem-solving. Even in mundane planning situations, mentally simulating an event helps us think of things we might otherwise have neglected. Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. Stories put knowledge into a framework that’s more lifelike.

When you’re trying to get people to act, the way you deliver the information is important. Stories are much more effective in getting people to act than simple arguments. If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking people to evaluate that argument, judge it, debate it, criticize it, and then argue back—at least in their minds. But with a story, you engage the audience—you’re involving people with the idea and asking them to participate with you.

Stories also help people focus on potential solutions. Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode. In other words, stories help people solve problems for themselves. And as anyone who has used the Socratic Method knows, people are always more likely to accept an idea if they think they’ve come up with it themselves.

Stories as motivation to act—We empathize with the characters and start cheering them on when they confront their problems. This gives us an emotional connection with the characters. When the protagonist in the story triumphs despite great odds, it inspires us to do the same.

When you think of an inspiring story, you may think that story needs to be a dramatic tale of life and death—like man versus nature (a la “Moby Dick” or even the “Biggest Loser.”) But even seemingly boring stories about solving business problems using a software application can be highly effective if your reader has the problem described. So use stories whenever possible when you want to improve the effectiveness of your marketing materials.

How has telling stories improved your marketing materials?

Plan for White Paper Success

Developing a white paper is a massive undertaking. It involves gathering tremendous amounts of background about customer challenges and industry trends, interviewing content experts about the vendor’s solutions, and then weaving all of this information into a coherent story that compels potential customers to investigate further. With all of the information required, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Creating an outline can help you stay in control of the white paper-development process. 

How does it work?

An outline serves as a starting point.

I start with a high level “30,000 foot” outline that describes the direction the paper needs to take. This outline, which consists simply of a few bullet points, serves as a guide for the type of information that needs to be gathered during the research phase.

For example, a recent high level outline for a project on tape consolidation hardware included the following:   

• Business problem—the need to reduce costs
• Why that’s moving companies toward virtualization and consolidation in general
• Tie in tape consolidation
• Describe cases where tape consolidation provides value
• Detail the ROI of tape consolidation

It keeps the project on track.

A high level outline—approved by all stakeholders—will help keep the project from derailing midstream. For example, if you send the high-level outline to content experts involved in the project before an interview, you can help them prepare and keep them from going off on tangents.   

It serves as a checkpoint.

Once the bulk of the research is completed, you can create a detailed outline. This outline can serve as a checkpoint mid-project to make sure you’re in sync with the writer on the direction the paper is taking and that it includes all the major points required. The benefit of using an outline rather than a rough draft is that reviewers often get hung up on word usage and grammar at an early stage when they really need to make sure the paper captures the big picture. An outline mid-project leads people to look at what’s important.

To recap, if you want to be sure your white paper project stays on track from beginning to end, create an outline.

How have you used outlines?

For Credibility’s Sake, Cite Your Sources

Potential customers frequently look to vendor white papers and thought-leadership pieces as they research new B2B solutions. But these buyers are smart and skeptical. Vendors who hope to influence them need to ensure that that their pieces are credible.  

One of the key ways I establish the legitimacy of an issue or trend I’m discussing in a white paper is by citing independent research. My research often takes me to competitors’ white papers, and I peruse dozens of papers each month.

I’ve observed that while most vendors like to include facts and figures from independent researchers, very few fully cite their sources. More often than not, they say something vague like: “According to a Gartner report.” Many times, the same research is cited repeatedly in different articles and white papers, all without a clear description of the original source.

This cavalier attitude towards citations undercuts the credibility of the white paper or thought-leadership piece, making it less likely to influence potential customers. As a result, vendors unwittingly reduce their return on their (often high) investment in producing their marketing material.   

So how can you maximize the credibility you achieve by citing outside sources and thereby optimize the ROI of your white paper?

Here are a few tips:

• Cite the entire source so that a reader can easily find the complete original document. For example, either include a link to the original document, or include a full description with the title, name of publisher, author, and date, as you would when you create a footnote in a term paper.
• Use recent sources. The definition of recent may vary slightly depending on the speed of change in your industry. However, it’s rarely a good idea to use sources that are more than a year or two old. For example, I concentrate on finding resources from 2011 and 2010 and sprinkle in material from 2009 on those occasions when I’m working on a niche topic with few resources available.  
• Cite independent sources. Look at who’s publishing the report. Often, vendors will sponsor research or even perform it themselves. Decide how close a competitor they are before citing any of their research—otherwise stick to independent analysts, such as IDC or Gartner.

Using independent research is a clear credibility booster for your white papers. But if you want to win over smart and skeptical B2B buyers, make sure you use recent, independent sources and cite them fully.

How do you cite your sources?