Part 6 in a series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, the outline for a white paper on your company’s complete transformation.
Have you been with an organization long enough to remember:
- when things were a mess, and what everybody had to go through to make things run as smoothly as they do now?
- how you used to be known for your parts, and how your customers came to know you as partners?
- when the market associated you with low price, and how you got it to associate you with high quality?
These represent Transformations, seismic shifts in the organization that set a new course. Almost every organization goes through these sooner or later, some more painfully than others.
Maybe you’re the last buggy whip company, and the sun is setting on your addressable market. Or maybe a management consultant has your CEO’s ear and puts in place a new direction and policy. Maybe you get hip to the fact that in five years nobody is going to pay you to do what you’re doing today.
Once you’re through the tunnel, you’re ready to tell the world about the crucible you’ve been through, and how much stronger you are as a result. You’re ready for a white paper outline that explains How We Rescued Ourselves.
Title and Summary
A Transformation white paper is a different kind of content.
You need to make readers feel as if they’re getting a peek in the kitchen at the best restaurant in town. If you pull this off, you’ll have a paper that makes for excellent social media content. Readers see past the façade of ordinary marketing and have the chance for a deeper conversation with you. Tip them off to this in the title and summary; for example:
- What Goes Down Can Come Up – Amalgamated Fuzz Transforms Its Sales Process
- How Acme Paper Took ISO 9001′s Benefits from Production to the C-Suite and Back
- Customer Input Takes Over, and Skater Industries is the Better for It
The Landscape
Count on a varied audience for this paper: customers, prospects, investors, journalists, and certainly competitors will read it, so devote a few paragraphs to the state of the industry and the problems faced by most organizations in your position.
- Tell this as a story, not as a datasheet or a newspaper article. Use conflict-driven business writing to draw readers in, and get to the conflict as soon as practical.
- Avoid using terms like “challenges” and “pain points.” Everybody knows you’re talking about business problems, so call them as much.
- Charts, diagrams, images and even quotations work well as complements to the main body of text.
Precipitating Event or Watershed
Who or what introduced the plan for changing things? Did somebody become fed up? Did somebody raise Cain at a shareholder meeting?
It’s important to describe this as economically yet smoothly as possible, because it’s the pivotal point in the story. Remember, your readers want to know what’s happening backstage, so give them what they want. (It may require some dancing to get this past your execs, but it really is important. Besides, any embarrassment is in the past, and you can anonymize anything too uncomfortable.)
How We Rescued Ourselves – The Transformation Process
How did you get this all done? What did it take? What processes did the organization put in place? Who had to be accommodated? What compromises were needed?
You spend this section telling readers, “Here’s how we did it. It wasn’t easy, but we got through it.” You may even give them enough information so that they too can do it.
Stay in story-telling mode.
Other End of the Tunnel
Here’s the point of the Transformation – indeed, of the entire paper: Yours is a new and improved organization now. List the reasons why.
Using as much subtlety as possible, you want readers to understand that you’re now a better company with which to do business. You’ve done the hard, internal work to purge inefficiencies and the things that separated you from your customers. You itemize the data points that support this:
- 28% fewer customer support calls
- 93% on-time arrivals
- 7% annual growth for the last three years
- a stock price that outperforms competitors by 4%
- Malcolm Baldrige awards
Conclusion and Follow Us
Still resisting the temptation to pat yourself on the back, draw some conclusions about what comes next: More Transformation? Additional phases? New business units?
You’ve taken them through the kitchen in our restaurant. It’s easy to blow it here and efface your good story with nonsense about how great your organization is; keep in mind that nobody cares about your company or products, because they’re preoccupied with their business problems and how you can help solve them. Your well-told Transformation story leaves them no doubt.
Be sure to invite readers to follow your blog, newsletter, video and webinars. If you’ve done a good job, readers will want to keep an eye on you for more insight.
The result is a first-pass white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see where you’re taking the readers of your Transformation white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.
Next, the Kitchen-Sink Outline.
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: Richard Moross CC2.0
Part 5 in a series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, the outline for a white paper that rationalizes a big change in direction.
Do you remember:
- when Nixon went to China?
- when the Supreme Court ruled that separate was not equal?
- when AOL started allowing unsolicited e-mail?
- when Feedblitz was free?
- when Google started including paid advertising alongside search results?
These represent big changes in behavior – changes that many people welcomed and that left many people out in the cold. Behind all of these changes was an entire landscape of forces that brought them about.
Most organizations, wary of alienating the people left out in the cold, try to explain those forces in order to control potential damage to their reputation and try to keep losers in the fold.
The Why-We-Did-This white paper serves this purpose. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a good consolation prize.
If you need to build this kind of paper to deliver your message of rationalization, consider the Customers-Industry-Us white paper outline.
Title and Summary
You can refine your title and summary once you’ve finished the paper, but I recommend that you smith working versions early on and use them to guide you while you write. Couch them in weighty terms without sounding bombastic, for example:
Naturally, those affected adversely by your decision will look at the title and summary (and the entire paper) and grumble, “whattaloadabull,” which is their prerogative. If you write with them alone in mind, your paper will come off as defensive rationalization instead of the positive explanation you want to convey.
Introduction
Describe, as clinically as possible, the forces behind your decision. Consider these two categories:
- Opportunities Too Good to Pass Up
- Threats Too Ominous to Ignore
Mind you, if you exaggerate, you’ll lose your ideal readers; nevertheless, stress the highly compelling elements in each of these groups.
What This Means for Customers/Constituents
Everybody understands actions motivated by customer preference, so this is the first line of rationalization. You’re not hiding behind the things your buying public asked you to do, but they’re the ones who keep the industry afloat, so taking action in their interest is just common sense.
What This Means for the Industry
You’re not alone in the industry, of course, so here you explain what these forces mean for your entire industry: longer shelf life, less pollution, lower health care costs, better ROI.
Your point in this section is that yours is not the only organization in your field that is subject to these forces, so even if your big decision is unpopular, your competitors will probably soon be acting similarly.
How We Are Responding
Given the combination of these forces and your own peculiar advantages (technology, market access, friends in high places), you declare without apology or reservation
Why We Did This
with undertones of
What Else Could We Do?
You want to elicit from your ideal readers the response
Yes, well, in that case, the change makes sense.
Mention your new direction and how it will manifest itself in your products and services, but resist the temptation to use brochure-type language, which will only annoy readers.
Conclusion and Follow Us
Populate your conclusion with the big concepts you’ve floated throughout the paper, especially important terms. Restate the forces and the flow of your argument through customers, the industry and your own organization.
Be sure to invite readers to follow your blog, newsletter, video and webinars. If you’ve done a good job rationalizing your change in direction, readers will want to keep an eye on you for more insight.
The result is a first-pass white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see where you’re taking the readers of your Why-We-Did-This white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.
Next, the Transformation White Paper and the We-Rescued-Ourselves Outline
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: USDI Bureau of Land Management CC3.0
Part 4 in a series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, an outline for a buckshot-in-the-air white paper that scares readers toward innovation.
What do you think about scaring your prospects and customers a little bit?
How do you feel about getting them off the dime to buy your products by prodding them or making them feel uneasy? Can your marketing communications writer pull that off in a white paper?
There are subtle ways in which to do that, and the innovation white paper outline shows you how to nudge readers out of their comfort zone and into action.
You just need to put a little Buckshot in the Air.
Title
Use a title that conveys urgency:
- Don’t Look Now… – Engineering Managers and the Coming Wave of Environmental Compliance
- What’s Spam Got to Do with It? Network Administrators Fight This Year’s Threats with Last Year’s Technology
The paper will embody some tension and conflict (see David Meerman Scott on conflict-driven business writing), and the title has to set the stage for it.
Summary
You’re probably going to describe your own innovative remedy for the problem, so do the right thing and prepare readers for that in your summary.
Being honest about it is better than pretending that it’s an independent, authoritative resource, and then stealthily injecting advertorial late in the game. Readers don’t like that.
Introduction
Keep your goals modest as you introduce the body of the paper.
- Your product will not overcome global warming; it will improve scrubber technology.
- It will not make malware evaporate; it will strengthen security at e-mail gateways.
- Your service will not fix the Great Recession; it will help cautious employers screen middle-manager candidates.
Don’t bother discussing the overarching topics of global warming or malware or the economic crisis, because your readers already know about them. Devote a couple of precious, introductory paragraphs to the subset of the problem that your product addresses.
The Buckshot in the Air
Your readers are comfortable with their understanding of the problem and their approach to it, so you need to describe the danger they face in relying on that old-think.
Two uncontrollable forces make up the Buckshot in the Air (as in, “something or somebody pursuing and shooting at you”): competitors and changes in the industry.
Your readers are afraid of these forces because they cannot predict them. You cannot predict them, either, but you have a new way of staying one step ahead of them. That is why people are willing to read your white paper.
Consider a personalization technology that helps people discover interesting mobile content without hours of fruitless searching on the phone. The ideal readers are wireless carriers, who already enjoy a tight billing relationship with users. The Buckshot in the Air might look like this:
- You don’t own all the data on your users. There are intermediate parties providing good content to your users, and they own very valuable information about your users’ preferences.
- A new category of competitor is arising, populated by last year’s strategic partners.
- You can try to direct your users to interesting content, but if they don’t find it relevant, you’re doing them – and yourself – more harm than good.
Does that feel as through you’re pushing the envelope? Are you afraid that your readers will think you’re bawling them out? Are you wary of sticking your nose into their business?
You are pushing it, you may be bawling them out and your nose is in their business.
This is what it looks like when you stop croaking about your products and start focusing on the problems you solve for your customers.
The Innovation
Here you describe the innovation toward which you’ve scared your readers:
- how it differs from other approaches
- how it will give readers a leg up on the competition and help them stay ahead of industry developments
- why it is important to find out more about the innovation as soon as possible
Of course, most companies want the paper to describe their own innovation, and this is where they begin naming their own name. If you prefer, you can keep this section anonymous, then drop your name in the last paragraph of the conclusion.
(In the pure sense of a white paper, they should refrain from naming their products, using the paper instead to build their own authority quietly. In practice, though, few can justify the time and expense involved in producing a good paper without talking about themselves and their products. Good marketing communications writers can balance the tasks of naming names and focusing on the customer’s problems.)
List a few technical details in a subsection (e.g., “How Does [the Innovation] Work?) – just enough to add some depth to the paper and to whet the reader’s appetite for more.
Conclusion and Follow Us
Recap the threats and the new-think for dealing with them. If you’ve left your innovation nameless up to now, mention it in passing in the conclusion.
Be sure to invite readers to follow your blog, newsletter, podcasts and webinars. If they like the way you look at their business problems in the paper, they’ll want to keep an eye on you for more insight.
The result is a first-pass white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see where you’re taking the readers of your innovation white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.
Next, the Why-We-Did-This White Paper: Customers-Industry-Us Outline
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: Major Nelson (CC 2.0)
Part 3 in a series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, an outline for a white paper when you need to set the record straight.
Sometimes you’ve just got to tell them that they’re wrong and you’re right. With the right structure, you can vindicate yourself in a well-crafted white paper.
Are you doing something that your competitors are positioning as controversial or, worse yet, wrong? Has your brand sustained “collateral damage” from one of your partners, customers or vendors? Is somebody calling you names and saying bad things about you on the playground?
When you sit down with the team and begin talking about damage control and ways to salvage your reputation, think in terms of seven myths that you’d like to refute. If you don’t have seven, pick four or five. These form the backbone of a solid white paper outline.
Title
Your title – or at least your subtitle – should mention the number of myths and the subject matter; e.g.:
- The Seven Myths of Highly Effective Plaintiffs’ Lawyers
- 10 Myths about Network Video
- The Five Myths of Generic Competition
(Search results suggest that 10/ten is the most popular number of myths to debunk, but you may not have that many.)
Summary
Keep your summary brief. Your readers know that the myths are just ahead, so don’t slow them down unnecessarily.
Background
Whether it’s ping-pong diplomacy, deep-water drilling or winning Middle Eastern hearts and minds, keep in mind that part of your audience needs a bit of education first.
Set the stage by describing what you do and how you came to do it. Include a section on measurable progress and results.
The Myths
State each myth, then refute it. Your goal is to refute the myths with statements that are memorable and defensible.
If your childhood literacy program affected 125,000 students – and you can prove it – emphasize that with a comparison to the population of Topeka. Or if 15,000 commuters are using your alternative-energy vehicles in a year, describe it in terms of sparing the country’s dependence on foreign oil for two entire days.
If applicable, refer to your detractors by citing articles or presentations in which they’ve cast doubts on your work. Take the high road in mentioning them, even if they’ve been less than honorable when they’ve mentioned you.
Conclusion and Follow Us
Recap the common thread among the myths and among your counterarguments. Be sure to invite readers to follow your blog, newsletter, podcasts and webinars; if they’ve moved closer to accepting your side of the story, you want to build relationships with them as well.
The result is a first-pass white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see where you’re taking the readers of your seven myths white paper and add or modify myths. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.
Next, The Innovation White Paper: the Buckshot-in-the-Air Outline
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: believekevin
Part 2 in a continuing series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, an outline for white papers that guide readers through revolutionary change.
This white paper outline is about The Revolution that your new ideas and technologies ignite in your customers’ organization.
Suppose you want your prospects to:
- replace a zillion spreadsheets with a customer relationship management (CRM) package
- move from a central headquarters to a virtual structure
- switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs
- change from a traditional phone system to one based on the Internet (VoIP)
When your product or service causes a seismic shift in how your buyers do something as business-integral as place a phone call, you should create a story around it that tells them what they’re in for. A revolutionary change is going to affect People, Process and Technology, and this is the structure on which you’ll base your white paper.
Title
Summary
The same things that apply to the white paper outline for the educational white paper apply here. Establish the people-process-technology theme in the summary and maintain it in your structure throughout the paper.
IMPORTANT: Avoid talking about your product or service by name. This white paper outline is about The Revolution that you occasion, but it’s not specifically about your features and functionality. Leave those for your brochures.
Then dive in. Assume your readers already know what has their hair on fire, are familiar with The Revolution, and want to know how it is going to affect their…
People
First talk about people. Describe how to sell the revolution to different groups in the organization, because if this doesn’t happen smoothly, then process and technology won’t matter very much.
Use a series of quotations – real and imagined – to give a voice to objections, warnings, praises, recommendations and water-cooler talk about The Revolution:
- “We don’t need agile development because our release cycles are so long.”
- “Our QA staff is stretched too thin as it is. The added workload of migration would break us.”
- “We want to spend less on trade shows but aren’t sure that social media is where we should put those dollars.”
- “We’ve already switched to authoring in DITA/XML tools, but our team is still doing things pretty much the same as before, only more slowly.”
- “We need to get our overseas offices on board with buying postage off the Web.”
You’ll build the People section around these quotations, ending with a brief segue into…
Process
The Revolution will introduce new vocabulary and new workflow to your readers’ organization. In this section, define that vocabulary in your own terms (this is stealth branding) and outline that workflow as you’ve seen it play out with your other customers.
For example, client Service-now.com reinforces the message that the most successful implementations of its IT service management platform rely on putting processes in place first. Outline these processes in this section as a series of easy-to-read steps.
Technology
Assuming The Revolution has a technology component, it comes last in the white paper outline. Now that you’ve addressed the People’s fears and the novelty of Processes, describe the software, hardware, machinery, materials and capital expansion required:
- cooling towers
- data center equipment
- earth-moving equipment
- gas turbines
- rubber bands and staplers
- Linux servers
If The Revolution is a service, explain the steps for implementing it:
- 30-minute interviews with executive staff
- recorded depositions
- subterranean termite inspections
This isn’t the place for the bill of materials, but you should list anything required to get The Revolution going successfully in terms that make both business and technical sense.
What Can We Expect from The Revolution?
List some of the business and technical benefits customers have experienced. Use pull-quotes. Refer and hyperlink to case studies and success stories, but soft-pedal mention of your product or service, because the essence of the paper is still The Revolution. Don’t worry: your readers know where to find you.
Conclusion and Follow Us
Use these sections to briefly tie up the white paper outline and invite readers to follow you. Your “Follow Us” section should be boilerplate, with the usual pointers: social media, phone, Web, e-mail.
Again, let other marketing pieces specifically describe your product or service. The goal of this white paper is to convince readers that nobody knows more about The Revolution than you do.
How about that? The result is a white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see the path down which you intend to take the readers of your revolutionary white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.
Next: The Vindication White Paper: Seven Myths Outline
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
Part 1 in a continuing series of white paper outlines, each with a different structure and focus. Here, an outline for white papers that educate readers on new technologies.
If you’re writing a white paper for yourself, you can get away without writing an outline first, but if other people will approve the paper, you need a white paper outline. Period.
In other posts about white paper outlines, I’ve explained this. The outline is to your white paper project what blueprints are to a construction project: they demonstrate how you understand the objective of the project, and they act like a skeleton that you flesh out with content.
‘Nuff said.
It’s All in the Structure
Readers crave structure. It’s how they follow along. If they can’t figure out the structure in your paper, they think you’re rambling. Literary authors (and some sportswriters) can get away without structure, but don’t try it in marketing communications.
Also, focus on the structure that makes the most sense to your ideal readers – depending on what they’ve come to expect in a white paper – more so than on the structure that appeals most to you.
- You want to inform and persuade, so your structure needs to support those goals.
- Your readers want you to solve their business problem, not tell them how smart you are, so show them how you can solve it.
The structure in your white paper outline is an important part of this.
A White Paper for Educating
Suppose your product or service does something completely new (or does something old in a completely new way). The kind of thing that causes your prospects to ask, for example,
You mean I can make phone calls anywhere for free?
You mean I can have my DNA mapped?
You mean I can double the capacity of my hard drive?
You’ve got some educating to do, and your first white papers should follow the Background-Trends-Emerging outline:
Title
Your title answers the reader’s first question: “Is this worth my attention?” Don’t spoil a good white paper with a lousy title; this kind of paper needs a title that grabs attention without straining credibility. Reinforce it with a good subtitle as well:
The Doctor is In…Your Phone – Testing and Transmitting Blood-Sugar Levels over Wireless
Starting the entire project with your title is not a bad idea, but don’t weld yourself to it, because the paper may evolve in a different direction.
Summary
Start with a couple of paragraphs on what the paper covers, to answer the reader’s second question: “What am I going to get out of this?”
Many marketing communications writers wait until the end of the project to do the summary, but I suggest sending a tentative one with the outline. It helps avoid misunderstandings about message and direction.
If you plan to discuss your own products in the paper – not the ideal course in an educational white paper – mention that in the summary instead of springing it on the reader on page 8.
Background and Problem
Sketch out a few bullets on how the business problem came to be. Write only about things you’ll need later in the paper, not about every conceivable market condition.
By the way, if you’re not careful, you’ll lose your readers in this section. They’re scanning to avoid things they already know and don’t care about, so sketch the background in a way that makes it easy for them.
Finally, phrase the problem in a way that meshes with your title:
IT managers are stuck in an Optimization Triangle, spreading scarce improvement-resources among business process, infrastructure and users.
If that’s the problem you want to emphasize, and if it doesn’t support your title, then change your title.
The problem statement, a pivotal point in the paper, is where you move toward conflict-driven business writing and depart from brochure copy.
Existing Products and Market Trends
Next, list 3-4 ways the industry usually deals with the problem, and the relative dis-/advantages of each:
- More deep-water drilling
- Cap-and-trade
- Tax-based conservation incentives
Then, mention market trends that threaten to make these existing solutions obsolete in the long run:
- Sooner or later, oil will run out.
This puts your readers on notice that they cannot afford to stand still. It’s another pivotal point in the paper.
Emerging Technology
Something new is on the landscape, though, and here you describe the technology behind your product.
Educating readers about a new category is not the same thing as telling readers about your products, so stay away from self-promotion. Outline a few bullets that describe how the new technology addresses the old problems better than the existing products do, while accommodating market trends.
If you really need to mention your product, couch it in terms that suggest, “We’ve seen this coming and here’s what we’re putting in place. It may not be ideal for every organization, but this is how we think the market is evolving.”
For More Information, Follow Us
Invite readers who have made it this far to follow you. That says, “We know that you may not buy from us (yet), but keep an eye on us for the day when you do.” The marketing writer who understands “following” is your biggest asset here.
Emphasize social ways for your readers to keep tabs on you: blog, Facebook, Twitter, discussion groups. Add your phone and URL for good measure, but remember that few people use an 800-number or a Website for serious following.
The result of this process is a white paper outline you can circulate. Your reviewers will be able to see the path down which you intend to take the readers of your educational white paper. Once you have their feedback, you can start on the draft.
Next: The Revolution White Paper: People-Process-Technology Outline
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: justiNYC
Don’t you wish you could be inside your reader’s head as he reads your content? What text could you throw away? What text could you monetize?
Active listening is difficult. In fact, it’s exhausting, especially if you’re new to it.
Do you know people who practice active listening? You’d know if you did. They begin their sentences with clauses like:
- “If I understand what you’re saying, you want me to…”
- “What you’re telling me is…”
- “You’re saying that you…”
Relationship counselors recommend active listening techniques because the most important question in interpersonal communications is:
Do you understand this the way I intend for you to understand it?
But What Are You Thinking About?
There is a similar question, which skeptical people like me wonder about, and which shy people like me rarely pose:
What are you thinking about while I’m talking to you?
Probably not about what I’m saying.
Now think about that dynamic and your content. Don’t you want to ask your prospects:
What are you thinking about while you’re reading my white paper/case study/Web page/collateral?
Maybe your marketing communications writer did a perfect job creating valuable content, and your ideal reader understands your message and your products exactly the way you’d intended. But that still doesn’t guarantee that the reader’s mind isn’t wandering as he reads your paper, does it?
Magical Window in Your Content
What if you could embed some kind of magical, interactive window on page 6 of your document that would connect you to the reader in real time? Your reader turns from page 5 to page 6, and your head pops out of a small frame in the middle of the page.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” you say, “but would you mind telling me what you’re thinking about right now?”
If your marketing writer has really done her job, of course, the reader will look quizzically back at you, surprised you would even pose the question. If it’s a white paper on solar power technology he’d say, “Why, I’m thinking about the solar panels installed on the roof of my company’s parking structure.” If it were the letter to the shareholders in your annual report, he might say, “I’m trying to figure out why your sales were off last year when you spent so much on upgrading your CRM system.”
Most of the time, however, that is not the answer that would come back. Instead, you’d likely hear, “I’m thinking about my daughter’s broken finger,” or “I’m thinking that I forgot to take out the steaks to thaw for dinner tonight.”
You Lose Money When the Reader’s Mind Wanders
Face it: Can you get through one of your own white papers without your mind wandering? What do you think about when you read your company’s Web copy?
This is your new test for readability in your content: Can you get every paragraph to contribute to revenue generation? Are you willing to throw away the paragraphs that don’t contribute?
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: D Sharon Pruitt
Ready for a white paper makeover? Pump some story into your white papers, turn them into e-books and separate them on your Website.
Complete this sentence:
When I hear “white paper,” I think:
- “Oh, boy, I get to read another one!”
- Wall of text with no pictures.
- Crew cut, short-sleeved shirt, black tie, 1950s.
- Skim, skim.
- Shred, shred.
- Dot mil.
Frankly, I don’t think any of these, because I enjoy writing them, in spite of the fact that it’s not a task for the faint of heart. But David Meerman Scott – here I go again – posted today on “Nerdy white papers vs. hip and stylish e-books,” and so I’ve paused the white paper I’m working on for a few minutes to mull this over.
David mentions several complaints about most white papers: they lack original design, they require registration, they don’t really go viral, they don’t contain much of a story. He juxtaposes them against e-books like his, which are more hip and easier to read. He cites a few examples of e-books that do the heavy lifting of white papers, without being a heavy read.
As a marketing manager, you need to put yourself in your readers’ shoes and think about how you can do the white paper, arguably the most valuable investment in your marketing communications arsenal, in a way that doesn’t bore the people you’re trying to impress.
So, how could you change your white paper strategy to tell the same kind of story in a more hip manner? I’m trying to figure out whether I could get away with it in the paper I’m working on, which is for a language technology client.
If you were your marketing communications writer, you would need to change a few things:
- Template. If you’re working in a template that your colleagues require you to use for papers of this kind, you need to either adhere to that convention or tell them this is not a white paper. Choose the latter.
- Tone. The minute you break out of the white paper mindset, you free yourself to write differently. You’re no longer persuasively arguing the merits of one business model against another; you’re telling the story of how this one works and giving your audience a good read.
- Design. Here you can try something radical – it’s not a white paper anymore, remember? – and switch from portrait to landscape. Did your computer break? I thought not. See what kinds of things you can do on the page that you couldn’t do before. Don’t just fill it with wall-to-wall text; use the space creatively.
- “Pitchurs.” Give your readers a break with more images. Not banal photos of happy people in meeting shaking hands, or mountain climbers scaling the highest peaks, but images that pull their weight in the story telling process.
- Attitude. If you were proofreading an e-book you’d written instead of a white paper, and had to complete the sentence at the top of this post, you’d pick “none of the above,” because you’d be in a completely different frame of mind about the project. And so would your readers.
And then, the best part would be putting them on your Website: You’d create a different sub-page under Resources. Next to Case Studies and White Papers, you’d have e-Books.
Try that, and see which one gets more clicks after a few months.
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: NASA
Have you worked out your company’s messaging yet? How many different messages do you have? Have you shared them with your marketing communication writers? Better get on it.
I was at lunch with three execs of a prospective client the other day. They want me to help them tell their story with new content, so we spent the first part of the hour talking about white papers, Web content, case studies, brochures, blog posts and Facebook.
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “That’s all about format. We need to talk about messaging first. What is it that you want to say to people? How are you going to demonstrate to them what makes you unique?”
I need to understand how their company is different from the competition, and messaging is a big part of that. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a lot of me-too content.
This company operates in what is commonly thought of as a commodity industry: the average customer buys on price and (if the company is lucky) grows to discover and value unique differentiators. So the goal of the marketing content is to describe those differentiators from the start so that the initial sale is not strictly about price.
Here’s what they said, and how it struck me:
- The business development manager said, “That’s easy. We’re quite simply the best at what we do.” Well, that’s pretty heartfelt, and it may even be true, but it makes for pretty lousy copy. I can’t go anywhere with it .
- The CEO said, “We’re small and we’re private, and we plan to stay that way. Some of our competitors are focused too much on being acquired, so they take their eye off the ball and quality suffers. We don’t have that problem.” That’s worth being proud of, and it may even add up to a message, but most customers don’t care who owns your stock; they care about their problems, and a vendor’s ownership structure rarely matters to resolving those problems.
- The director of sales says, “We’re able to help our customers align our services with their business objectives.” It sounds pretty dull and hollow when you put it like that, but it’s better than the other two. It’s the kind of thing a customer might say after a few years of working with the company. We might be able to take it somewhere as a theme.
The Point: This company is in need of content, but they have yet to decide on a message. There’s no harm in using each of these disparate ideas as talking points, but:
- they need to add up to something;
- they need to add up to something that customers care about; and
- they need to make sense to me so that I can use them.
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter with more tips on working with your writers.
photo credit: Wilfrid CC3.0
Bloggers often learn from and post about mistakes. When it’s our customers who are making the mistakes, should we post on them?
In the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple, Jack Lemmon plays Felix Ungar. At a dinner party, he mentions that he writes for TV news broadcasts. Doe-eyed neighbor Cecily Pigeon replies, “That sounds like a fascinating profession. Tell me, where do you get your ideas about what to write?”
Boirrrrrr.
When you’re building out your company’s blog, where will you get ideas for content?
Mistakes – regardless of who committed them – are rich material. You can weave a post around a mistake and turn it into valuable content with a title that reads something like “4 Ways to Avoid…” or “13 Things Not to Do When You’re…” Your readers will enjoy and learn from these lists, and chime in with comments.
But Will They Respect You in the Morning?
Suppose you decide to post on mistakes that your customers have made. What do you do when you know that your customers are in the audience, and when they may recognize themselves in the post? Will they leave you a snarky comment? Will they Facebook-fire you, on your own blog, yet?
Helen Popkin summarized the balance between the temptation to post and the urge to stay alive:
Never post anything you wouldn’t say to your mom, boss and significant other…And thanks to Twitter further eroding the wall between your big mouth and a moment required to download some good sense, the Internet is now empowered to get you fired faster than ever.
Still, you’re convinced that it’s a good story, and so you decide to post on it. You can anonymize it the way Henry Miller did with the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in Tropic of Cancer, but if your customers are in your audience, they’ll recognize themselves. Worse yet, if you’re describing a mistake they don’t even know they made, you’ll be in double the trouble.
“That Won’t Happen to Me”
Maybe you think that your customers won’t ever subscribe to your blog or find out what you’re posting. Or maybe you think you’re indispensable, so even if they do read your post, they’ll just slap you on the back and let bygones be, as they buy more of your goods and services.
Prudent bloggers think twice about that.
Joel Spolsky ran a blog called “Joel on Software,” which has a long, broad following among software developers. Last month, Joel announced he would cease posting to the blog. Among the reasons he gave:
We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.
Getting Out of the Pickle
So you want to keep your blog going, and you want to write (nicely) about the mistakes your customers make, and you want your customers to read your blog. How do you reconcile all of these?
- Don’t post the mistake as a rant. The lesson you’re trying to impart will dissolve in the vitriol and you’ll have two problems: an insulted customer and an alienated following.
- When you describe the mistake, describe the solution. If the company hasn’t gotten to the solution yet, WAIT to post until there’s more closure to the story. It will make for a better lesson anyway.
- Don’t name names. If your readers can see their own company in the business situation you’re describing and think, “How did they deal with it?” then what will they care whether the company was Exxon or a hot dog stand?
And if my customers are reading this, I promise I’m not posting about you.
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. He also publishes a newsletter and would be honored if you subscribed.
photo credit: Jeffrey Beall (CC2.0)
