Breaking your white paper into these three parts can help you build a campaign around it. Start with your white paper outline.

It was supposed to be a simple, short paper:

We’re looking for 4-6 pages of copy. It’s for a lead generation campaign. It’s about our new line of wireless schmedlapps.

That’s all they knew. I knew a little about schmedlapps myself, so they were comfortable with me. We signed the agreement and scheduled the interview.

The schmedlapp subject matter expert is a senior marketing manager. He briefed us because he knew how he wanted the campaign to go, and because he had enough exposure to customers to understand the audience for the paper. It was a jolly, upbeat interview, resulting in a decent helping of grist for the writing mill.

So I started the white paper outline

as I always do: I reviewed my notes, listened to the recording (you do record your interviews, don’t you?) and began moving bits around into a decent flow. Then, suddenly, I got a wild idea from an Alinean webinar I attended featuring Tom Pisello & Jim Novy.

The webinar was titled “Mapping Your Interactive White Papers to the Buyer’s Journey” and it emphasized three steps on that journey:

1. Discovery
2. Consideration
3. Decision

Ker-ching!

I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with – so I started rearranging the white paper outline into exactly those sections.

1. Discover – Why are Schmedlapps Becoming So Important?
2. Consider – Are Schmedlapps Right for My Organization?
3. Decide – How Do I Make the Case for Schmedlapps in my Department?

Readers crave structure in white papers, and this seemed perfect. Betting on the come, I wound out the 4-6 pages of copy to an outline worth 9-11 pages and submitted it.

Double ker-ching – The client’s reaction

We held a conference call to review the outline – they had given me lamentably few actionable changes in writing – and most of the marketing manager’s comments were run of the mill until he said:

I think we should take this structure and break it out into three separate white papers.

To repeat, I’ve never been shy about using a good idea – especially if it wasn’t mine to begin with, and could result in additional business – so I let the manager continue down that road. He had sold himself on the idea of developing three separate white papers and telling the schmedlapp story over a three-month campaign.

Works for me. And, I didn’t have to convince anybody of anything.

So, we’re full speed ahead in building the discover-consider-decide series of papers. The client understands that this represents a change of scope, which affects the original estimate. It’s a better-rounded series of papers for the client, and new work for me.

Caveat writor

While I think this is a good structure for the schmedlapps story and campaign, I don’t want to encourage marketing communications writers to impose it on every white paper you ever write. There are times where it won’t apply, and even when it does apply, you should not use it for every paper.

Why not?

Because your writing will become formulaic and staid, and your white papers will start to look like those ghastly boring case studies that everybody posts on their website, with the invariable Challenge-Solution-Result flow.

If the only tool you have is Discover-Consider-Decide, you’ll start bending every client’s story to fit.

Keep this in mind as one way to tell the story, but not the only way.

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. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: joguldi

Related posts:

1. Steal This White Paper Outline!
2. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Educational White Paper
3. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Revolutionary White Paper

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

Related posts:

1. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Why-We-Did-This White Paper
2. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Educational White Paper
3. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Seven Myths White Paper

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:

• Rapprochement with China – America Goes Geopolitical
• Paid Search Advertising and the Web in Your Future
• Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry

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

Related posts:

1. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Innovation White Paper
2. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Educational White Paper
3. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Seven Myths White Paper

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:

1. 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.
2. A new category of competitor is arising, populated by last year’s strategic partners.
3. 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)

Related posts:

1. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Seven Myths White Paper
2. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Educational White Paper
3. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Revolutionary White Paper

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

Related posts:

1. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Revolutionary White Paper
2. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Educational White Paper
3. 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline

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.

Related posts:

1. The White Paper Outline Buffet: The Educational White Paper
2. Steal This White Paper Outline!
3. 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline

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

Related posts:

1. 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline
2. Steal This White Paper Outline!
3. “It’s a Good Outline, But I Hate It.” – Making Outlines Work

The first step in writing a white paper is an outline, which acts as a skeleton that you flesh out with evidence and persuasion.

My post last October, 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline, resulted in a large number of visits, so I’ll go into more detail in this post. As a matter of fact, I’ll give you an outline, right in this post.

It’s the outline for a technical benefits white paper I wrote some years ago; the client has given me permission to use it. You may go ahead and steal it. After all, I stole the title for this post from Abbie Hoffman’s famous Steal This Book, so it seems only fair.

Your company’s hardware acceleration technology relieves system bottlenecks by offloading compute-intensive algorithms from software running on host processors to dedicated hardware. The task is to create a paper that interests engineers in your technology and convinces them that your approach makes sense.

Summary

This is 1-3 paragraphs on what the paper covers. It answers the reader’s question, “Why should I bother reading this?”

Many marketing communications writers defer writing the summary until after the body of the paper is finished. I prefer to take a stab at one at the outline stage. It shows my reviewers what I understand they want to convey and gives them the opportunity to straighten me out if need be.

Since you plan to discuss your own technology in the paper, mention it in the summary. Don’t be coy and spring it on the reader at the end.

Acceleration Opportunity

The Market and Competitive Threat
The Application
The Algorithm

In this section and subsections, you describe the landscape and trends around acceleration technology: who’s buying it (citations of recent market data help to make this more credible), how they’re using it (e.g., for speeding up anti-virus scanning at enterprise e-mail gateways), and the mathematics behind the algorithm.

It’s a good idea to put some buckshot in the air and point out to readers the necessity of their doing something different. The essence of a white paper is persuasion, and the subtle suggestion that obsolescence awaits readers who do nothing, goes a long way toward convincing them to act.

Your Design

State of the Industry
Your Solution

You’ve led the reader to the point in the paper at which you describe your own approach to acceleration technology.

It’s useful to describe existing approaches to acceleration – e.g., sacrifice network throughput in the interest of security, throw more boxes at the problem, create a custom chip, rewrite the software more efficiently – but for the sake of balance, the reader needs to understand that there are downsides associated with each one. Each approach also meets several different factors with varying degrees of satisfaction: cost, time to market, maintainability, performance, standards-maturity, and so on.

Your acceleration technology is not the fastest hardware and not the fastest software, but it combines and optimizes the mix of the two for a new approach, and it most nearly satisfies all of the selection factors. You may also leave an out for the next generation of your accelerator, which will indeed satisfy all of today’s factors.

Case Studies/Use Cases

XML Processing
Network Security
Cryptography

If you’ve kept your readers this far, it’s a good idea to trot out instances where your acceleration technology is in use, preferably with statistics to demonstrate that it’s better, cheaper and faster than what was in place before.

Case studies within a white paper are a relief to a reader. “I’m interested only in cryptography, so I get to skip the other two. That will help me get through this paper faster.” Don’t try to make all of your case studies fascinating to all readers; just ensure that each one will resonate for its particular audience.

If you can drop names of customers, it’s a huge benefit.

Hardware Acceleration-Main Messages

Conclusion
Follow Us

Now, you tell them what you’ve told them. This is useful because some readers will cut right to the chase and read the end, then go back for the body of the paper only if the conclusion convinces them that they’ve missed something.

The main messages are a series of bullet points (preferably three) that skim the highlights of your paper’s argument. Again, these help the impatient reader qualify the paper as worthy of his/her time and effort.

Your conclusion picks up where the Summary left off, adding more detail about your technology and its real-world applications and savings.

“Follow Us” used to be “For More Information.” If your paper has accomplished its goal, readers don’t need more information from you. They want to go out to the Web and follow you to see what other information they can find about you. Sure, you give them a phone number and a landing page, but point them to your presence in social media and on blogs.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

Related posts:

1. 4 Elements of a White Paper Outline
2. Castrating Your White Paper in 1 Easy Step

Writer on the wrong path?

White papers – or any long pieces – need structure, and you need to agree on the structure before you write the paper. Be sure your writer includes these elements in an outline.

How often do you get started down a path in your work, only to realize you have to backtrack and go down a different path? Is there anything more frustrating than discarding work you’ve already done and restarting it?

For example, your marketing communications writer interviews three subject matter experts for a white paper you’ve commissioned, then writes up the interviews and sends you a draft. You read it. You scream.

“No!!!” you holler. “This isn’t where I want this to go. We have to tear this down and start over.”

White paper draft gone astray

Here’s what can go wrong on a long piece when the writer just dives in and goes straight to the draft:

• Off-topic – “This isn’t what I wanted you to write about,” you complain. “I don’t want the paper to describe the history of the industry. I want it to describe our technology.”
• Off-fact – Does the draft cover the facts I want in it? Think Thomas More in Utopia: “Include nothing false, omit nothing true.”
• Off-message – The white paper supports an organization’s goal and message – thought leadership, lead generation, sales support – and each paragraph needs to move the reader in that direction. If I’m trying to build trust over time, don’t give me content that bellows “Buy Now!”

You need to see structure before you see the draft. A good writer will take care of that for you by first providing an outline.

White paper outline

Look for these four elements in the outline of a marketing or technical white paper:

1. Summary – Sometimes airily called “Executive Summary” – hey, we’re all executives now, so let’s get over this – this will tell readers what they’re going to get out of the paper, and in a draft it tells you what the writer understands about the subject. Frankly, most people would argue that draft-stage is too early for a summary, but it shows you which path your marketing communications writer intends to take the reader. If you don’t like it, this is a good time to let her know.
2. Main messages – Three (count ‘em) bullets in a box either just before or just after the Summary. Bullet 1 states the problem and why it costs customers time and money; bullet 2 mentions the inflection point, or why things are ripe for change; and bullet 3 vaguely describes the new solution and how it will help customers save time and money. The writer must get these right, and you must agree with them.
3. Bullets for the rest – A reasonably well thought-out series of bullets that build the argument yet give readers the impression that they’re drawing their own conclusions from facts you’re presenting. Be sure they include nothing false and omit nothing true.
4. For More Information (How to Follow Us) – Homework for you. The writer isn’t responsible for what you want readers to do once they’ve finished the paper; that’s your job. By including this in the outline, the writer is giving you time to talk to Customer Service or your sales team or your Web team and put the plumbing in place for readers who want to take the next step.

Isn’t this the kind of structure you want when you’re spending big money on a project like this? What do you put in place to keep your writer from going too far down the wrong path?

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photocredit: pfly

Related posts:

1. “It’s a Good Outline, But I Hate It.” – Making Outlines Work
2. A White Paper Project That Went Well
3. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part I

Skeleton? Outline? Draft?

You and your marketing communications writer should agree on an outline for larger projects. It’s helpful for business purposes, but sometimes it’s a creative pothole.

Have you ever watched somebody hang a picture or organize a workbench in a way that worked, but was alien to you? “It would never have occurred to me to go about it that way,” you say. “I’d have started at the ends and worked inward, or measured first.”

An outline presents the same problem. Some reviewers just can’t work with a mere skeleton. They need the body and prefer the skeleton hidden.

Problems with outlines

If you’re a marketing communications writer doing a paper for me, I want you to send me some evidence that you understand what I’m trying to convey, and that you can organize the message in a way that will make sense to my ideal reader. If we wait until the full draft, you can be so far down the wrong path that it will cost us both too much time and money to get back on track. That’s why I want to see an outline.

But the solution to that problem usually introduces a few more problems:

• Outlines are like slide decks: long on bullets and short on real meaning. You raved about a presentation you saw at a conference last month and asked the speaker for a copy of the deck. You opened it and went through it later, but all of the presentation juice was gone. Worse yet, you showed it to a colleague who got nothing out of it. The same thing can apply to an outline: You have an underlying message in mind for the paper, but you can’t tell from the outline whether the writer gets it.
• What’s the right amount of detail to put in? The writer wonders, “How much detail do I have to write up to show that I get it? (If I get it?)” The writer also doesn’t quite know the amount that the marketing manager wants to read and has to wing it.
• Some writers think that outlines get in the way of organic writing, and they don’t think creatively within the confines of an outline. (Larry Brooks posted on this a few weeks back in regard to creative writing, and the point is valid for marketing copywriting as well.) The outline they deliver feels forced to both the writer and the reviewer. Drag.
• Maybe the reviewer just doesn’t get it. Like the example of hanging the picture or organizing a workbench, some people cannot look at an outline and make enough sense of it. They want a full story they can modify right away. They don’t want to see the skeleton at all.

Making an outline work

Here’s a hybrid solution: Have the marketing communications writer give you a skeleton, but with a head (or at least a hand).

Ask for the bulletized outline of points and sub-points that the writer intends to cover in the paper, then have her write a couple of summary paragraphs that will go at the beginning of the paper and set its tone. Or, if she doesn’t plan to include a summary, then ask for the conclusion along with the outline.

Either of these will synopsize the paper and give you an idea of where the writer plans to take the reader. Each of them is an opportunity to use important terminology (and SEO keywords), so you can correct the writer’s grasp and usage of terms that your company values.

When you as a marketing manager can see a completed head or hand, it builds your confidence in whatever else will go onto the rest of the skeleton.

John White of venTAJA Marketing posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: billolen

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