No question, white papers have become a fundamental building block of most B2B companies’ marketing strategy, used to demonstrate thought leadership and entice suspects to surrender their contact information and become prospects.
In view of that importance, it’s fair to ask: given the monumental changes wrought by the Web that enables their global propagation, how can it be that white papers have scarcely changed in format and appearance since the days of Gutenberg? By and large, they still resemble nothing so much as a student’s senior thesis.
Writing in his White Paper Pundit, Jonathan Kantor provides… a history lesson about the term itself…
“It actually refers to a blank sheet of white paper that was used to hastily cover condensed summarizes of larger government research documents (which) were read by early 20th century Parliamentary officials prior to their legislative vote.”
…before pointing out that the variety of communication styles on the Web – perhaps most especially including social media – has left white papers in the dust. As he puts it, “If the goal of the modern white paper is to grab reader attention and quickly deliver essential business messages to (a) short attention audience, shouldn’t we as marketers consider any change that helps us achieve that goal more effectively?”
Jonathan has put his prescription for change into a white paper entitled “Ensuring that your white papers appeal to busy executive readers” …which is constructed to serve as an example of the new “short attention span” white paper. It’s free, although email registration is required.
Via a summary in RainToday, we also came across an excellent pdf by Jonathan Kranz, “Bringing New Color to the Gray World of White Papers.” We have space here to summarize only a few of his thoughtful suggestions, so do download the pdf for more:
Make it modular, not linear. There’s just no rationale anymore for the academic, expository style that white papers have used forever. Instead, try organizing the material into small, stand-alone sections that favor scanning, enabling the reader to pick and choose the bits relevant to them …without requiring them to absorb the entire paper end-to-end.
Make it a PuPu platter, not an entree. Now that the material is modular, you can further depart from the boring use of long, uninterrupted blocks of text. Almost any text block can be spiced up by using subheads and bullet points. Other devices include:
- Pull quotes framed in graphic boxes that reiterate important points, or customer quotes relevant to the main body topic
- Call-outs of relevant, “did you know?” statistics
- Sidebars with real-life anecdotes or mini case studies illustrating the main point
- Illustrations, photos, charts, graphs that support your text
Lighten the tone, pump up the design. You won’t destroy your research-y cred by using a tone that’s more 1-to-1 conversational and less Moses-from-the-mountain; nor by using creative design and illustration to attract attention and complement written ideas, vs. confining the work to the same-old black text on white or beige paper.
By moving your B2B’s white papers more in the direction established on the rest of the Web, you’ll gain a more powerful way to generate leads, attract press/analyst/blogger attention, maintain thought leadership, and move prospects further through your pipeline.
