what can I do to start to write and design white paper
1. What is white paper?
A white paper is an in-depth report or guide about a specific topic and the problems that surround it. It is meant to educate readers and help them to understand and solve an issue.
In the world of marketing, a white paper is a long-form piece of content, similar to an eBook. The difference between the two is that white papers tend to be more technical and in depth. The facts and opinions expressed in white papers are often backed by original research or statistics that the publisher has aggregated from reliable sources. They often include charts, graphs, tables, and other ways of visualizing data.
The term “white papers” originated in England as government-issued documents. One famous example is the Churchill White Paper, commissioned by Winston Churchill in 1922.
Today, the term is most commonly applied to “deep dive” style publications. Businesses — especially in the consulting, financial, or B2B sectors — use them to communicate their organization’s philosophy on a topic, make the case for the superiority of their product, or simply to present research findings related to their field.
White papers are no less editorial than other forms of content, but the depth of research lends them an authoritative tone. For this reason, they are good candidates for promoting thought leadership.
Who uses white papers?
In the past, white papers were most often produced by governmental agencies, NGOs, think tanks, consultancies, and financial institutions that needed to present the findings of their ongoing research in a succinct format.
With the widespread growth and adoption of content marketing (the creation and distribution of non-promotional content intended to generate interest in a business and its offerings), white papers have become more common in other industries as well. Any organization that engages in content marketing can benefit from producing white papers.
Their popularity across industries is due to their versatility. While all white papers have certain elements in common, a B2B startup will use them differently than a large consultancy, and both will use them differently from a governmental organization.
Types of white papers
There are numerous types of white papers a business might publish.
- One type is the backgrounder, in which the benefits of their product, service, or methodology are explained in depth.
- Another is a problem-solution approach, which walks the audience through the solution to a problem that is common in their industry.
Other types of white papers simply present a summary of useful statistics and information about the state of a particular field or industry. An example of this would be the Content Marketing Benchmarks Budgets and Trends from the Content Marketing Institute.
Whatever type you produce, the contents of your white paper should serve to showcase your expertise in a given area. Your audience is searching for information, and will look for an authoritative source — a business they perceive as having in-depth knowledge of a subject.
The contents of your white paper should serve to showcase your expertise in a given area.
The purpose of a white paper
White papers enable you to build trust with your audience. They show readers that you’re reliable, experienced, and adept in a given domain. When potential customers search for information to help them understand a problem or opportunity they’re facing, and you provide them with a quality white paper that helps, they’ll turn to you again in the future.
This perception of authority can also serve to boost sales in an organization. More than half the respondents to the Eccolo Media B2B Technology Content Survey reported having read a white paper before making a buying decision. Buyers prefer to purchase from vendors they trust and see as experts in their field.
Finally, white papers are extremely useful for lead generation. The Content Preferences Survey from DemandGen found that more than three-fourths of survey respondents were willing to exchange personal information for a white paper — more than for eBooks, case studies, analyst reports, podcasts, or infographics.
With all of these potential benefits, utilizing white papers in your content marketing strategy can produce great results.
More than three-fourths of survey respondents were willing to exchange personal information for a white paper.
2. White paper examples
When you think about white papers, you probably think of PDF articles with thousands of words. But times are changing and so is the way we produce and consume content.
Nowadays, every marketing collateral (including white papers) needs to be well written, well structured, and designed for every type of visitor.
Here are some great examples of white papers doing exactly that.
What Developers Want — CodinGame
This unique one-pager presenting findings from the Developers at Work Survey demonstrates how a white paper should be done. The animated, interactive data charts show off just what’s possible with our embed feature.
Privacy and the GDPR — BDO
This well-produced special edition produced by BDO and creative agency Scripta does an incredible job of turning a conventionally dull topic into a piece of content that’s engaging and comes to life.
Building and Applying a Content Marketing Strategy — Foleon
This white paper is a step by step guide to succeeding with content marketing.
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3. How to write a white paper
Starting a white paper can be a daunting task. So much information and research are required that it’s easy to get lost in that portion of the work and let it become a roadblock to actually putting things on paper.
Even after the writing itself has begun, white papers are tricky to do well. Simply listing statistics without some form of narrative arc is a surefire way to keep your white paper from ever being read. Luckily, following a few simple guidelines can help keep a white paper engaging and make the process of finishing it much easier.
Pick the right topic
This might seem obvious, but without a topic that resonates with your audience, your white paper is not likely to be read. When choosing the right topic, you should consider three important criteria:
- It should be something you are qualified to write about.
- It should be something your audience is interested in.
- It should address a topic around which little content has been written already and thus fill a “content gap.”
Naturally, finding a topic that brings points 1 and 2 together is vital. White papers are meant to be authoritative pieces of content based upon the author’s experience and expertise, so it’s important to write about what you know. But you must match this to the interests of your readers if you’re to produce something they’ll be eager to engage with.
Don’t be afraid to crowdsource information from within your organization. If the topic of a white paper is related to engineering, why not interview an engineer or have them look over what you’ve written? The same goes for other roles. Crowdsourcing knowledge means having the power of a true expert in many fields.
Finally, filling a “content gap” will help your white paper get noticed and gain traction. By addressing a topic no one else has written about definitely, your white paper will be more likely to rank highly on search engines and even be featured elsewhere on the web.
Pro tip: You can even ask your audience what they would like to see in your upcoming white paper. You’ll get ideas, make your topic more relevant, and you’ll generate buzz around your content even before it’s finished. In fact, we used the same method for this guide!
Define your audience
Defining your audience goes hand in hand with choosing the right topic. But moving beyond your audience’s interests, it’s important to think of the kinds of people who will be reading your white paper.
- Are they fellow professionals, well versed in your subject?
- Are they likely to be reading something they are relatively unfamiliar with?
Knowing this helps establish the voice you should use and whether industry-specific jargon is appropriate. It also narrows the scope of the research you should include. It’s always important to ensure all arguments are logically sound and well supported, but the stats and information presented should be relevant to the specific audience you’re targeting.
Part of defining an audience in the age of Google centers around how people will find the white paper. This means thinking about which platforms specific personas use for research and what search terms they put in. Not only will this help a white paper get found by the right people, but it is useful when outlining the white paper later on.
Optimizing for keywords is important, but remember to write for people, not for search engines. Google is getting better all the time at understanding and matching search intent with relevant content.
Wrap it in a great intro and outro
Like with all good writing, your intro should serve to captivate your audience, pique their curiosity, and entice them to read further. It’s good practice to provide a brief summary of what they’ll find in the white paper and to emphasize exactly what benefit they’ll get from reading it.
Your outro is equally important, especially if you’re using your white paper to market your products or services. You should avoid any self-promotion in the body of your white paper, but you can certainly mention your relevant product offerings and how to obtain them — perhaps using a compelling call-to-action — at the end.
Pack it with value
White papers are not meant to be advertisements for your company, and you should avoid any overt promotion. Instead, you should provide plenty of useful information that will be valuable to readers even if they don’t become customers. Emphasizing value is the key to a great white paper that will get shared and widely read.
Remember, white papers serve to showcase your expertise as a company or brand in a given field. Your readers should come away having learned something useful and with the impression that you’re a reliable source of expert information. As pointed out earlier, generating this kind of reputation will lead to greater business success as buyers are more likely to purchase from companies they trust.
Emphasizing value is the key to a great white paper that will get shared and widely read.
Don’t be scared of multiple drafts
No first draft is ever a finished work. Elizabeth Bishop, the renowned and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, wrote seventeen drafts of her poem “One Art” before it was completed. It’s now considered one of the best villanelles ever written.
While a white paper may not need seventeen drafts, there will undoubtedly be points missed and logical inconsistencies in the first version. Finishing a draft, stepping away, and coming back to it with a fresh mind is the best way to ensure quality. If there’s another good writer at your company, getting another set of eyes on it is even better.
Keep it interesting
White papers should be more detailed and thorough than blog posts or eBooks. This may cause them to be more dry and formal, but this doesn’t mean they have to be boring.
A trap that white papers easily fall into is using statistics as a crutch and not maintaining interest throughout. Technical as it may be, you still want your white paper to be read. To make this happen, it’s useful to borrow techniques from fiction and creative nonfiction writers.
There are lots of resources for learning about a plot, but generally, it has five parts, as illustrated in Freytag’s pyramid:
These won’t always correspond perfectly in a factual piece of writing like a white paper, but they can get you thinking about how to create and hold interest. Use those ideas to keep readers’ attention until the very end.
4. Mistakes a white paper should avoid
There are some pitfalls and common mistakes to avoid when writing a white paper. Each of these has the potential to make an otherwise stellar piece of content into a wasted effort. Here’s a brief list of things to look out for.
Sounding like a sales pitch
When white papers are used as part of a marketing campaign where businesses showcase their product, a common mistake is to make them sound like a sales pitch. Don’t let this happen; it will immediately turn your readers off. In a white paper, your audience is seeking unbiased, educational information that will help them, not try to persuade them. Save the sales pitches for other content, like product brochures.
Lack of adequate research
As previously mentioned, white papers should be well-researched documents. It’s true that conducting lengthy original research may be outside a marketing team’s budget, but merely including a few stats from the first page of a Google search simply won’t cut it.
Aggregating statistics and searching through scholarly work may take time, but the result will be worth it. For your white paper to achieve its intended effect, It’s important to establish your content as an authoritative source to which the audience would want to return.
Poor design
We’ll go in-depth into design in the next section, but it’s worth mentioning here. The written content of a white paper is what matters most, but neglecting design is a big mistake. Designmakes your salient points stand out and helps the reader understand what they’re reading. Using visuals (like images, videos, charts, and graphs) that support your arguments is crucial. Check out some white paper examples built with Foleon to see examples from clients of ours who have an eye for design.
Not telling a story
White papers are informative and factual. We’ve driven that point home already. That doesn’t mean they should be boring. Backgrounders, problem-solution white papers, and research findings all have a story to tell, and the reader is far less likely to make it through the entire piece without some form of narrative to keep them engaged. Setting up a problem, elaborating on a solution, and including some type of success story is a proven formula for making any type of content more story-like.
Leaving it abstract
Because most white papers will involve sharing research findings, it can be easy to leave them in the realm of theory without explaining how to utilize those findings on a practical level. This is truly more of backgrounders but can be the case with problem-solution white papers as well.
A good example is the abundant amount of content on employee engagement. Many B2B cases have covered the importance of employee engagement and the pitfalls of getting it wrong. Too little of this content goes further and gives concrete examples of what companies in specific verticals can do to alleviate the problem.
5. White paper format
Before addressing anything else, we first need to talk about the format you’ll use.
A picture is no longer worth a thousand words. Today, its value is in the number of eyeballs it can keep glued to your content and the ratio of those viewers it convinces to click through to other sections of your website.
Your carefully crafted copy and painstakingly gathered statistics won’t earn those clicks on their own. The average human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish. And with 3.3 million Facebook posts, 448,800 tweets, and 149,513 emails sent every minute, competition for your readers’ attention is intense, to say the least. Long form mediums like the white paper need serious sparkle just to compete.
You’ll need more than just black text on a white background. Your design choices regarding things like color, typography, and the use of visuals will play a prominent role in the success of your white paper. Here are a few important principles to keep in mind for creating a quality white paper design.
Keeping mobile visitors in mind
More than 54% of internet traffic is now mobile, and web designers have adapted to this trend by creating what’s known as responsive design. Before this, web pages simply scaled according to the size of a user’s screen, retaining their layout. Naturally, this made most pages both unreadable and unnavigable on smaller devices.
Responsive design solved this by allowing elements on a page to rearrange, resize, or be completely hidden from view in response to the size of the screen. When a smaller screen is used, font-sizes increase, buttons become larger for touch screens, and the entire layout adjusts to make the page mobile-friendly.
But while this has become standard for web designers in a mobile-first world, producers of other digital content assets like white papers have generally not adapted. Surprisingly, most companies that offer white papers and eBooks on their websites still use PDF format.
The problem with PDFs is that they’re unreadable on smaller screens. They’re fixed-layout documents — they can’t adjust or adapt to different screen sizes. Reading them on a mobile device requires excessive zooming and panning around, which is a terrible experience for users.
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Mobile traffic is ever-increasing. If you decide to produce your white paper as a PDF, you risk excluding this vast segment of your audience. It’s a design mistake that will cost you views and conversions.
See examples of responsive white papers
Emphasis and readability
Because in-depth white papers contain lots of text and visuals, as well as supplementary information like footnotes, figures, logos and copyright info, the danger is that your design becomes cluttered. Clutter accumulates before you realize it. You may choose a clean layout and color scheme, to begin with, but as you continue to add content, things can get crowded. Often, you must make tough choices about what not to include to strike the right balance between completeness and readability.
Good design makes bold choices and prioritizes important information. These choices and priorities affect layout, placement, color, font size, page order and more. Use these design elements to create emphasis on vital pieces of information. But be careful. Emphasizing too many pieces of information — or too few — will cause readers to struggle to discern what’s important.
Good design makes bold choices and prioritizes important information.
Have a look at what’s trending
Bold fonts and color schemes are in. If you look at the hippest tech companies right now, you’ll see lots of pastels and color gradients. Of course, all that might change tomorrow. But still, a great way to get inspiration when you’re just starting is to take a look at what design trends are currently popular.
U2’s frontman, Bono, sings “every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief.” And he’s right. Good designers are always drawing inspiration from other designers. The best way to create a successful design is to spend a lot of time looking at what others are doing successfully. Use Evernote, or a bookmarking service to save white papers and other exceptional designs that you encounter for future reference.
Don’t know where to start looking? Dribbble and Behance are two networks where great designers share their latest work. They consistently have material that’s on the cutting edge of what’s trending.
Design for your audience
While trends may inspire you, it’s more important to align your design with your audience and your subject matter.
- Will you be addressing suit-and-tie financial executives or blue-collar management at construction firms?
- Are you writing about changes to privacy regulations in the tech industry, or about the effects of farming on biodiversity?
Your design should support and strengthen your topic. The colors and typography should be consistent with what you’re writing about, the tone you’ve chosen, and the audience you’ve defined. Writing a white paper for a funeral parlor? Hot-pink headlines might be a bad choice. Taking color psychology into account can help you achieve the look and feel you’re after.
Brush up on the basics
No prior knowledge of design? No problem.
If you don’t have a designer working with you in-house, you can still teach yourself the basics of design and check work against those principles. A big part of the battle is knowing the search terms that will get you the knowledge you need. Luckily, good primers on basic graphic design are abundant.
After doing a bit of reading, start creating. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. If you create a white paper and don’t like the design, try to pinpoint what it is about the design that needs improvement. After the reading you’ve done, you’ll have the tools to critique your own work and the work of others. This is the best way to improve and create well designed white papers.
Choosing the right tools
At Foleon, we pride ourselves on providing a tool that makes creating responsive digital white papers easy, even for those with no prior graphic design experience.
Choosing a tool like this, which takes the guesswork out of design, will shorten the time it takes for you to produce great white papers. There is a vast ecosystem of tools out there, each of which is geared toward a different purpose and skillset. The right one will enable you as both a designer and a writer.
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