Whitepapers are problematic on their own:
- They contain too much copy (less is more)
- They read like the books you read in school. You know the ones you DREADED that ended up with drool on the pages when you fell asleep on them.
- They are white (duh)
That’s not to say they don’t have a place, but thinking that people are going to read your whitepaper just because you wrote it is wrong. A whitepaper’s place is to back up the other things you say.
For example, say I create a product
“The X Product”
and it:
“Allows you to see the errors of your ways in Real time in a simple 1 page printout”
Now being the student of marketing that I am (meaning I study marketing all the time, I’m not sitting in a class somewhere right now), I’d back this up with an example of the output of this great product and 2 or 3 testimonials (video if I can get them) of people explaining how their lives are sooo much better because they have a real time method to see the “errors of their ways”. No installation, no maintenance.
1 step to a better life.
That’d be enough for most people to buy it.
I showed the actual value.
Now, it would add credibility (to some people) to have a 10 page study (ie whitepaper) that backs up this claim. Nobody would read it, but to some, it might be a comfort that someone at least bother to write such a thing.
If you’re one of these people, you’re about to get run over by a horde of forward thinking marmosets. As you lay examining the conference room’s geometric carpet pattern, you may wonder why such a thing wasn’t mentioned in the planning meeting. You have TPS reports to do, shoo.
]]>