I still get asked by a few clients every now and then to write a white paper for them. Those projects are increasingly few and far between, and honestly, my process for writing a white paper is not much different from my process for writing a 1,500-2,000-word blog post.
As blog posts have gotten longer, it begs the question, what’s the difference between a blog post and a white paper?
Let’s start by taking a look at the definition of a white paper.
Table of Contents
- What Is a White Paper
- History of a White Paper
- Do You Need a White Paper?
- How to Write a White Paper
- What to Do with Your White Paper
What Is a White Paper?
According to Wikipedia, a white paper is defined as a “report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body’s philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.”
Is it just me, or does that sound like a blog post to you?
If you’ve spent any time at all reading blog posts published on a company’s website, especially if that company is in a B2B industry or provides professional services, they’ve most likely published blog posts that fit the definition of a white paper, or come very close to it.
I’ve spent some time wondering whether anyone really needs white papers now that we have blog posts that serve the same purpose. To answer that question, let’s take a quick look at the history of white papers.
History of a White Paper
According to Wikipedia, white papers date all the way back to at least 1920 when Gertrude Bell, the British explorer and diplomat published her 149-page white paper, “Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia”. Churchill published his own white paper in 1922.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that white papers became common as an American form of content marketing, specifically when it came to inbound marketing.
Then blogs entered the scene, but it took a while for businesses to adopt blogging as part of their marketing strategy. At first, blogs were associated with online diaries. People would post their thoughts and experiences on a site like MySpace and that’s what a lot of people thought about when they thought about “blogging”, but those days are long past.
Now most of us go directly to the internet when we’re looking for information on a topic. If we visit a company’s website, we’ll look for their blog page so we can get a sense of their expertise, especially if they provide professional services. Blogging has become a significant way for businesses to establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry and convert the leads who find their website into customers.
Do You Need a White Paper?
Now that we’ve defined what a white paper is and looked at their history (as well as a tiny bit of the history of blogging), let’s consider whether people really need white papers anymore.
My answer is the same as pretty much any answer I give to a content marketing question: it depends on what your goals are.
I know that can be frustrating to hear over and over again, but hear me out. The key to any successful marketing strategy is understanding your target audience. In the case of blog posts vs white papers, that means understanding whether they’re more likely to read a blog post or a white paper (or are they more likely to read a blog post if it’s called a white paper)?
There is still a stigma regarding blog posts and whether anybody reads them, but that’s dying out. More and more businesses are recognizing the value blogs provide to increasing their online visibility and authority. If more people are reading (and writing) blog posts, the question becomes: can you just write a blog post and call it a white paper?
The answer is: absolutely. If you’re publishing content on your own website, you can call it whatever you want. If you know your target audience is more likely to read something called a white paper over something called a blog post, then by all means, label your blog “white papers” and they’ll be none the wiser.
The title of “white paper” still holds a fair amount of weight, especially in B2B industries. It sounds more professional, and there are still people who look for white papers over blog posts, so if you work in a B2B industry and you know your target audience will be more likely to be swayed by content when it’s called a “white paper” rather than a “blog post”, let’s talk about how you can write a white paper.
How to Write a White Paper
Since there is so much crossover between white papers and blog posts, there’s going to be a similar amount of crossover between my tips for how to write a white paper and how to write a good white post, but there will be some key differences, so pay attention.
Choose Your Topic
As with any piece of content you create, the first step is always to decide on a topic, and I do recommend following the same procedure to decide on a white paper topic as I do for deciding on a blog post topic, with a few exceptions. While some blog posts can be shorter and some can be timely, a white paper should be evergreen content that prospects can read for years to come and still find relevant.
As with blog post topics, I always recommend making sure you do your keyword research before deciding on a topic for your white paper. Even if the white paper is meant to be downloaded rather than posted online for Google to crawl, categorize, and index, keyword research still gives you a good idea of the questions your target audience is asking that have not already been answered by all your competitors. That’s an indication of a content gap, and filling that gap is key to positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
FAQs and topic generators like Answer the Public are also great sources of inspiration for white paper topics.
Research Your Topic
You’re clearly already an expert in your industry, so unless the topic is new for you, there isn’t much of a reason for you to research it as far as educating yourself on the topic. What you need to find out is what information is already out there. Some of your blog posts can get away with being short, introductory pieces of content on a given topic, but a white paper needs to be the ultimate guide on that particular topic, and the only way for it to be the ultimate guide is if you cover everything that has ever been covered on that topic and then some. And the only way for you to know for sure what has and has not been covered on that topic is by doing some research.
While I recommend doing all that research for your blog posts for the same reason, your research for your white paper can differ from your blogging research. For example, you might decide to do a report on the status of a particular part of your industry, and while you can absolutely publish that as a blog post, it’s also a great opportunity for a white paper.
Even if it’s not a “report” per se, you should be sure to include some statistics in your white paper. Ideally, you should be including them in your blog posts as well, but people expect to see them in a white paper. In a blog post, they’re perceived as more of a bonus, rather than a necessity.
You can also interview professionals in related industries for your blog posts, but that’s more likely to take the form of a Q&A post. In a white paper, you can interview two or more different professionals and include quotes from those interviews to support your position. This gives it a more journalistic feel, which people are more inclined to seek out in white papers vs blog posts.
Write Your White Paper
As with a blog post, when you sit down to write your white paper, you need to understand your audience so you can create content they’ll understand and that will engage them. I always caution people against using industry-specific jargon in their blog posts if their target audience is unlikely to be familiar with that jargon, but since white papers tend to be used primarily by companies in B2B industries, your audience has a better chance of understanding the jargon, in which case you can feel free to use it throughout your white paper. If your target audience works in a related industry that uses slightly different jargon, they might not be familiar with all the terms and acronyms you use in your business, so again, it all comes back to knowing your target audience and creating content for them.
That said, you never want your content to be too weighed down with jargon and acronyms. It should always be engaging and easy to read, regardless of whether it’s a white paper or a blog post. There’s no point creating content no one wants to read, because in today’s world of endless amounts of content, it’s too easy for your prospects to click away to something else the moment they get bored or confused.
Edit Your White Paper
I always recommend hiring a professional editor whenever possible. At the very least, get another pair of eyes on your content before you publish it so they can catch all those little typos and grammatical errors you missed. When we read content we wrote, we tend to skim it rather than really read it because we know what we meant to say, so our brains insert what we meant to write instead of what’s really there on the page/screen, which is why it’s so important to get someone else to read our content for us.
If you can’t get another pair of eyes on your content, my first tip is to leave it alone for as long as you can. At least 24 hours, but preferably a week or even longer. The longer you can leave it alone, the more fresh you’ll be when you revisit the content, and therefore the more likely you’ll be to catch those tiny errors you made.
Another tip is to switch to a different font when editing. This kind of wakes up our brains and makes us think we’re looking at completely new content, even though it’s the same words we wrote ourselves.
Finally, read it out loud, even if it’s just to yourself. Reading it out loud forces you to slow down, which gives you more opportunities to catch those tiny mistakes you didn’t catch earlier because you were just skimming your content, rather than really reading it.
What to Do with Your White Paper
Now that you have this great white paper, what should you do with it?
As I mentioned earlier, you can always publish your white papers on your blog and just call your blog posts your white papers, or refer to your blog page as your “resource center” or something else that will grab the attention of your target audience and make them want to find out more.
You can also maintain a blog page with shorter, more informal blog posts and publish the occasional white paper on that page. You can either call it a white paper, or just call it another blog post. Again, it all comes down to understanding your target audience and which titles are more likely to pull them in and make them want to read more.
I’ve also seen websites where white papers are offered as a free download, which provides a great opportunity for your prospects to download your content onto their computer and read it at their leisure, rather than taking the time to read it on your website right then and there.
The up side to this strategy is that some of your content now lives on their hard drive, while the downside is that they have to be more proactive in making the time to read it and take the next steps in the buyer journey, and let’s be honest, how likely is that to happen in a world of constant time crunching and infinite distractions?
One way to get around this is to offer it as a free download if they sign up for your newsletter. That way, you can continue sending them great content and check in with them, regardless of whether they finished reading the white paper. Just make sure you’re staying within the bounds of the GDPR.
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If you’re ready to implement white papers as part of your content marketing strategy, but you don’t have the time or inclination to write them yourself, it’s probably time to invest in our white paper writing services.
