Getting CLEAR: Structuring the White Paper
for Maximum Impact
Good white papers are great marketing tools: IT customers
depend on them, journalists like them, and executives actually read
them. However, there's an annoying trend towards writing the "marketing
white paper," which is market-speak for "big fat brochure."
Of course white papers are marketing tools, and
their ultimate purpose is to get customers to buy the client's product.
But prospects download white papers because they reasonably expect
to learn something. When a white paper merely touts a product's
general wonderfulness, and neglects to mention how it works or what
problems it solves, the prospect can't learn a thing.
White papers can be more or less technical depending
on the client's goal, which should never include frustrating the
heck out of serious readers. The key to a happy prospect is using
a clear and readable structure for the white paper: even the most
general papers will have a decent technology and benefits section,
while more technical white papers will benefit from a reader-friendly
structure. As an added bonus for the writer, using a structure makes
writing faster and easier.
An easy way to structure a white paper is CLEAR,
which stands for:
Clarify the customer's problem
List your technology's features
Educate the customer on benefits
Add proof points
Restate your case
Clarify the customer's problem Briefly state the problem and its solution.
This section can run from two to three paragraphs to a page in length,
depending on the overall size and complexity of the paper. The section
serves as your executive summary: state the customer pain point
and how your technology will solve it for them.
List your technology's features Next, explain what your technology is and what
is does. Not every white paper needs an extremely detailed technology
section, but even a more market-oriented one should at least explain
itself. Don't worry about non-technical executives reading into
the technology sections and getting lost. They won't be reading
this far anyway -- that's what opening and closing paragraphs are
for.
Educate the customer on benefits Now that the customer has some notion of what
you're talking about, this is the place to talk benefits. The trick
here is to cast a wide net without going ridiculously overboard.
We have all read marketing materials where a single product will
push the company into Blissful Storage Nirvana. (Most marketing
makes products sound like that - look at cosmetics advertising -
but a customer can throw away a $7 lipstick, not a $50K piece of
software.) Talk clearly about practical benefits and make the project
sound worth doing.
Add proof points This is the place for case studies or examples.
Named customers are best, but anonymous customer studies will work
fine as scenarios. Briefly describe the customer's problem and how
your product solved the problem. Don't make the customer look bad,
by the way. Write "A major insurance broker demanded a highly
secure storage network" as opposed to, "A major insurance
broker was suffering serious hacker attacks." Leave that little
fact for the newspapers and confidential meetings in the boardroom.
Restate your case The old saying is right, "Tell 'em what
you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em , tell 'em what you told 'em."
Finish by summarizing your points -- restate the customer problem,
explain how your technology works to solve those problems, and end
by restating the benefits to the customer. A little -- a very little
-- hyperbole is O.K. if you want to end on a high note, but a straightforward
ending is perfectly all right.
Like this one.
The Christine Taylor Company
P.O. Box 3499
Wrightwood, CA 92397
