In Silicon Valley, every company wants to produce white papers. They’re considered an essential part of marketing technology products, and they’re on the checklist for every product launch. Beyond the launch, Product Management and Product Marketing typically want to provide prospects and customers with a wide variety of white papers on product-related topics.
White papers have their strengths: you have several pages to describe your products, their benefits, and their underlying technology to an interested audience. Customers or prospects in the early stages of learning about your sector get educated about why their problems should be solved, different approaches to solving them, and how to evaluate these approaches. In the case of experienced customers, a good white paper can further establish your credibility and deliver convincing arguments about why your company’s approach is superior. Done right, white papers can be great marketing tools and often generate more qualified leads than any other source.
Unfortunately, though, companies often squander this opportunity. Most technical white papers are never read, even if readers actively sought them out. Typically, in the software industry, many readers stop reading part way through the first page, overwhelmed by verbose, jargon-filled content and wondering how it applies to them.
White papers can avoid this fate and be much more effective marketing tools if you 1) do some up-front thinking, 2) carefully craft your arguments and provide proof points, and 3) use a good writer.
In the case of point #1, up-front thinking, Sure Product Consulting asks clients who want us to write their white papers the following questions. Prior to our even bidding on the project.
- Why do you want a white paper?
- How should this white paper be different from your marketing collateral? Does it have different goals? A different target audience? Will it have different messaging? Different content?
- How should this white paper be different from your competitors’ white papers?
- What are you going to do with the white paper? Give it away at conferences? Offer it as a “freebie” to customers who subscribe to your monthly newsletter? Or just make it a website download for anyone who wants it?
- How critical is it that customers actually read the paper, digest it, and remember its main messages? (This may seem like a silly question, but you’d be surprised at how often the real goal is to collect email addresses instead of truly communicating ideas.)
- How will you measure the success of this white paper as a marketing tool? (Qualified leads generated? The customer’s ability to remember key messages? Sheer number of email addresses collected?)
- Why do you believe a white paper is the most effective method to reach your goals?
- How “neutral” do you want your paper to be? Neutrality increases your credibility. But it also means you must even-handedly discuss alternative ways to solve customer problems—perhaps even naming your competitors.
- If there is just one message you want readers to take away, what is it?
- What tone—informal or formal—should your white paper take? By “informal,” I mean using “you” and “we” and not worrying very much about dangling prepositions and split infinitives. In the software industry, most white papers refer to the company in the third person, rather than “we.” They talk about “customers,” rather than “you.” In our experience at Sure Product Consulting, most software companies prefer this more formal writing style, even though readers are more likely to actually read and retain the messages presented more informally.
If you get clear on these issues before you start to write, your white paper project will go much more smoothly. You might even eliminate a feedback round or two, which has been our experience. The result will be a better and more effective white paper.
Today, enterprises and consumers alike, expect to try out your software (or online service – see note 1) hands-on before making a purchase decision. Thus, the necessity of Product Evaluation Guides that:
- Get prospective customers up and running with your software as quickly and as easily as possible.
- Give positive, low-risk product experiences, so prospective customers have the confidence to start tackling real problems with your software — all prior to purchase.
- Make it clear how the software is better than the competition’’s.
Sounds simple enough, but many Product Evaluation Guides fail due to simple mistakes. Here are the three most common mistakes that product marketers make when writing Product Evaluation Guides:
1. Not providing detailed-enough step-by-step instructions.
I’ve seen too many Product Evaluation Guides with hyper-brief instructions like: “1. Create a new project. 2. Create a new workspace,” without any explanation about HOW to do these tasks.
Where’s the icon the user should click to create a new project? What should the user input into each field in the “New Project dialog box” that pops up? What’s a workspace anyway? Explain please. Otherwise, the user will get frustrated and conclude your product is unusable, when in reality it’s just your Evaluation Guide.
Remember, most users of Product Evaluation Guides are unfamiliar with your product and your lingo, because, after all, indoctrinating those unfamiliar users is the main purpose of your Evaluation Guide! Assume they have scant knowledge of your product or similar ones.
2. Not providing context or explanation about why these are the steps.
On the flip side, I’ve seen Evaluation Guides filled with detailed, step-by-step instructions — but they never explain WHY these are the steps. This leaves the reader uncertain about how to apply the same “step template” to his own problem. What parts of the instructions are “template” and applicable to other similar problems, and which parts are specific to just this example? The user is left guessing, frustrated, and unable to move forward with using the product to solve his problem.
One way to remedy this is to smartly divide the document into sections and sub-sections of related steps. At the beginning of each sub-section, briefly explain the high-level process and why these are the steps. When describing each step in detail, note if this particular step is specific to this example and how it would be changed for other situations. And finally, at the end of the section, recap why these were the steps and provide some more context about how to adapt them if necessary.
3. Including too much marketing-speak.
It’s very tempting to load up a Product Evaluation Guide with lots of puffery and claims of your product’s status as the “leading high-performance platform for scalable, synergistic ,and secure social networking” (or something like that).
However, remember your goal is to get the user successfully using your product — hopefully with his real-world problems — as quickly as possible. Marketing-speak slows the user down. It requires him to use too much of his brain to understand what you are saying — brainpower he could have applied to using your product and figuring out how he could apply it to his own situation. Plus, many of today’s users are just turned off by the usual marketing blah-blah and will think less of your product for using it.
Note that by “Marketing-speak” I am not referring to “good marketing” language the clearly states what your product is, what it is not, its benefits, and its unique differentiators. I mean language that – intentionally or not – is buzzword-laden and ambiguous.
Conclusion
Writing a great Product Evaluation Guide can be a tricky business. But if you keep the main goals in mind and avoid the three common mistakes, you’re on your way.
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Note 1 - To avoid awkward language in this article, I use the term “software” generically to encompass online services, enterprise software, and consumer software.
