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The primary purpose of writing a whitepaper is to educate people about your product, its features and most importantly, how it would benefit the customers. It can range from a single-page to a hundred-page document. With this type of writing, you have a huge freedom as you don’t really need to follow a specific pattern. You can design your content the way you like wish and choose to be authoritative adhering to facts. Here are some experimented tips to write and market whitepapers.
Provide Information Your Customers Want
It’s likely that you would provide product-centric information in the whitepaper that you are going to write, but to market it widely, you should know what information your customers are looking for. Therefore, before you start writing inquire what issues your customers are experiencing and what kind of solutions they prefer.
Abstain from Delivering a Sales Pitch
While writing a white paper, most people primarily focus on promoting the products and this is where the basic fault is made. Customers want stuff remedy their problems instead of what your product has to offer. Therefore, try to find the answers to customer queries through describing your product and get the trust of your customers instead of wasting the opportunity.
Make It Conversational
When you are helping someone to find a solution to a problem, you should talk to him in a more informal manner. To be specific, your tone should be conversational. This is what you should keep in mind while writing a white paper. Just try to sound authentic, helpful, friendly and trustworthy.
Attach Evidences
When you are marketing your product, it is quite natural that you would make use of superlatives. But, don’t make it with a hollow voice. Show proof to back up your claims. Observe a deep research and pull out the facts, data and expert advice to establish the authenticity and quality of your product.
A Catchy Title
In the field of digital marketing, it’s very important to attract the attention of the readers and one of the easiest ways to do it is to write a catchy title for the content you have developed. It’s also true for the white paper. The title is what your readers will see at first and if it can’t impress them, they will just go to another page. As white papers are meant for educating people about the advantages of a product, try to develop a title that expresses the benefits the customers are going to get.
Write Descriptive Contents
As you are writing something that’s going to guide people on a specific matter, don’t be a miser to spend your stock of words. If you need to write it a hundred page content to make people understand about your product, let it be.
Proofread
Your task is not done with the completion of the writing part. You have to proofread the entire content. It’s essential to make your white paper smoother to read. Ask different people to suggest areas of improvement. Rewrite the parts that have been made too formal. And finally, ensure that there is no existence of irrelevant and misspelled words.
Simplicity
To explain the features of something complex in your whitepaper, you should keep the simplicity intact (because you do not want to make the explanations even more perplexing). Besides, if you attach a download option or an email sign up form, don’t ask more than a minute from the readers to complete the procedure. You should stick to the basics for example name, contact details, interest and company.
When it comes to market your white paper, you need to take steps with more care. It’s only the marketing strategy that can help your well-written content it reach the maximum number of people. Here are some tips to market a white paper.
Area of Distribution
There’s not any particular area where whitepapers can be distributed. In short, there is no visible boundary. You can choose blogs, newsletters, syndication, as well as earned media for the promotion of the content. But you have to understand where it would be beneficial to invest. Look for the places where your potential customers make frequent visits and after that choose your area of distribution.
Go Social
Undoubtedly, you have to pay much attention to the channels that have more potential customers for you but you should never ignore the social media channels. They can work for you under any circumstances. Just try and collect some followers for your page and then promote your content. You would definitely experience effective results. There are also social media channels like LinkedIn that have effective tools to promote your content.
Build Your Network
Irrespective of the field you are in, you need to have a strong network. You should connect with the influencers and experts in your area and join other networks related to your business. Apart from this, you should be open to your customers and ask for their valuable feedback on your whitepaper.
Marketing white papers is a great way to earn more credibility as more customers respond to informative whitepapers instead of stereotypical ads. All you have to ensure is that your whitepaper is organized and conceived perfectly so that a natural and genuine interest can be created. And most importantly, trust your own well-researched decisions. Leave nothing on assumptions.