One of the classic problems with selling technology is trying to describe and explain how it works. Writing a white paper is one way of satisfying information-hungry buyers.

In the early 1990s, when I first came across technology white papers they were produced by the technical team. Those white papers focused on technology and the company experts’ perspective on that technology. In short, written by experts for experts, white papers had a very limited audience.

Since those days, marketing communications department(s) have discovered white papers and their potential as a marketing tool. The consequence is confusion.

Today, white papers offer a much wider range of content and are written in a variety of styles ranging from those that are highly technical and dense with text to others that use friendly, uncomplicated copy and lots of images. Giving your readers a title that indicates your white paper’s technical depth and jargon level can help eliminate any potential confusion.

The basics are simple. If you’ve written a report, a proposal, or a lengthy university or college paper that required a title page, a table of contents, an introduction, some explanatory passages, and a conclusion, then you have the format.

As always, content, design, and writing style choices come down to the brand or corporate identity that you’re promoting and the audience you’re targeting. Content can include discussions of technology issues, explanations of new developments in the industry, business processes, technical innovations, or any topic that is appropriate to your audience and to your company’s brand.

Design can run the gamut from a page that’s crowded with unbroken text (no heads) and virtually no white space (still beloved by technical audiences), to a page that has several heads to break up the copy, inches of white space, illustrations, pull quotes, and lots of colour.
There are a few traps you can fall into with white papers. One is condescension. In an attempt to make the material accessible you’ve written a white paper your readers regard as a waste of time and/or insulting.

Depending on your time and resources, you can test your material with someone who’s representative of your audience, talk to various teams within the company (sales, customer support, etc.) to get a good sense of your audience, and/or review your competitors’ white papers to see how they handled the situation.

Brochure writing is another trap. Yes, your white paper is a marketing tool but readers expect it to be largely informational and/or educational. Avoid the colourful language (hyperbole) and hard sell found in your brochures because here it will kill your marketing efforts. Make sure your sales pitch is subtle and placed towards the end of your document.

Of course, this advice is true in general. However, I have seen pieces that are wrong for virtually every audience you could imagine, except the intended audience. Yes, there could be people out there who would be happy with a two-page white paper or, alternatively, a 100-page white paper. (In my opinion, 8–10 pages is an ideal length.)

For more information on white papers, go to Rose Hill’s Web site http://www.solobizville.com. When you sign up to be part of her R&D team she’ll send you her report, Creating Effective White Papers. There is a lot of applicable information despite the focus on small business.

You can also check http://www.capulet.com where you’ll find 10 Tips for Writing White Papers (written by Darren Barefoot and originally published in Intercom, February 2002). Finally, I just got this lead: http://www.whitepapersource.com/forum/index.php. (I took a peek and found White Paper Statistics, Writing Tips and Tools, Lead Generation, and more.)