What Is A White Paper And How Can You Write One?

Featured article by Damian Troy, Independent Technology Author

Marketing, for any business, is a vital part of building a valuable customer base and strong brand presence. There are countless types of marketing techniques available, and white papers are just one of them – but what exactly is a white paper? While an Essex SEO agency can provide writing services for your business to ensure it’s perfect every time, understanding just what a white paper is and what it takes to write one can benefit your company greatly. Here, we’re exploring just that.

What Is A White Paper?

A white paper, at its essence, is a form of content marketing. These papers are essentially a long form piece that discusses a topic or issue that your audience will find valuable and interesting enough to read. When done right, you can use these papers to persuade people one way or the other in an argument (within reason) and even promote your product or service. The actual form of a white paper will differ depending on industry, but in general, if it’s persuasive, in-depth and authoritative and presents a problem with a provided solution, then it’s likely to be a white paper.

So, how do you write one?

Here Are Our Tips:

–        Topic

The first and most important thing you’re going to need to do when it comes to writing a white paper is to pick a topic that your audience are actually going to want to read about. This can be the most difficult part of the entire process despite how simple it may sound! White papers are designed to tackle an issue and provide solutions, so common problems are a good place to begin but you’ll need to have a strong understanding of your audience and what they want to get you started. From there, choosing a topic should be easy.

–        Professionalism

While this may be a marketing piece, it’s important that you think of it as a professional piece of writing. This isn’t a blog or a guest post – it’s a professional report and it’ll need to be in a business style.

–        Be Persuasive

White papers are a marketing tool, they’re there to give you another way to convince your customers and clients that your product is one worth buying so you’ll need to be persuasive – but a different kind of persuasive. White papers are the perfect opportunity for you to build up credibility around your brand. Provide your product as a potential solution to the problem, but make sure that aim for a subtle integration that doesn’t come across like your average advertisement.

–        Use Copywriting Best Practices

Paragraphs, sentence lengths, tables, bullet points – they’re all usable in a white paper and you should definitely aim for them too! Your white paper is going to be longer than your average blog post and so providing your customers with headings and bullet points to help them scan the argument and ultimately get themselves hooked will not only benefit the reader, but you and your white paper too.

–        Share & Promote!

There’s no use writing a white paper and doing nothing with it – you’ll need to share and promote it. Post links on your website, on social media, send out links via emails or anything else you usually use as a marketing technique. People need to know about it, so you need to share it and get them to share it too.

Writing a white paper is a case of finding the right technique while remaining professional in your approach. With the right topic, the right tone and a good understanding of your audience as a whole, your white paper could prove to be a highly effective marketing tool.

About the Author

Damien Troy is an experienced and notable author, who loves taking on new challenges and writing across a huge range of topics -channelling his personal experience and expertise. When Troy isn’t tapping away at his keyboard, creating his latest masterpiece, he can be found exploring new countries and cultures or burying his head in a good book.