4 Sure-Fire Ways to Guarantee No One Reads Your White Paper

B2B content marketing expert Stephanie Tilton sheds light on four crippling content mistakes to avoid when you’re writing a white paper.

Writing a white paper that will have your customers and prospects eager for more isn’t easy. In fact, unlike less labor-intensive forms of content, it’s a process often fraught with unique challenges.
When producing your first white papers, be sure to steer clear of these four common stumbling blocks.
If you want to ensure your white paper is a disaster, just follow these steps:

1) Produce a Product-Focused Paper

If your paper is aimed at someone well along in the buying cycle, it makes sense to discuss your offering. But if you’re targeting prospective buyers at an early stage of the research and purchase process, focus on what’s on their minds — and that’s likely their need or pain, not your product.
It’s often difficult for company insiders to step outside of their organizational roles and view a business issue from an impartial (i.e., not product-focused) perspective. If your organization is fortunate enough to maintain a dedicated in-house writer, you probably don’t need to worry. If that’s not the case, consider hiring a professional writer who will contribute a much-needed level of objectivity.

2) Overlook the Planning Stage

Too often, white papers are developed without enough forethought. As a result, companies often end up with a paper that doesn’t appeal to prospects or customers, and provides little value to the sales team.
Ideally, you should conduct research into the issues and topics that matter to your prospects. Document these, along with — at a minimum — the objectives you hope to achieve, the key theme, and top points to be covered. Use this document to kick off the project.

3) Rush the Review

When people throughout the organization are corralled at the last minute to review a white paper draft, it’s a setup for failure. Here are two big reasons to make sure your review process is thought-out and scheduled in advance:

1. Proper review requires context: If reviewers weren’t involved in approving the outline, they won’t apply proper judgment in determining whether or not the paper is meeting its goals.
2. Proper review requires time: Without advance notice to set aside time to read the drafts, it’s likely they either won’t provide feedback in a timely manner – causing you to miss your deadline — or they will rush through the review – resulting in a weak paper.

Lack of awareness about review expectations can further compromise your project. When reviewers rush their review of the first draft — and instead provide the majority of their feedback on the second draft — you’re stuck making major changes at a time when you should be focused on fine-tuning the details.

4) Require Registration by Default

Don’t simply throw up a registration page for every white paper you produce. Willingness to register for papers is often tied to where prospects are in the buying cycle and how much they’ve engaged with your company.
If you do choose to gate the paper, you should:

• Build up information about the person by using progressive profiling. In other words, ask for minimal information to start and collect incremental information during each successive interaction.

• Reduce the need for forms by offering a social sign-on option. This allows site visitors to use the information from their profiles on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to fill out your registration form.

Editor’s note: For more tips to creating white papers with impact, see our Quick Guide to Writing White Papers that Convert.

We want to hear from you! What other crippling content mistakes are companies often guilty of?