1. The Business Environment: The recession has caused businesses to seek cheaper white paper solutions, resulting in shorter, more cheaply produced, text-oriented formats. Shorter white papers also have become more sales-oriented, and businesses are demanding that these documents must now generate leads and provide a substantial ROI. The white paper marketplace has also become extremely crowded. Just about every business has used one or more white papers, and businesses can no longer enjoy the unique competitive advantage that the medium provided just a few years ago.

2. The Business Reader: Knowledge workers are putting in longer hours with larger workloads resulting in greater stress. The amount of distractions (meetings, phone calls, travel) leave precious little time for reading large tomes of complex information, especially large blocks of standard paragraph-oriented text found in most white papers. Finally, these readers are also turned off to the abundance of white papers that contain overt ’sales messages.’

3. Social Media: Short, quick, colorful, rich information has become a new norm, best exemplified by Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These new online social media are changing the face of business communications and how users interact with promotional information. The short attention spans common with today’s knowledge workers are fueling new forms of rich information such as video, audio, and interactive webcams. As users grow accustomed to this form of interaction, there is less of an appeal with traditionally formatted text documents.

What’s the result of these changes on the white paper?

Cheaply produced, short length, overtly sales-oriented, stark, all-text white papers suffer a disconnect with today’s short attention span social media–aware business reader. While businesses can claim that they “now have a white paper,” the lack of clear differentiation with a “me-too” all-text white paper fails to engage today’s rich-media–oriented business reader.

What’s the solution?

The incorporation of visually engaging elements will grab attention, allowing key bottom-line solution messages to be easily assimilated by the time- and attention-challenged business reader. These elements include:

* Summaries, both executive and concluding, that appeal to short attention spans
* Text elements such as pull quotes, bullets, shaded text sections
* Graphic elements such as concept graphics, business charts, and industry-specific illustrations
* Page design that grabs initial reader attention and creates a visual invitation for business readers

The use of these and other elements will provide clear differentiation for white paper marketers. The application of a visual approach will generate a unique competitive advantage for business marketers who face a crowded field of plain text papers. It will also provide a unique way for white paper writers to produce more engaging and profitable white papers for their clients. Both writers and marketers should consider the advantages of visual enhancements and design as part of their ongoing white paper strategies.

To learn more about this topic, be sure to catch my sessions at the forthcoming White Paper Success Summit 2010.

About the Author:  Jonathan Kantor has been writing white papers for 11 years as principal of The Appum Group, “The White Paper Company,” and is author of the blog WhitePaperPundit.com. His new book, Crafting White Paper 2.0 is now available via Lulu Publishing.

“Understanding your audiences will help you write the content they need in the words and the way they need it,” says industry veteran Ginny Redish in her excellent book, Letting Go of the Words. This can also help you select and organize your content to be useful and appealing.

That’s why you really must start every white paper project with an audience analysis. This doesn’t have to take very long or cost a great deal. But it’s a step no white paper writer can afford to skip.

Knowing your audience helps you decide:

* What problems they experience
* What terms and acronyms they know
* How much technical detail they can understand
* What proof points and sources resonate best with them
* What to put in and what to leave out

Assuming your white paper is a pre-sales document aimed at likely prospects, you need to find the answers to these three questions:

1. Who is the ideal prospect for the client’s offering?

This includes demographic data such as age, sex, education, location; anything you can state as facts or numbers. It can also include psychographic information on the attitudes or opinions of those prospects.

2. What do they do on the job?

This includes their job title, responsibilities, and where they fit in the pecking order: Are they a decision-maker, technical recommender, or member of a selection committee?

3. Where do they work?

This includes the size, type, sector, and location of the organization.

Ideally the client has developed a set of personas (typical customer character sketches) that spell all this out.  If not, consider this your first research job. Ask anyone who talks to prospects: people from marketing, sales, or customer service. A customer advisory board can be an ideal source.

Then use your research to develop a brief description of your intended reader. The closer you can get to an actual person you can visualize, the better.

Here’s the format I generally use:
“Our intended reader is a [sex] [age] [job title] in a [size of company] [sector of company] in [location of company] [anything else important].”

Here’s what this looked like for one white paper project I did recently:
“Our intended reader is a male 40- to 60-year-old IT director in a mid-sized manufacturing company with headquarters in North America and manufacturing outsourced to Asia.”
Sometimes the demographics are less important than the concerns driving your audience.

Here’s another example I developed for a white paper:
“Our target reader is a seasoned project manager working in a federal government agency or with a prime contractor for a major stimulus project. This project manager is responsible for coordinating many subcontractors to bring in the project on time and on budget.”

As you draft your white paper, you may have dilemmas or differences of opinion about what to put in and what to leave out. Asking “Does our audience need to know this? Would they understand this? Do they care about this?” quickly gives you the answer.

What if you have more than one audience for the same document? In that case, call one the primary reader, and the other the secondary. And if you need to, layer the information for the secondary audience, as I discussed in a previous article.

This is the first key to your white paper success, drawn from my upcoming presentation “7 Ways to Guarantee Your Next White Paper Is a Success” for the White Paper Success Summit 2010. To find out about the other six, be sure to register for the upcoming summit here.

About the author: Gordon Graham helps B2B software companies tell their stories with crisp, compelling white papers. He’s the founder of www.thatwhitepaperguy.com, and a frequent poster on the www.whitepapersource.com forums.

At White Paper Success Summit 2010—the only online professional development event of its kind—white paper thought leaders will serve an all-new menu of proven business-building tactics.

Michael Stelzner, organizer of last year’s sold-out inaugural White Paper Success Summit and author of the best-selling Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, says now is the time for white papers: “The old-fashioned way of selling—advertising, traditional press releases and product marketing—doesn’t work anymore. These days, educational marketing is much more effective and that’s where white papers come in.  And white papers are especially effective in a down economy.”

White Papers Influence Decision Making

A September 2009 survey by Eccolo Media supports Stelzner’s comments. In the study, which polled 501 executives involved in B2B technology purchases, 84% rated white papers as moderately to extremely influential in purchasing decisions. The survey also revealed that white papers are the most frequently shared type of collateral—with 89% of respondents passing them on to other people.

If you’re a marketer who is under the gun to produce quality leads in 2010, the masters of white paper marketing will share their secrets at White Paper Success Summit 2010.

In addition to Stelzner, you’ll interact with an all-star team of white paper experts, including Bob Bly (The White Paper Marketing Handbook), Brian Carroll (Lead Generation for the Complex Sale), Jonathan Kantor (Crafting White Paper 2.0), Roger C. Parker (White Paper Design That Sells), Joe Pulizzi (Get Content, Get Customers), John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide), Jill Konrath (Selling to Big Companies), Ardath Albee (eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale) and Gordon Graham, to mention a few.

Tricks of the Trade

Here’s a sampling of a few of the Summit sessions, where the white paper pros will reveal the tricks of the trade:

* More Business Than You Can Handle: How to Achieve the Business Dream With a Single White Paper
* Supercharging Your White Paper Distribution for Maximum Impact
* Launching White Papers Like Products: 7 Steps to Boosting White Paper Performance
* Leveraging Social Media to Promote Your White Papers
* Proven Techniques for Using White Papers for the Complex Sale

In exclusive live forums at the event, attendees will pose questions to the white paper “professors” and use special LinkedIn groups to network with peers. If you miss a live session, no worries—you’ll have  access to recordings and transcripts of every one.

No need to book pricey hotel reservations, pack a bag and trudge off to the airport to attend this conference. You can relax and enjoy the online Summit from a comfortable chair in your home or office. The sessions are spread over an entire month so you can fit them into your hectic schedule.

Highly Successful Event

To say that last year’s White Paper Success Summit was a hit is quite an understatement—96% of attendees said they’d recommend the event to a friend. The 2010 Summit starts Tuesday, February 2 and runs through Wednesday, February 24. Attendees can get tickets at significant discounts by booking early.

Don’t rely on the same old sales pitches in the coming year. Attend White Paper Success Summit 2010 and learn how to generate a steady stream of leads by providing valuable business content with white papers. Now is the time—your business might depend on it.

“Without costly ads or fancy designs, white papers are saving businesses by establishing thought leadership, attracting steady streams of quality leads and helping businesses close deals,” says Stelzner. “Once a white paper is done, it can continue to reliably deliver leads for months or years to come.”

For more information or to register for the Summit, visit http://www.whitepapersummit.com/ms/.

As companies scale back their marketing budgets during recessionary periods, marketing expenditures are being carefully scrutinized, renegotiated and reduced if possible. The result of these cost-containment initiatives has been an explosion in shorter, less expensive white papers, typically between two and four pages in length.

While these short white papers may include the label “white paper” on their cover, and may provide an organization with bragging rights to claim that they have a white paper on their website, these short documents do little to satisfy the expectations that business readers have of the medium. On the contrary, the monetary savings gained by employing such a strategy typically do not offset the diminished perceptions of the featured solution, company and/or brand sponsoring the white paper.

Why?

The limited amount of space available in a short white paper (two to four pages) is typically used for a solution description and its various beneficial attributes. Because marketers want to “cut to the chase” and quickly describe their solution rather than wasting space educating the reader with background information, these short white papers are often perceived as glorified sales brochures. This “short length” strategy is one of the leading complaints of business executives when pollsters asked their opinion of the white paper medium.

As evidence of this position, a February 2009 study conducted by InformationWeek.com titled, “White Papers: How to Maximize the Use of White Papers in Your B2B Marketing and Sales Process,” concluded that over 78% of the executive respondents indicated that having “Minimal Marketing” is either extremely important or somewhat important in a white paper.  This means less selling and more educating are preferred.

The label “white paper” means something very specific to this business audience. Not only does it imply that the document will provide high-quality information on the designated topic, but also that there needs to be sufficient length to thoroughly educate the reader on that topic. In my opinion, an ideal six- to eight-page white paper would include the following attributes:

* Executive summary (one page)
* Introduction (one page)
* Assessment of existing challenges (one to two pages)
* Presentation of the solution and benefits (one to two pages)
* Optional case study (one page)
* Conclusion (one page)

If you do not have an adequate amount of information to fill six to eight pages, then don’t call your document a white paper. Call it a solution guide, a product reference sheet, a technical primer or a vision statement, but not a white paper. Creating a short two- to four-page white paper that doesn’t meet readers’ expectations will not only waste your limited budget, it will frustrate your target business audience as well.

About the Author:  Jonathan Kantor has been writing white papers for 11 years as principal of The Appum Group, “The White Paper Company,” and is author of the blog WhitePaperPundit.com . His new book Crafting White Paper 2.0 was just released.

In a previous article, I described how to “clone” one basic document for various segments of an audience (link to: http://www.whitepapersource.com/writing/how-to-clone-your-white-paper/).

But what if you can’t even do that? What if you have to write one white paper for people in two very different roles, such as technical versus financial or top executive versus line manager? What if you know that your white paper will go to people with vastly different levels of knowledge or experience?

In this case, your white papers need two “layers” of information, one for each segment of your audience. Here are six possible tactics for doing this (you can mix and match these as needed).

Layering tactic #1: In-line definitions (brief asides that define a term or acronym, just like this) are used after the first occurrence of a term that not all readers will know. You can see this every day in any newspaper.

Layering tactic #2: A glossary of terms may be useful if your white paper is peppered with terms that one segment of your audience may not know. In this case, gather together all of your in-line definitions on one page at the end of your paper.

Layering tactic #3: Hyperlinks to background material can be useful. For example, if you’re discussing virtualization, you can include a link in your white paper to a good background article from a credible source. You can even link to an illuminating discussion on a blog, as long as it takes the same dignified tone as your white paper. If you’re distributing your white paper as a PDF, make sure to make the clickable text visible, and test it before you send it out.

Layering tactic #4: Sidebars are short pieces set off from the main narrative, often as tinted text boxes. These are useful for presenting background that more knowledgeable readers already know, or a list of bullets, steps in a process, or a mini case study. A sidebar can be as short as a single sentence, or as long as a whole page.

Layering tactic #5: Quick summaries are small text boxes that sum up an entire section or page in a few quick points. Scientific American uses a little text box labeled “Key Concepts” with each of its major articles. This has the double benefit of boosting the “scanability” of your white paper.

Layering tactic #6: An appendix is a separate section tucked in at the back of a white paper. While we don’t often see these in white papers, there’s no reason not to include one to help reach a second audience with the same document. An appendix can present more or less technical information, procedures, describe the methodology used in your paper, or any other information that you think not every reader will want or need to know.

One or more of these tactics should help your white paper communicate to your different audiences. And they may be useful in almost any white paper, because they provide different pathways through your document for readers who want more or less information.

About the Author: Gordon Graham helps B2B software and clean tech firms tell their stories with crisp, compelling white papers. He’s the founder of www.thatwhitepaperguy.com and a frequent poster on the WhitePaperSource Forum.

If you want to use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to boost your bottom line, you’ll need some how-to directions. A brand new guide has just emerged, SocialMediaExaminer.com—a free online magazine.

Premiered on October 12, 2009, Social Media Examiner is a colorful, free weekly online magazine that features articles, interviews and tips from the world’s leading social media gurus. The publication gives business owners and marketers every
tool they’ll need to leverage social media techniques for success.

“We pulled out all the stops for this new online magazine,” said Michael Stelzner, the site’s founder and organizer of the smash-hit Social Media Success Summit event.

Stats Show Businesses Don’t Know How to Use Social Media
Facebook boasts 300 million active users worldwide. Fifty million people use Twitter. Forty-three million rely on LinkedIn. Social media sites are worldwide hangouts for everyone from Fortune 100 CEOs to clever young entrepreneurs.

“Social media marketing is fast becoming THE standard for building visibility, awareness and credibility for businesses of all sizes,” says blogging expert Denise Wakeman of The Blog Squad. “It gives businesses an unprecedented opportunity to more fully engage with and listen to consumers, which can lead to better brand awareness, brand loyalty and product development.”

The Social Media Marketing Industry Report, published earlier this year, found that 81% of all marketers who use social media said it generates more exposure for their business; 62% said it helped close more business deals; and 85% of small-business owners said they reaped benefits from social media techniques.

But a July 2009 study by eMarketer revealed that although 81% of executives feel social media marketing enhances brands and business relationships, 51% of them aren’t using it for one simple reason: They don’t know how.

A Jungle of Information
Mari Smith, one of the world’s leading authorities on using Facebook for business, says that when it comes to step-by-step instruction on how to use social media, it’s a jungle out there. “There’s so much conflicting and confusing information about social media available online and offline. Businesses need a reliable source of social media news, resources and sage advice that they can implement with confidence.”

Stelzner, the founder of Social Media Examiner, says the free online publication satisfies that need perfectly: “Many businesses don’t have a clue about where to start or what to do. Social Media Examiner is a free, no-strings-attached site that tells people exactly how it’s done. The online magazine gives readers easy-to-understand, useful techniques that they can implement immediately.”

The colorful, interactive SocialMediaExaminer.com provides how-to articles, case studies that give specific examples of how top business leaders use social media, video interviews with experts and summaries of the latest research. The magazine will run new, updated content every week and readers can post comments and join online discussions.

Stelzner has a track record for delivering rich content in his publications and seminars. He doesn’t disappoint with Social Media Examiner.  Some of the biggest names in social media will weigh in, such as Mari Smith, Denise Wakeman, blogging expert and co-author of ProBlogger Chris Garrett and Jason Falls, who has crafted social media campaigns for top corporations.

See How It’s Done
“SocialMediaExaminer.com can help businesses because it gives readers expert advice from people who are actively using social media tactics,” says Falls. “Readers see what award-winning thinkers not only say, but what they actually do to drive customer engagement and business success online.”

Stelzner has worked tirelessly for many months to make this groundbreaking publication happen. He started with two goals for Social Media Examiner: First, make it a first-class, user-friendly publication, and second, make it one of the top 500 sites in the world.

Getting to Social Media Examiner is easy—just visit SocialMediaExaminer.com to dig into the great content and sign up for your no-cost subscription.

“Business has always been about being where your customers are, and today, that’s online,” says case study expert Casey Hibbard. “First impressions are made, deals are closed and relationships are deepened online. If you’re not there, you can bet that your competitors are.”

Because the white paper baby you love will be awfully lonely—unread and unseen—unless you make active efforts to unleash it upon the world. Here are some things to consider:

Generate leads or go viral?
You have to choose your overall strategy from the start. Is this a sales-based effort to gather qualified leads? Or is it a marketing effort intended to establish your authority, expertise and presence? In sum, are you pushing or pulling?

The two strategies take very different paths. If you’re going for the leads, you’ll develop a campaign that may involve email blasts, direct mail, telemarketing and even (gasp!) print advertising. Certainly you’ll gate the content by requiring registration (i.e., getting names and email addresses) in exchange for the paper.

If you want to go viral, gating is the last thing you’ll want to do as it dramatically reduces the number of downloads. Indeed, your whole promotional approach will look entirely different, emphasizing relationship or PR efforts such as outreach via social and traditional media.

“Sell” the paper—and nothing else
Whichever path you choose, one thing will remain consistent: in your messaging, you’ll focus on the value of the white paper’s content. What will readers get by downloading or requesting the document? How will they benefit from what they read? You’ll lose leads and credibility if you diffuse your message by talking about your company, brand, products or services.

Rally your allies
No matter how large or powerful your organization is, you cannot succeed alone. You need a network of allies who will eagerly spread the word about your paper, tweet by tweet, email by email, blog post by blog post.

Building this network imposes another set of responsibilities on your part. First there’s research: who’s talking about the issues you address in your white paper? Which blogs, LinkedIn Groups, online forums, social communities, periodicals and so forth are speaking to your intended audience?

Once you’ve identified the right venues, however, you can’t simply crash the party by waving the white paper in your hand and yelling, “Come and get it!” (You’ve probably seen this many times on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, for example. Are you impressed—in a good way?) No, you’ll have to build relationships first by demonstrating good citizenship: reading other people’s blogs and articles, leaving relevant comments, and being generous with retweets and blog mentions (”Hey, check out what Jane Blogger has to say about…”) of your own.

Create more spokes on the wheel
Instead of thinking of your white paper as a stand-alone effort, make it the hub of a wheel of activity centered on the paper’s issues. Depending on your talents, resources and inclinations, these additional tactics may include articles, videos, podcasts, webinars, a series of blog posts, live speaking appearances and more.

Be prepared with talking points and examples
If your promotional efforts succeed (I’m optimistic and believe that they will), you’ll be approached for interviews via a number of channels: email exchanges, guest blog posts, recorded webcasts or telecasts. While some elements of any interview are unpredictable, there are two things you can certainly anticipate: a request for two or three major “take-aways” or important messages from your paper, and real-life examples of your ideas in action. Be sure you’re ready to share both.

Plan next steps
What comes after your white paper? What do you want readers to do as a consequence of reading it? How will you leverage your paper’s success and sustain the attention you’ve gained? The answers depend on the nature of your business, your audience and the issues you’re addressing, but may include: offering a series of additional white papers that explore your topic in further depth; encouraging participation in dedicated blogs, fan pages or online communities focused on your paper’s issues; inviting prospects to virtual and live events; perhaps even publishing an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned, dead-tree, paper-and-ink book. Your options may vary—the point is to look out for them.

About the Author: Jonathan Kranz is the principal of Kranz Communications and the author of Writing Copy for Dummies. You may download his latest ebook (for free and without registration): The eBook eBook: How to Turn Your Expertise Into Magnetic Marketing Material.

The bottom line is that our relationship with printed material is on the decline. Today, the preponderance of material that we rely on to inform us, educate us, and assist us with our daily decisions comes from online sources. White papers certainly fall into this category.

As evidence of its growing popularity, if you had performed a Google search for the term “white paper” ten years ago, the number of returns would have been in the thousands. Today that same search yields over 100 million items!

So given the decline in printed information, why do white papers remain so popular? In my opinion, there are three things that represent this trend:

1. Print Transformation—At the beginning of the decade, a large portion of white papers were printed, warehoused, and distributed in a similar fashion to brochures and fact sheets. Today the majority of white papers are distributed as PDF files, read online, and distributed via websites, email attachments, and online library sharing sites such as Scribd.com or DocStoc.com. This has made white papers easier to read, more popular, and more widely distributed to millions of readers with one click of a mouse.

2. Fact-based Reporting—Many opinion analysts attribute the decline in newspapers to the rise of opinion journalism; in other words, the substitution of fact-based reporting with opinion and agenda-centered activism. In comparison, white papers are fact-based deliverables.  Without referenced facts to back up assertions, a white paper quickly loses its credibility and audience. With factual information as a foundational principle, many business executives frequently seek out white papers as part of their decision-making process, growing the popularity of the medium.

3. Commercial Innovation—While many newspapers attempted to supplement print with corresponding websites, their heart just wasn’t in it. Most turned out to be online versions of their printed newspapers, and most did not leverage the “connectedness” of the web to build online social communities. Conversely, the commercial influences on today’s white paper have transformed the medium from the stark printed government document of the 1920s to today’s interactive, colorful, multi-platform, social media environment. As a PDF file, I can read and share the same white paper via Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and a host of handheld devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry with complete font, image, and content integrity. I can also discuss its content on many online blogs, wikis, forums, and social media sites.

I can’t say whether the traditional newspaper will be around by the end of the next decade. What I can say is that as long as white papers continue to demonstrate the level of innovation shown so far, their longevity will certainly be assured well into the future.

About the author: Jonathan Kantor is the principal of The Appum Group, “The White Paper Company”, and a 25-year enterprise-marketing veteran with over 11 years of white paper marketing expertise. You can read more about ‘Short Attention Marketing’ via his blog at www.WhitePaperPundit.com, and follow him via Twitter at Jonathan_Kantor.

To be fair, uninspiring technical writing isn’t entirely the fault of its authors, who face unique challenges - not the least of which is having to persuade and educate at the same time. But a few principles help keep me on course as I write for my technology-focused clients.

Technology Is About People
People read white papers and other marketing materials, and people create the technologies we write about. Job one in writing about technology is to get close to the engineers engaged in the hard work of writing code or bending metal to create new products. Which isn’t always easy.

During my stint as a technical writer for a major airline, I watched in dismay as an engineer I had to interview actually got up from his desk and walked rapidly in the opposite direction when I approached for our meeting. It wasn’t until after I spent some time in the break room with engineers chatting about their aviation and video-making hobbies that I developed the rapport I needed to do my research.

Even if you are working off-site, you can still gain the confidence of experts by treating them like the people they are rather than simply research subjects.

It’s just as important to pay close attention to your audience. Picture your intended reader and ask yourself: “What does this person want to know?” “How can the products I’m writing about help this person do his or her job more effectively?” Even better, track a few of them down and learn about their needs first-hand.

Less Is More
Chances are you’re writing for a business (not technical) audience that needs the CliffsNotes version of the story you’re trying to tell and not the whole novel. Derek Walters, communications manager at the Energy and Environmental Research Center in North Dakota, uses what he calls the “tell your grandmother test” when interviewing engineers and scientists. If Grandma won’t get it, chances are your readers won’t either. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Enough said.

Benefits Sell, Not Functions
If your subject is technical, you have to spend some time introducing the technology involved, but don’t overdo it. You want to focus on the benefit the technology can provide. Readers aren’t so concerned about how it works; they mainly want to know how it will help them make more money, save time, have fun, or otherwise improve their lives.

XCOR Aerospace public relations director Douglas Graham has boiled down the central message of his communications to this: “We are developing reliable, reusable rocket engines so that people like you and me will be able to afford to go to space.” Any discussion of how individual rocket engines work or whether they use this or that type of oxidizer pump is secondary to the central message. “That puts it in a context for the average person,” says Graham.

And that’s ultimately what all technically focused business writing should be about: putting technology in the right context for actual people.

For more on this subject, see my free paper “Selling Breakthrough Technology: 10 Secrets to Writing Better White Papers, Press Releases and More” at http://www.michaelbelfiore.com/breakthrough.

About the author: Michael Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists (Smithsonian/HarperCollins, 2009), the first book on the agency that created the Internet. His corporate clients have included Sharp, Canon, Target, and American Express.

One of my clients asks me to write a white paper every time the sales force encounters a serious objection. So the more objections, the more white papers. But isn’t there a more scientific method?
Yes, there is. Here’s a list of questions you can use to get at that answer.

1. Experience: How many white papers has the company published before? If the answer is none, they should probably do one or two to learn about the process.

2. Market segments: How many markets does the company cover? It will likely need at least one new white paper for each significant market, every so often. Segments can be defined in many ways:

* By vertical market: education, finance, retail, airlines, whatever
* By size: small, enterprise, Fortune 500
* By volume: transactions, SKUs, employees, and so on

3. Problems solved: How many business or technical problems does the company solve? Does it need one white paper for each? Sometimes each “problem” has a separate product line with its own marketing team; in this case, treat each as a separate company.

4. Competition: Does the company have aggressive competitors that publish many white papers? The scope and pace of competition is a factor.

5. Budget: How many white papers can the company afford to publish and promote effectively? If the company only has the budget for one per quarter, four a year may have to be “enough.”
As you can see, there’s no neat formula for figuring out how many white papers are “enough.” So let’s look at a sample company.

A sample company: Contextualistics
Let’s say Contextualistics is a software startup with a smarter way to scan natural language. The company seeks partners to embed its language processor into search engines, help systems, and perhaps virtual personas. The marketing director wants to gain mindshare and generate leads using white papers.

So how many white papers does the company need? Let’s go through our questions.

1. Experience: No-one in the firm has ever created a white paper. So they should probably start slowly with one or two, then review what they learned.

2. Market segments: Contextualistics needs clients who do search engines and online help. (Virtual personas will come later.) Are these two segments so different that each one needs its own white paper? Let’s say yes, so the company needs two (or one “cloned” into two versions).

3. Problems solved: The language processor really solves one big problem, getting machines to understand natural language. So we can stay at two papers.

4. Competition: The company has a couple of competitors with one white paper each. So two will do nicely to start.

5. Budget: The marketing director can get the budget for two white papers in the next three months.

So Contextualistics has its answer: For now, two white papers will be “enough.” After that, the company can review the results, and revisit this exercise for the upcoming period.

A larger company with more aggressive competitors may clearly need more white papers. For instance, a medium-sized company with three main markets may want one white paper for each market every quarter. In this case, 12 white papers a year are “enough.”

And a Fortune 500 company likely has many product managers, each wanting white papers for his or her products. For a company this size, there is no real need to calculate how many white papers are “enough.”
So, how many does your business need?

About the author:  Gordon Graham helps B2B companies tell their stories with crisp, compelling white papers. He’s the founder of www.thatwhitepaperguy.com, and a frequent poster on the www.whitepapersource.com forums.