8 Essential Elements of an Effective White Paper
If you’re looking to create content that attracts leads and provides value for customers, you may develop a white paper to share your messages. You may have a topic but, from there, don’t know where to begin. Learning about the elements of a white paper that make the tool effective for your audience can guide content creation that interests and engages with your audience. We’re discussing what these elements are with topics like:
White Paper Structure
Though white papers can cover a variety of topics and apply in most industries, they generally all follow a similar format. Sections to add to your white paper include:
- Title: The title grabs the lead’s attention and clearly states the problem or topic the white paper covers.
- Abstract: The abstract or executive summary gives an overview of the full paper and provides just enough detail to let the reader know if it’s worth their time to continue.
- Introduction: This section defines the issue and provides any necessary background information the reader needs to understand the upcoming definitions and solutions.
- Problem definition: This section identifies the problem from the perspective of the target audience.
- High-level solution: This section answers the problem defined in the previous section and gives a description or list of alternative options, including those of your competitors.
- Solution details: This section is the main “selling point,” and explains in detail why your product, service, or company is the right choice of all the available high-level solutions from which the customer could choose.
- Business benefits: This section provides additional details about how your product or service solution directly benefits the reader’s business or organization.
- Concluding summary: Similar to the abstract, this section summarizes the information from the entire white paper but emphasizes the selling points again to make them memorable.
- Call to action (CTA): This section tells the reader what you want them to do next, such as visit your eCommerce store or schedule a call with your client representatives.
8 Elements of a White Paper
When you’re brainstorming ideas for your white papers and conducting research, consider including these eight elements:
1. Clear Goals
Your goals for your white paper should be specific to the target audience. Who are these people? What do they already know and what are they trying to learn? What are their pain points? It’s helpful to set goals beyond general topics like “build brand awareness” and “generate more leads” into something more tangible. That won’t just make it easier for you to track if your white paper is doing its job, but also help you learn if it’s actually valuable to your audience.
If you want to discover what your audience is searching for online and how the content you provide stacks up against the competition, request your free content analysis from CopyPress today. You can learn about underserved content topics and keywords that can make for a good white paper for your target audience. CopyPress has a team of content creators at the ready to help develop these topics into white papers that will educate, interest, and engage your target audience. Schedule a call with us today to discuss your content needs.
“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”
Kevin Doory
Director of SEO at Auto Revo
Related: Marketing Goals: How To Set and Achieve Them
2. Concise Summary
Your white paper provides a more thorough insight into your products or services than you may cover in a blog post or even in your website copy. The long-form copy contains data, research, and hard-selling points that get your target audience to follow your call to action and make a conversion. But they may never make it there if you don’t include a summary they can scan first.
Both the abstract and the concluding summary give your audience a chance to sample and scan the content before committing to reading the whole thing. That’s why it’s important to make the summaries concise, but impactful. Hook people and encourage them to read more without giving away all the content.
3. Data Transparency
Image via iStockPhoto by @wutwhanfoto
You want your white paper to be a source of reliable data and information for anyone who wants to learn more about the topic. The best way to do this is to be transparent with your data collection and sources. You can be transparent with your data by explaining the parameters of any tests or experiments you did to collect the information. Use accurate numbers and figures and give insight on how you drew any conclusions based on the collected data. If you used data from outside sources, be sure to cite them, and link back to them if possible.
4. Qualitative Data
There are two types of data you may come across when conducting studies and writing white papers: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data is the kind you can measure with tools, metrics, or other numbers. For example, the number of likes you get on a social media post is quantitative data. You can see the actual number and report it.
Qualitative data is more subjective. It comes from people’s self-responses or things like observed behavior. This type of data has to have some sort of analysis or interpretation around it to make sense to the target audience. It’s important to provide a healthy balance of both types of data to humanize your topic. When looking for sources of qualitative data, you may conduct polls or surveys, cite case studies, or interview clients or industry thought leaders.
5. Logical Flow
While most white papers follow a similar layout and format, sometimes they can deviate from the template if there’s more data or information to share outside of that premade scope. When you’re planning your white paper outline, consider how each section flows into the next. Does it make sense? Would it be better to rearrange some sections to make the data clearer or the message stronger?
Knowing as much as possible about your target market before you write your paper can help you make the right decisions about style and flow. It can also help you pick the best ways to present data to lead to more conversions.
6. Data Visualization
The design is just as important an element of a white paper as the written content. Design can include the font choice, color decisions, and the pick of visuals like photos or infographics to include with your written work. Incorporating infographics and other data visualizations helps illustrate your key points better than words alone. Visual learners or those who don’t like math may appreciate another way to view statistics that’s easier to digest and understand. Have your content and design teams work together to create a white paper that appeals to its target audience.
7. Think About the “Why” Factor
Don’t just create a document to attract leads and flaunt impressive statistics. Think about why you’re publishing this white paper. Beyond just your goals, what is this document’s actual purpose? Is it to teach people about a specific topic? Is it to sell a product? If you have a solid idea of why you’re creating a white paper for your business, it may make both the research and writing process go more smoothly. Making sure all your data, sections, and visuals point back to one main idea will make the paper easier to understand, more enjoyable to read, and more valuable to the consumer.
8. Develop Launch Plans
How are you going to release your white paper to the world? It’s a good idea to know how you intend to do this before you even start the project. That can help you frame things like design and choose what visuals or interactive elements you can include. For example, if you plan to release your white paper as a lead magnet to a digital download, you have more options to include content links and embedded video within the document.
Now that you know the most important elements of a white paper, and you’re ready to create your insightful and engaging white paper, call CopyPress. We work with our clients to develop the full plan from ideation to launch in a way that’s painless. Our team of strategists delivers white papers guaranteed to make people stop, look, and engage with your content.
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