White Papers—the Solution Prescription

Often white papers are considered the most effective and standard tool of marketing for most of the technology companies. Since their offerings are new and complex, the technology and solution surrounding them needs to be presented in a way that the business audience could understand as part of their business problem solving and help them take a decision.  More so, a company also write and publishes white papers to—gather leads for the sales force, educate potential customers, media, salesforce or channel partners, influence a selection committee, redefine a market space, build credibility or mindshare, and keep up with competitors.

More so, white paper readers remain in search of potential information that can help them understand an issue, solve a problem, or decide. This often involves learning about the technology, solutions, a case study or features and benefits of a product or service they may consider buying. A survey of IT managers by Forbes.com and Bitpipe (now TechTarget) showed that 76 percent of them read white papers to stay on top of new trends, 69 percent to get information about products and vendors, 50 percent to compare products, 42 percent to help justify buying decisions, and 33 percent to develop a shortlist of qualified vendors.

Eventually, a client also is unlikely to commit to an expensive and complicated product or project until they first have all the facts. They'll probably hold meetings with other people in their organization to assess about the offering. Therefore, the more compelling information they have at their fingertips about your company and what it offers, the better the chances of you closing the sale.

In a nutshell it is a report, which addresses a problem and then presents a solution. White papers were first published by the British government in the early 20th century. They explained government proposals for new policies and legislation and are still used for that purpose to this day.

However, since the early 1990s, they have become a tool for business—to—business (B2B) marketing. They are heavily used by IT companies as their products tend to be expensive and complicated. But, increasingly, management consultancies, engineering firms, banks, lawyers and others selling to businesses are using them as well. This is not surprising. White papers are ideal for explaining everything from new manufacturing processes through to the impact of new government rules on business.

What little data there is on the use of white papers seems to suggest they are being increasingly adopted by businesses to support marketing.

Some 61% of businesses involved in B2B marketing already use white papers, according to the US-based Content Marketing Institute. Marketing Sherpa, another US institute, reckons white papers are probably the most important tool for those marketing to businesses.

White papers tend to be long documents packed with useful arguments and data. They're usually written by experienced in-house or freelance copywriters. But to resonate with their intended audience they must be written objectively and present genuine solutions to real problems.

Sometimes, a common mistake is to pepper these documents with sales hype. This is not the place to do that. It undermines the credibility and value of your arguments. To write a good white paper—identify a key problem faced by your customers and explain how it can impact them such as lost market share, cost increases or reputational damage. Describe other approaches and solutions to this problem that have been used and point out their limitations. Now present your solution and address how it has helped other companies and why it works. Describe in detail, preferably with numbers, demonstrating the scale of improvements. Then round-up with a conclusion. Wherever possible, back your arguments using research and statistics from respected third parties such as government agencies and trade associations. This builds credibility.

A truly good white paper is educational and even groundbreaking. It should have your prospects nodding in agreement as they read it. They should come away better informed and believing that you clearly know their problem and understand how to fix it.

A well-produced white paper also places you as the go-to-expert in your field. That not only helps justify buying from you, but possibly paying a premium, as your company's expertise makes you a safer bet to do business with.

If you happen to be writing a white paper, these points can help you build your strategy to achieve the real intent of its publication.

Technical Writers: Can you justify your job?

Technical writers are in the profession of disseminating the technical knowledge in structured format for the consumption of the user, which is aimed to realize a specific task or use. The present situation is, where the industry is filled with the technical writers who come from different backgrounds. Most of the technical writers are engineers, some of them have taken the technical writing course and some of them have made transition into this field from direct mass communication and journalism. The document produced by these technical writers has mixed quality as good, bad and ugly. However, most often the complaint received from the customer is that the documents are not user friendly.

If analyzed, most of the time the language is not very appropriate, clear and grammatically correct to explain the features and functionality. Some times the information presented does not have flow; sometimes many of the information are missing from the document. In nutshell we have not grown to a level to claim ourselves expert in the field of technical writing. One can say that this field is still in the nascent stage in India. Largely true, because our curriculum does not include this subject and we do not intend to take it as a career. Most of the people today who opt for writing career become journalists and join media related jobs.

The apathy is that most of the people who are today’s technical writers are not from the writing background, nor do they have inclination towards writing. It’s sheer job opportunity, which has drawn them to accept the job. Many of them working after a brief period have made a decision to shift to other fields and remaining are carrying on the task to continue their job. It’s quite ridiculing that the job what you do everyday is the job you do not like to do but you are bound to do because you are paid for that. Or, the job what you do is not your cup of tea. All these factors add to the immature technical writing produced by some of the unskilled technical writers, which brings bad name to the community.

The job what you hold today, is not just the job what you can hold because of the fact that you can write little bit of English. If you do not love your job then in fact it will not take you anywhere. You first be writer before you become a technical writer. As a matter of fact, you have to be first a writer to be a medical writer, political writer, and technical writer or fiction writer. If the writer is missing in you then nothing else can help you to become technical writer. Therefore, not only writing, but good quality writing is desired to be in this profession.

Can transition add value?

For many of the aspiring creative writer working as a technical writer might seem a good option because it is going to be paid well. If you are transitioning from your current non-writing position to technical writing because it's a hot market, you like technology, and/or you want to do away with your freelance tag, perhaps you are thinking right. But in case you just like writing, then you should think before you step in.

Writing and editing user manuals, help documents, technical bulletin and API document could be painful if you don’t love doing so. Technical writing is demanding and you will be tried writing different sort of technical stuff, which might not satisfy your liking for writing what you are looking for. So, before deciding to choose a career into technical writing, you must evaluate yourself.

Some would prefer to go for highly satisfying writing career of their liking even if it pays them less. Some would love to write about technology and enjoy doing so. Some would find technical writing as boring and unimaginative. Some would find technical writing as very interesting and creative, as it relates to problem solving and that requires lot of creativity. Follow your instinct to know where you fall among these categories.

What the technical writers meet and seminars stress upon?

Added to that the seminar and meet organized for the technical writers stresses upon learning different kinds of authoring and word processing tools, which is any way technical writers have to know to perform the task. I don’t know if any of the meet stresses to shape good language in spite of knowing that most of the technical writers come from non-writing background and that is going to be the bottleneck problem as they grow in their career. It is assumed that technical writers are basically the writers who has all the language ingredient in them to produced good writing and it’s the technical knowledge what they lack. Fundamentally, the assumption is right in the sense that you know what is expected out of you in terms of job and aim of the meet is to update you with new knowledge of the industry. Otherwise also, it’s the personal responsibility of the person to shape up their language skill who opts for this career.

Promise of global business

The reflection of good writing can be a visual part in any form, be it script, an article, an essay, an advertisement or a user manual. Especially user manual is supposed to be a first date with the product. Great manuals can sell products. There are good tutorials, which can make you understand the product so well that time and again you would love to continue with the same products.

But still there will be people who would still persist in search of your inner beauty. However, this is not the way to bet. Microsoft has consistently been trying to address everyone’s questions to make it competitive and have advantages. Still they may have messages. Above all to write the good manual you need to have good writers. And if you don’t have good writers your documents will not serve the purpose to the user. Bad documentation increases the cost of technical support and earns you even bad reputation in the industry.

Can we rise to the occasion and face the reality?

The best technical communicator is a technical person, is a subjective issue to argue. However, technical writers are the writers who have the rare ability to communicate and teach through indirect means such as paper and online media.

But it is very difficult to merely narrate a profession, which is entirely dependant on the personal caliber of a person. It is really a tough question to ask who can make a good technical writer. Many good writers who are able to write good story, poetry and fiction have many a times proved to be good technical writers as well and at a time bad writer too. Its all dependant on the personal interest what you could make of yourself

Possible solution?

Probably possible solution to stabilize this field in today’s context would be to hire really good writers so that they can justify their presence in the job. For the technical writers also, it would be apt to get out of the tag of half-writer, pseudo writer or be in dual job capacity being a writer and someone else too. If this field is to sustain well in India, the quality of writing has to be improved immensely to meet the challenge.