White Paper Planning: 4 Important Questions to Ask First

We get a lot of inquiries into white paper writing. While white papers are effective brand assets with great ROI, I find myself answering a few basic questions repeatedly, so I thought I’d address them here. The questions below aren’t in any particular order, but I hope they help you, your team, and/or agency partner think through your next white paper.

The questions:

1. How do your customers actually buy?
2. Do you actually have a point of view?
3. What data do you have?
4. How will you promote the white paper?

How do your customers actually buy?

The first question isn’t about white papers, but about sales. It’s crucial to understand the who, what, why, when, how, and how-much of your sales process.

Who exactly do you sell to—down to the job title? Why do they want to buy a product in your category; and why your product, specifically? How long is your typical sales cycle? What do you typically bill clients?

The answers to these questions will frame data collection, timelines, resonance, and expectations. 

For example, if your typical sales cycle is 18 months, you sell into nursing teams, and part of your sales cycle goes through the Value Analysis Committee (VAC), you’ll need to decide whether to write a white paper that addresses specific nursing challenges (targeted for earlier in the sales cycle); or to help the VAC as a whole make a more informed decision (i.e., targeted at late stages of the cycle). 

If you sell services in the 100k-1M range, the problems you address will differ from if you were, say, selling $199/yr seats. It also sets expectations: if you’re working with an 18-month sales cycle, you shouldn’t expect your brand new white paper to deliver hot leads in week one.

The wording, topic choice, data required, experts contacted, and promotion plan will all look different depending on your understanding of the business. Which brings me to my next question:

Do you actually have a point of view?

A white paper is primarily about changing mindsets and behaviors. People in your industry (peers, customers) currently do things One Way™, and you’re trying to convince them the Other Way™ is better. Because of this, you need a pretty strong point of view to carry the white paper from intro to outro. Without it, inertia wins, and nothing changes.

It’s not just one reader, either; you’re often trying to convince a buying committee to bet on your solution over the status quo (or a competitor). Each reader needs to be able to convince their colleagues without you in the room.

“Strong POV” is relative here and will depend on your industry. For example, you might need to convince people that utility locating without the right tools is asking for death and lawsuits, or that digital health founders shouldn’t build clinical solutions before understanding how medical reimbursements work. Both of these are relatively strong POVs with plenty of angles you can explore, and you’ll need data to back them up. Which brings me to:

What data do you have?

Data is the backbone of any white paper. It’s what makes it shareable, quotable, and actionable. A basic white paper on cloud cost management might get a cursory glance, but one with benchmarks from an analysis of 300 other cloud leaders carries your company’s name into high-level rooms.

‘Data’ can look different here, depending on what you have access to:

• If you have a healthy email list, you can ping your subscribers with a small incentive to get responses, analyze those responses, and turn it into a white paper. You might have to remind them 2-3 times over a few weeks.
• You can use services like SurveyMonkey, Wynter, or Qualtrics if you’ve got the resources. These services can put together relevant panels for your needs.
• You can leverage conferences you’re sponsoring or attending. Ask people to scan a QR code and fill in a short Google Form (5-8 questions) on-site and analyze that data.
• You can ask 5-8 ideal profiles to sit with you for 30-60 minutes and get their thoughts on the topic. This option is more qualitative, but you get rich insights from the transcripts (record video if possible). It also makes for tailored content later (more on that in a bit), and incentivizes your interviewees to share the white paper once it’s out.

Remember that a white paper is opinion + data + (your) solution, so the data exists to either support or falsify your hypothesis/opinion. Consider collecting data first before working on any white paper outlines, as your conclusions and framing may change mid-way.

How will you promote the white paper?

A white paper shouldn’t gather digital dust on your website, but should circulate widely. The general thread is: “How can we get this into the hands of the people who need to take the action we want?”

There are a few options for white paper promotion, from strongest to weakest, some of which may seem obvious but get overlooked:

1. Interview your ICP: Yes, that’s a promotion tactic. The easiest way, by far, to craft a white paper that travels is to embed the ideal reader into its production. People love being heard and quoted, and seeing their name in your white paper or report almost guarantees your first few ambassadors. The outreach can take a little time, but it’s absolutely worth it.
2. Email it to your ICP: This simple act overcomes invisibility by putting it in front of the right eyes. If you have an appropriately segmented email list, start there. Send it to people in your network who might know others that need to see it. Add a link to it in your email signature. Email is one of the easiest ways to spread the word; don’t be shy about it.
3. Publish it on your website ungated: Another strong but obvious move. Nobody likes typing in their phone number, postcode, and social security number just to download a PDF. It’s also deeply counterproductive: you want people to consume your content, and gating it defeats that purpose. Do you really want your CRM getting spammed with john@doe.com, Director @ Acme, tel: +1 234 5678 in Afghanistan? You want firmly interested leads, not uncertain ones—so reduce friction and ungate everything.
4. Pitch it to industry publications: Press helps, and news rooms love relevant new reports as it gives them a credible source to cite. Even better if your white paper involves some sort of regional or industry-based benchmarking, as you can then reach out to journalists in each of the regions without sounding repetitive. You might need to build a media map for this; here are some pitching tips to help you along. Aim for even just one press mention in a newspaper, relevant newsletter, podcast, or industry roundup.
5. Run an ad campaign: Ads are one of the lowest bandwidth ways to drive more eyes on your brand new white paper. You can get granular on sites like LinkedIn if, say, you want DevOps Managers to see your new cloud white paper, or if you’re looking to get Risk Managers to see your related banking white paper. It may cost a bit of money, and you’ll need to put together some creative assets, but a 1-month campaign can yield powerful results down the line. (We did this with our AI policy report). Pair this with an ungated webpage for best results.
6. Present it at events: When you’re spending thousands to sponsor and travel to events, it makes sense to maximize your mileage. A white paper gives you one more thing to talk about with peers and prospects, and you can embed a QR code somewhere on your booth or in your keynote slides to drive traffic. Pick out a few key insights from your data to talk around and encourage people to go check out the full thing.
7. Write up a blog post: If you’re an observability platform, you ideally want to be ranking for ‘observability white paper’. An ungated landing page helps with this, but you can take it further with a search-optimized blog post around the white paper. But don’t stop there: find ways to embed or link to the white paper in other blog posts. For example, if you have an existing blog post on enterprise observability mistakes, that’s a great candidate for internal linking.
8. Video clips: If you followed my advice in #1 above and recorded the sessions, you should have some video clips you can use to promote the white paper (with your guests’ permission). You can do a recap video (basic graphics + voiceover), an executive summary (your CEO talking about the topic), or simply post some edited and captioned clips of you chatting with your guests during the talks. Such videos are incredibly versatile, and you can embed them on the landing page, use them in the ad campaign, play them during your talks, embed them in blog posts, and otherwise share them on social media.
9. Social media posts: Sure, write a series of posts announcing your new white paper; but also show all the other ways your white paper is getting mileage. “Here’s a video of our CEO talking about the topic”; “Here’s a slide of the white paper cover on the slide at a keynote”; “Here’s a press clipping of our new white paper in a tier-1 newspaper”; “Here’s someone else posting on LinkedIn about their contribution to our white paper”; and so on. If you do it right, you’ll have no shortage of things to talk about.

Final thoughts

These questions help shape and frame the white paper you need to write as opposed to the one you’ve imagined. Sync with your editorial team or agency partner on these questions before committing resources to a white paper, and feel free to reach out for help.