How-To: Whitepapers

As I have written in earlier Blogposts, Whitepapers are a perfect means to communicate with your expert customers. As a document, they are located somewhere between a marketing brochure, and a book. And they are often written by subject matter experts, rather than marketing gurus.

In his article → Showing Off Your Solutions in a White Paper, PAUL B. BROWN provides useful insight into the question of how you write such a document. Here an universally important insight:

„STRESS THE BENEFITS Sure, the white paper is intended to be a subtle way of advertising your product or service offering. But customers are not necessarily interested in a commercial pitch, subtle though it may be. They want to know how what you are writing about can benefit them. In other words, you want to underscore in your paper the benefits it can provide to your readers, says Michael A. Stelzner.“

Before you can write a good white paper you need to know the following:
  • Who are my customers?
  • What is my product, and how does it benefit my customers?
For the first question, it is not sufficient to know company names, sizes, or purchasing department. Here you need to know, which personas will buy your product, and what they intend to do with it (in the literature, see the topic Buyer-Personas). For the second question, you need to understand how your product’s features map to the typical customer needs.
If you have knowledge about these both areas the typical wording does the rest to translate the benefits into the language of your readers. At the end they will say, „yes, he got me“…

Weiterführende Informationen

Das Original dieses Artikels ist auf →Der Produktmanager erschienen (©Andreas Rudolph). Regelmäßige Artikel gibt es über die (→Mailingliste), oder indem Sie →mir auf Twitter folgen. In der Online Version finden Sie hier die versprochenen weiterführenden Links:

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    This entry was posted on Montag, November 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 pm. It is filed under PM-Themen, Thema des Tages and tagged with , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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