White papers are a really useful way of getting in front of your customers.

A white paper is typically a longer form piece of primary research, conducted by a company to help educate their audience in some way.

When planned properly, they can connect with your target audience’s problems in a deep and engaging way. They can also help you land key messages in a broader industry context and increase your chances of conversion from existing traffic. For example, clever marketers can use white papers to address sales objections to educate the market.

So, how can your start-up utilise white papers?

White papers are particularly prominent in B2B marketing. They are typically used to help hook potential customers by enticing them with new insight into a topic relevant to their day-to-day operations. For example, a marketing software business may research how analytics of consumer behaviours will adapt with a new legislation change. Or a HR Tech business may research how employee retention can be improved in a particular sector or role.

White papers are most effective when they:

• Offer tangible takeaways to help your customer achieve their goals
• Share a new finding or insight that’s original in the industry
• Focus on key issues or current trends in the industry

Unsurprisingly, the ‘answer’ in many white papers is centred around the solution the author company is offering. White papers have also had a surge in popularity in recent years, so buyers are getting more cynical and can easily spot a ‘dressed-up’ brochure that’s masquerading as a low value white paper. The answer to this increased competition and saturation? If you’re going to do one, do it properly.

Where you start is the most important stage of any white paper. Most marketers overlook the planning stage, which means they point their white paper project in the wrong direction at the start and then reap underwhelming results. Do not be pressured to ‘just start’. Before you begin, you need to know what answers you want to find, what you’ll do with them and, most importantly, why they matter.

A hypothesis needs to be:

1. Unique to your research and add to common industry knowledge
2. Centred around your audience’s challenges
3. Provable through your research methods
4. Commenting on a trend that’s ‘bigger’ than your business
5. Easy to summarise and share in marketing messages
6. Strategically advantageous to your business
7. Delivering value to your partners/contributors

Additional time spent on the ‘story’ of the research is never time wasted.

Who is the focus? What are the challenges they face? How are you going to frame the insights to make them relevant to your target reader? 

Create roles or archetypes to help convey your message. If you are looking at different consumer behaviours, give a certain audience a name or category to identify them by. For example, if you were looking at online buying behaviours across generations, you could look at the Gen Z shopper vs the Gen X shopper. This can help you tell two stories of adjacent customer profiles and compare their differences.

Customer obsession is essential when building a white paper strategy. 

Let them lead you.

If you want to create something meaningful, dovetailing your plans with your audience’s pre-existing thoughts and challenges is essential. Your initial hypothesis often evolves over time. This evolution should largely be driven by time spent with your target audience and by feeding in their insights.

Ask open questions, push them on ‘why’ they hold certain beliefs.Think about the interconnected supply side and demand side relationships that surround your audience.Where are the unknowns in their world? You’re looking for an underserved area or blind spot which naturally holds some tension or issues. Identify what levers they can pull to hit their own goals and play with them. If targeting more than one audience, consider how you can serve or connect their issues.

Take a sample of your target audience and keep them as a close group where you can test your ideas for an immediate reaction. This can help avoid later issues where your research direction doesn’t fit well with your audience’s issues, but you’ve already committed and it’s too late to change direction.

Don’t just focus on a demographic with tick box categories, consider their challenges as a person. What does their working life look like in their job role? Where do they want to progress to personally? The more you can illuminate shared opinions and tap into these undercurrents the better. For example, if I was a marketing tech platform, I could look at the challenges younger millennials have in explaining digital marketing to their colleagues. If they want to progress their career, they need better ROI insights to give them leverage in budget conversations with more traditional older board-level finance leaders with limited experience in this field. These insights will help illustrate their performance and may well help them in future promotion conversations too.

Most white papers use secondary research to set the scene. They critique existing understanding by curating findings from other relevant research projects. Effectively, this step helps you build a story towards your findings. Likewise, including reputable sources and data from notable authors can also add credibility to your stance.

Use AI tools to get you started, then look into left field sources you wouldn’t expect the tools to pick up on their own. Ask colleagues for sources they love and look to industry bodies who may do research to lobby government. A mix of public and private sector sources can help to add balance to your argument, and if there are academic papers available try to weave them in. The goal of secondary research is to show ‘what else is out there’ and show the ground work you’ve done. This diligence can add weight to your paper and make you feel less ‘shallow and commercial’. Some great research sources include YouGov, Mintel, KeyNote, and other research-specific bodies.

Following this, primary research is where you can make a real impact. Most look to surveys due to their flexibility and ability to gather a significant quantity of data. The staple of the industry is SurveyMonkey, which for a few hundred quid will do the job but there are lots of other tools out there.

Survey design could be an entire article on its own, but some top tips include:

• Maintain a mixture of answer types e.g. tick box will help you attract hero statements, rankings help you establish priorities, radio will help you create comparison, text box allow you to gather ideas you didn’t expect.
• Keep the language in your questions and directions simple and direct.
• Try to progress from easier to more detailed questions. Build their mindset up to more nuanced points. Be aware you can accidentally lead people through your tone here so try to stay balanced. E.g. if you ask them questions focused around negative outcomes they are more likely to answer negatively as they progress in their responses.
• Test your survey on a handful of your audience to see how it lands and discuss how they understood it.
• Use a few radio questions to help you compare across audiences e.g. age, sector, location. This helps you draw conclusions when you directly compare difference in how they answer the other questions.
• Ensure your answers will directly test your hypothesis
• Consider the ‘story’ you can tell with your answers and how they help you build a picture across multiple topics.

Launching surveys is difficult. There are thousands of surveys looking for candidates. Many platforms will offer a ‘pay-per-response’ model to attract candidates from their established bank, but this can have mixed results. These platforms can often attract candidates who have ‘volunteer bias’. They’re also being paid to respond, which can bias results anyway.

In our experience, we find putting some paid social spend behind a survey to your existing followers or a pre-established audience works well. We tend to include copy that relates to the ‘why’ of the research and incentivise participants with a prize (Amazon vouchers normally do the trick). Send out emails and ask partners to share, the best results normally come from responders you’ve developed through your own channels.

Quick fire polls on social can also add an extra dimension and show greater balance in your results. Although be aware that the findings are less applicable as you can’t control the audience due to the polls public nature.

Whilst your survey is doing the rounds, you can look to conduct qualitative research. This can work better for higher profile contributors, who you may want to include quotes from with pictures. This is a real opportunity to engage with potential clients and add credibility to your findings. The outcome of the research can sometimes be secondary to the partnerships you build with potential clients. “Buy my stuff?” is a harder outreach message than “Want to contribute to some content?”. If they get to simply offer their opinion whilst you do all the heavy lifting, it tends to create a more collaborative relationship compared to traditional ‘buyer and seller’. Most high flyers can’t resist being part of a sector-leading piece of insight that’s going to raise their profile. Your pitch for their involvement needs to be compelling so think about what it can do for them before you engage.

White papers tend to be quite significant bodies of work so try to consider what parts can run in tandem to help keep pace with your project.

In terms of the story, tinkering in data analysis to find similarities and differences when comparing groups will help you build a full picture. If you list all of the findings out as statements and code them based on your theories, you can normally piece together a narrative. Likewise, you can build secondary theories on this by considering how much more likely one group is to share a view compared to another. Push your findings to experts internally to get their viewpoint as to why you’ve got these results. Time spent creatively pursuing and dropping different approaches is essential to creating something meaningful. But don’t forget, look at your results with a strategic lens(this is where pursuing the wrong hypothesis can come back to bite you).

Due to their size, shaping a white paper also tends to be a journey through different topics. For example, I’m an HR tech company looking at the rise of millennial managers compared to their older counterparts. I could dig into their personal career goals, their approach to hiring, their strategies for staff retention and then progress into how they compete for talent with their peers.

Whatever the story, make sure your ‘key findings’ section holds the readers hand through your narrative and sets them up for the detail they’re about to dig into. 

Once you’ve got your story, you should think of the design. Design is king in white papers. Do not underestimate it. Invest in great graphics, data visualisations and varied page layouts. Due to their size, many white paper authors focus on producing endless reams of copy which people simply won’t read. Use lists, call outs, quotes, imagery, sections and other tricks to help frame your findings in the best way possible. Don’t overlook contributors' names, titles and logos.

Finally, ensure your story leads to a conclusion and action. Something needs to happen off the back of your findings. Many marketers will look to start a campaign to ‘fix the problem’ they found or refer back to it in their literature.

Pre-launch, consider how your white paper ‘lives’. Is it a subdomain website or a downloadable pdf? Or do you use an interactive document host like Issuu or FlippingBook? Do you need a compelling launch video to help attract readers?Have you created a deck to present at events or with clients?Make an active decision on what roster of materials you need and put equal effort into all of them. White papers that don’t hit their targets tend to underestimate how much effort goes into pushing the findings after the research work is done.

In terms of releasing the paper, galvanise your internal team and external contributors around a launch date. Create social assets for them to share their specific contribution.By using external contributors and aligning with their goals, you can access their networks. If appropriate, contact event organisers to discuss your findings on stage or put on your own event for prospects.Consider how you can extend the life of your white paper’s relevance and build campaigns around it in the future.

When it comes to PR, consider if you are going to try and offer an exclusive to a key target or go out to all your sources at the same time. Warm up journalists and think of hooks that make it relevant to their readerships. Also consider if there are other larger news stories you could piggy back on or apply your findings too. Most journalists are used to receiving research-focused press releases so ask what they’d like to see. One thing to note, you do need a decent sample size of survey respondents to land a big title (1500-2000 dependent on the sector and style of research). 

• Focus on a specific problem
• Make it audience centric
• Say something unique and valuable
• Mix your research methods
• Make your hypothesis relevant to your core offer
• Don’t overlook design
• Get your team behind it
• Use partners to networks and insights
• Produce great wrap-around marketing content
• Make sure your findings inspire action

Young Blood – a marketing agency who created a creative ‘movement’ around youth identity to display their ability connect brands with culture.

What’s Powering The Powerhouse – the story of the Northern scale up landscape, told by those who built it from Praetura.

Pintrest Predicts – Pintrest’s commercial team predict future consumer trends through the insights collected on their platform. A great example of storytelling.

GP Bullhound Insights – their sector reports and deep dives offer real rich insights into their chosen markets. A really robust content strategy that dovetails into their core offering.

Reality Check from Mindshare – a selection of exceptional reports that use a mix of methods to dig into specific growing consumer trends.