Get More Out of Your White Papers with an Annual Plan – Here’s How

Get More Out of Your White Papers with an Annual Plan – Here’s How:

Once you come to appreciate the effectiveness of white papers to generate leads, you’re ready to benefit from a structured approach to developing your company’s white paper library. An annual white paper plan enables your firm to more effectively respond to changing market conditions, customer requirements, and competitive situations.

First, it’s important to understand that there are different types of white papers, with varying levels of detail, depending on the intended audience(s) within your target market(s). I like to break white papers into three groups:

1. High-Level, Strategic Vision White Papers provide a broad overview of strategic business initiatives, can support a larger corporate vision, reinforce a market leadership position, or announce a new marketing campaign.

An example of a strategic white paper could be a piece on the iPhone 4G personal assistant app Siri, discussing Apple’s strategy for voice interaction with mobile content, and how that technology will shape future products, vertical markets, and market leadership.

2. Mid-Level, Solution-Oriented White Papers provide specific, solution-focused information on how the strategic vision supports a particular vertical market need.

An SAP white paper on enterprise applications for the healthcare industry, showing how the company’s strategic vision benefits enterprise productivity within that market, would be an example of a solution-oriented white paper.

3. Base-Level, Tactical White Papers provide granular details or a comparative analysis of how specific solutions tactically or technically support specific customer needs.

A white paper on Adobe Flash that shows application developers how to leverage their video compression technology to improve the quality of video content on smart-phone platforms would fit into this category.

Once you have determined how many white papers you need to develop within each of these three categories, the next step is to develop a rollout plan as part of your annual marketing calendar.

First, understand the relationship between content ‘elevation’ and frequency: The lower the elevation (base level, tactical content), the more frequently you’ll need to publish white papers to support the number of targeted vertical markets. The higher the elevation (high level, strategic content) the lower the frequency, since you can only have one strategy.

My recommended strategy for your annual white paper calendar might look something like this:

High-Level, Strategic White Papers – Annual Frequency

The best time to release a strategic white paper is at the beginning of the year, or when your company is about to announce its vision or strategy. Reinforce that strategic message via other deliverables over the remainder of the year — publishing more than one strategic white paper tends to confuse your target audience, diluting the impact of a single strategic message.

Mid-Level, Solution Oriented White Papers – Quarterly Frequency

Once a strategic white paper has been released, your next task is to educate your targeted vertical markets about how that strategic vision can support their specific needs. I recommend releasing at least one mid-level, solution-oriented white paper per quarter. If your company serves multiple targeted vertical markets, (such as healthcare, insurance, and legal) a good strategy would be to release one white paper for each targeted vertical per quarter.

Depending on your organizational structure, your ability to release of more than one vertical market white paper per quarter depends on the resources within your sales and/or marketing organization to support multiple vertical market initiatives, and their capacity to deliver multiple solution messages simultaneously.

Base-Level, Tactical White Papers – As Needed

Tactical white papers can be released as frequently as necessary to answer customer/prospect business needs, clarify corporate positions, or address a competitive threat. The number of tactical white papers that could be released over the course of a calendar year depends on the availability of your internal or external resources to develop the content.

Finally, as the year comes to a close, it’s time to think about the coming year and begin planning for the next white paper calendar.

By applying a structured white paper plan to your corporate marketing campaigns, you will grow more connected readers and stronger content affinity, which results in warmer business leads.

You can learn more about white paper planning in my online class, “Crafting a B2B White Paper Strategy”, part of my 3-part course White Paper 201: Crafting White Papers that Build Quality Business Leads”, only $69.95. Learn more about it here.