You’ve read the stats, you know the facts: the whitepaper is increasingly considered the darling of B2B marketing tools.
But do you know the secret to translating your company’s products, services, or processes into clear, benefits-oriented, client-facing copy?
We do, because we’ve written persuasive whitepapers for clients ranging from oil & gas companies to global consultants.
What’s the trick? We think it starts by coaxing the best information from your subject matter experts (SMEs).
You know that technical professionals like engineers understand their material better than anyone else. But because they’re so close to it, it’s often tough for them to break it down and write about it in terms your audience can understand. Actually, getting your SME to sit down and write at all might be the toughest task you face.
At the same time, finding a writer who can understand your technical topic can be tricky, too. The learning curve might be too steep for the average freelancer.
But when you work with The Writers for Hire, you’re not hiring an “average” freelancer. Our writers have decades of experience working with technical gurus across a number of industries – energy, petrochemical, engineering, manufacturing, technology development, and many more. That means they understand the data you put in front of them. Even more important, they recognize how your SMEs think. So they can ask the right questions to tease out all the material they need. Then and only then can the wordsmithing magic begin. The result? A compelling, strategic whitepaper that gets decision-makers to act.
Just need an abstract to start? We can do that, too.
Corporate Whitepapers
Our diverse team includes writers with backgrounds in science and technology; oil and gas; and software engineering. That means they’re smart, naturally curious, genuinely interested in what your SMEs have to say, and easily able to understand them. But more than that, our writers love whitepapers: reading them, studying them, and learning about leading-edge trends to apply to your project.
In Addition to Written Whitepapers, We’re Experienced Writing:
Because we have multiple writers with whitepaper experience, we can handle large, complex assignments and meet even the most challenging deadlines. You can depend on us every step, from brainstorming through final review:
Concept development. We’ll collaborate with you to develop the right approach, and tone for your audience, consistent with your marketing goals.
Project management. No hand-holding needed here. We can manage the entire process, from interviewing SMEs to suggesting appropriate images to make your case visually.
Editing and review. Edits and rewrites to improve clarity, flow, and organization. Includes technical reviews by your team to assure accuracy.
Proofreading. Always completed by a previously uninvolved proofreading resource for squeaky-clean final copy.
As a marketing specialist, you recognize that SMEs (subject matter experts) are critical to effective content marketing. They’re authorities on your company’s products and services. Without them, your company couldn’t run—and it would be nearly impossible to create detailed content that showcases your company’s expertise.
But if you’ve ever had to collaborate with one of these experts to produce a piece of thought leadership content, you might know that convincing them to share their knowledge—especially in writing—can be challenging at times.
Whether you are planning a new marketing campaign, seeking to raise your company’s digital profile, or venturing out on your own as a thought leader, you need SMEs on your team. Developing a strong partnership with your SMEs can help you write valuable content that benefits both you and your customers.
There is a wealth of online information about working with subject matter experts. Here is a compilation of some best practices that have helped other marketers, and may help you, generate more SME and SME-enabled content.
Photo by fauxels from Pexels
Meet them where they are—literally and figuratively.
You may be familiar already with SMEs who are very active communicators within your company and on social media. Seek them out! You’ll already have insights on their interests and areas of expertise, and they might be more receptive to a writing project than other SMEs.
For the less active, you will need to exert a bit more effort to get a feel for their comfort level with writing and their preferences for working collaboratively.
Before starting, or deepening, your efforts to partner with SMEs to write, you might want to seek out other teams in your company—sales, public relations, training—who have experience working with SMEs. Some members of these teams no doubt will have tips that might prove useful to you.
A guide to working with SMEs to develop e-learning materials, for example, notes that a SME could be heavily vested in content that already exists. They may resist new ideas about how to present information, a possibility you’ll need to address before launching a project with them.
Get to know your SMEs and the issues that matter to them.
This will help you target topics that they can elaborate on for your customers.
Ask to be copied on the SMEs’ emails and collect other examples of their writing, such as documentation related to their work, their LinkedIn profiles, and any formal presentations they’ve given recently. Attend their working meetings, or just hang out in their spaces to get a sense of their immediate priorities and what they see coming in their field and for the company.
From there, you’ll need to communicate directly with the SMEs to explore those topics in more detail.
Daniel Burstein of MarketingSherpa suggests five questions that content marketers can ask SMEs to get the ball rolling, with the goal of gathering information your customers will want to consume and share:
How will the [a new product or service] help [target audience]?
What challenges have you helped customers overcome recently?
How have [industry developments] affected [target audience], and what should they do about it?
A [job title] in our LinkedIn Group wanted to know [question?].
I’ve heard a lot of people in the industry talking about [target keyword]. For example, [other thought leaders in the industry] said [something you’ve read while doing industry research]. What is your take on this?
These kinds of questions can form the basis of impromptu chats or informal idea-sharing sessions. Providing brief written summaries of these encounters for your SMEs to review might relieve some of their writing burden while engaging them in the creation of useful content. Asking SMEs to react to and edit your own high-level attempt to explain your company’s product or service could be another form of burden sharing.
Conduct formal interviews.
Be sure you to do your homework and prepare thoroughly for interviews so that you do not waste your SME’s time. Preparation should include conducting keyword searches on the SME’s area of expertise, gathering information on the SME’s professional background and experience, and sending out the interview questions ahead of time. Brendan Cottam, writing for B2B marketers, provides a good example of keyword research and questions aimed at making the most efficient use of your expert’s time.
Maximize, Maximize, Maximize!
Once your expert has provided writing, or data, start maximizing their contributions to create content that your target audience will want to read and share.
“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
To this end, be creative in finding ways to convert your experts’ contributions into useful information for your customers.
Identify the superstars.
In cases where your SMEs already are competent communicators, convert their written products into formats that you can promote inside and outside the company:
Share slides from their conference presentations.
Edit their oral presentations into short online videos.
Post the executive summary and excerpts from their white papers.
Give the less confident a gentle nudge.
Some SMEs may just as soon let you do the heavy lifting. These less enthusiastic writers may be willing to provide content—qualitative or quantitative—that you can then edit, reformat, and post. For the poorest writers, you might consider using the editing process as an informal tutorial or providing more formal tutorials, taking care to focus on the mechanics of communicating the message while respecting them as substantive experts.
The concept of prewriting—the thinking and planning that precede drafting a written product—can help overcome anxieties about writing and boost reluctant writers’ confidence.
You can draw upon the wealth of online college-level instructional material available today, material that walks you through pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.
Resources such as Duke University’s Writing Studio and MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing will help you tailor your tutorial to the needs and preferences of your SMEs. For example, outgoing, talkative types might enjoy brainstorming sessions, while the more quietly cerebral SMEs might enjoy a hands-on mapping exercise. Check out images of pre-writing for inspiration.
In partnering with SMEs, especially reluctant writers, it will be especially important to mine your conversations and interviews for nuggets of valuable content. In her article on working with SMEs, Jessica Miller of PR 20/20 lists “20 marketing opportunities from 20 minutes with a SME,” including:
Sharing key points from interviews with your company’s blog authors, customer service representatives, and sales teams.
Recording podcasts featuring SMEs’ answers to interview questions.
Using content from interviews to draft high level one pagers, including infographics and tip sheets to share across marketing, sales, and service teams.
Measure and Reward
Before launching any major initiative to get your in-house SMEs to write more, think about how you will measure your efforts. You also might want to consider how, within your company’s culture, you will recognize outstanding contributions from these experts. Once you’ve uploaded content that your SMEs have authored or inspired, Gillin recommends:
Putting tools in place to measure views, shares, comments, likes, downloads, and other metrics of engagement.
Making sure everyone on your team is actively upvoting, sharing, commenting, and retweeting.
Featuring SMEs’ writing in company blogs and company publications.
Whether you’re starting fresh or building upon existing strategies, coaxing your SMEs to write more, giving them a shout-out when they do, and putting in some additional effort yourself could well produce results that both you and your customers will value.
The whitepaper is arguably the keystone of a great content marketing campaign.
A single, comprehensive whitepaper on an enduring industry topic can last years – creeping up month after month in search results, circulated and posted by peers and potential clients, attracting hundreds or thousands of mentions on social sites.
The whitepaper can also be incredibly versatile. Think of a whitepaper as the Mr. Potato Head of the content marketing campaign. Pull out the pieces and put ‘em back together again for endless combinations – from email blasts to social media, infographics to speeches. (Need some ideas on how to make your whitepaper’s shelf life even longer? Check out our blog on repurposing content.)
Such a versatile and powerful document has certainly attracted the attention of a marketers in almost every major company in every major industry. (We listed just a few examples, below.)
But where do these things come from? Often, whitepapers are credited to a company’s subject matter experts (SMEs) – but are they really the ones writing these things? In the vast majority of cases, the answer is a resounding no. SMEs are busy people, and whitepapers – good ones, anyway – take hours of work. This is why almost all whitepapers are either ghostwritten, or at the very least heavily edited by professional whitepaper writers.
Of course, we aren’t the only ones. There are a growing number of specialists in the industry. Like Richard Goulde, Wilton Blake, and options on sites like UpWork or Outsource.com.
Gordon GrahamYet, arguably one of the most well-known players in the field is Gordon Graham, renowned author of the 2013 book Whitepapers for Dummies, who has been writing whitepapers since 1997.
Gordon Graham was generous enough to interview with us late last year, providing us with some insider tips on whitepaper promotion, ROI metrics, and trends.
The Writers For Hire: What is a whitepaper, anyway?
Gordon Graham: It is a time-tested format for long–form copy that combines expository and persuasive writing, whose roots go back more than 100 years, and whose future stretches ahead for as long as companies sell anything relatively new, complex, and expensive that needs explaining to a B2B prospect.
The Writers For Hire: What is the best way to promote a whitepaper?
Gordon Graham: It should be promoted long enough and well enough to be effective. Promote it everywhere; promote it like a madman. Promotion plans consist of multiple tactics to give exposure to the whitepaper. So treat it like you would a product launch, use everything from social media to advertising.
The Writers For Hire: Have you seen any changes in the past couple of years in marketing strategies and tactics?
Gordon Graham: I think social media continues to grow. We have used LinkedIn and Twitter for a while now to inform each other about new documents. Now, people are posting covers of their visual media like whitepapers in places like Instagram and Pinterest. I guess I would say, look at every social media channel, especially if any of your prospects are using those channels. Any marketer should learn where their audience visits, in social media, and use those channels to present the whitepapers.
Also, companies are beginning to want to know specifically how much revenue is being generated by each whitepaper. They want to know how many downloads, leads, sales and revenues result from the document. They want to be able to say, ‘We can attribute $3.2 M in revenues directly to our XYZ-Whitepaper Campaign.
The Writers For Hire: What is the best way to quantitatively calculate whitepaper success?
Gordon Graham: Clicks, CTR, comments, cost-per-lead, downloads, email bounce rates, leads, likes, e-mail opens, open rates, page views, perma-links, registrations, reposts, revenues and sales can all be measured to determine the effectiveness of a whitepaper.
The Writers For Hire: How many whitepapers per year do your large company clients post and market?
Gordon Graham: For a large company like 3M, they are probably a Fortune 100 company, they may have seven major divisions. For example, a division might be ‘Healthcare.’ So each division would want their own whitepaper. In one year, a single writer may compose 10 whitepapers just for that one division. So that gives you an idea. On the other hand, a lot of mid-size companies who do just one whitepaper per year. So, it depends on the size of the company and their specific needs.
The Writers For Hire: How long does a whitepaper generate ongoing income?
Gordon Graham: As long as people are having the same problem that is being described in a whitepaper, the document could be generating interest for 10 years or more. For example, in industry, corrosion is a major problem that needs treatment. Unless new treatment to control the problem is invented, the original whitepaper, describing the effective solution, would suffice. There’s no limit to that. A “backgrounder” whitepaper will continue to work until the product changes. That’s why I like whitepapers…because they’re very meaty and substantial. Companies can put them on their website and they’ll work very hard. They work harder than any other kind of content and they last longer, literally years for some.
Many thanks to Gordon Graham for sharing his expert insights and knowledge for this blog! He’s a good guy and an amazing writer, so if you hire him, we’re OK with that. Although, admittedly, we’d rather you hire us.
You’ve made a decision to take your business game to the next level. You know a thought leadership campaign will get you there. So, how do you do it?
How to Develop a Thought Leadership Campaign
If it’s a sales pitch, it’s not thought leadership.
“True thought leadership starts with empathy,” said Brian Solis, a principal analyst at Altimeter Group and author of What’s the Future of Business (WTF). “Can you tell me the top ten problems your audience has at any given time? How about the top ten aspirations? Are you thinking through where your audience wants to be, compared with where the market is going? That’s what inspires me. Someone who is honestly trying to better understand the people they are trying to help.”
To establish an effective thought leadership campaign, follow these five simple steps:
Know your audience—as it relates to your business and beyond, what’s on their minds?
Consult the experts—ask the most knowledgeable people on your team for their advice. Keep asking.
Structure a thought leadership content strategy map—what are your goals? What expectations are realistic? What topics should you cover that matter to your audience and fall within your team’s expertise?
Write it. Publish it.
Continue the conversation—how did your audience react? If they didn’t react, where did the distribution fall apart? Tracking emails, downloads, retweets, likes, etc. can help you learn more about your audience’s thoughts and needs.
Continue the conversation: How many people is your content reaching? What is the audience saying? What can you do to further distribute your content through reshares and backlinks? Credit: firstsiteguide.com
Writing and publishing may be the shortest item in that list, but will require an ongoing commitment. Maintaining a blog can be an extremely effective way to get your whitepapers and infographics to your audience.
Look at the bright side! Firstsiteguide.com shows blog posts, case studies, and long-form copy (printed or posted articles around 1,200 words) are both effective and relatively easy to produce. That makes these forms of content especially attractive, whether starting or maintaining thought leadership campaigns.
How to Write a Thought Leadership Article (Whitepaper, Blog…)
An effective thought leadership article needs to have perspective, content, and a path forward. Remember, if it’s a sales pitch, it’s not thought leadership. But if your content fails to connect your company with value to your audience, you’ve missed the mark.
Perspective means having a deep, well-researched understanding of your target audience and customer base. Who are you trying to reach? What do you know about them?
The content is the article itself. It should showcase your company’s understanding of its customers, show how products and services benefit those customers, and build relationships with them for the long term.
A path forward is an action point for the reader to seek solutions to business problems through your company.
A 2014 study showed 85 percent of B2B (business-to-business) marketing leaders did not connect their content to business value (2014 Forrester Research/Business Marketing Association/Online Marketing Institute study). The study found that while nearly 75 percent self-reported using customer stories and case studies in their content, only three percent said it was a primary focus. Just 12 percent said publishing research and expert perspectives was the main focus of their content marketing. And only five percent said frequent communication with their customer base was a priority.
These marketing leaders were missing huge opportunities to utilize their case studies, a type of content both highly effective and easy to produce—or even already produced! With attention and focus, a minimal amount of effort disseminating the case studies could have reaped huge rewards in achieving thought leadership goals.
Start your research by gathering available information. Does your company already have research or experts on your subject? Past brochures or interviews? Take it a step further: Could you interview sources at a business closely tied with yours, or satisfied customers who can speak to realistic results of working with your company? And please remember that while, yes, everyone loves Wikipedia, no, you may not use it as a source.
When it comes to the actual writing, there are plenty of sources available to help improve your craft. If you love your subject, all you may need is a helpful editor to lend a second pair of eyes and clear up any rough spots. Not up to the task of the actual writing? You can always outsource it. But if you’re comfortable with grammar basics and able to fluently translate your industry’s jargon, great! Get writing!
Now the big question: What type of content do you write? As you start brainstorming articles, papers, or posts that will matter to your audience, think about what type of content will further your business goals.
Is your goal branding? Your content style is presence.
Is your goal trust and transparency? Your content style is window.
Are you marketing your expertise? Your content style is currency.
Are you interested in joining together like-minded people? Your content style is community.
Are you providing customer service? Your content style is support.
These brands are nailing their content strategies. Credit: Altimeter@Prophet
Now, think about the style and tone of your piece. What publications do you admire and want to emulate? Is the writing formal or conversational? Crisp or punchy?
And always include a simple infographic, video, even a photo—anything to engage with your audience at a visual level and increase shares on social media. A meaty, fact-filled whitepaper is great… unless it puts your audience to sleep. Consider resurrecting dense prose into logical infographics when appropriate. Make it simple, and make it memorable. If you can deliver information more simply in a crisp diagram, you probably should.
If you can get a lot of information across more simply with a simple, crisp infographic, you should. Credit: H-57 Creative Station
Stand Out from the Crowd
With many companies vying for position as thought leaders, keeping an eye on the competition can mean the difference between emerging victorious… or irrelevant.
First, identify a handful of competitors in your specialization, companies or people trying to reach your same audience. What are the most effective thought leaders doing differently from the rest of the competition? Analyze their audience’s responses. What are they doing well? What could they do better? Learn from them.
The Step Strategy—Model your work off the competition, but do it a little better.
The Superiority Strategy—Boldly challenge competitors by branding your business solutions far superior within the same field.
The Innovative Strategy—This strategy side-steps conflict with innovative intellectual capital.
Social Media: Do I Have to?
You really do. And why wouldn’t you? The only cost associated with social media is the time and staff to stay engaged. That can lead to a huge return on investment (ROI). Follow these five pointers to promote your thought leadership through social media.
We’ll talk more about social media in the conclusion of our thought leadership series. Until then, we’re Socially Devoted to You! Credit: Demandforce
Target your audience—knowing your audience is crucial in every aspect of thought leadership and business, especially social media.
Provide solutions—social media users are seeking answers to their problems. Use your thought leadership to provide what they need.
Convert visitors to customers—this is that critical link between presenting information to your target audience, and providing your readers with an action point. They’ve come to you for a solution, so here’s an opportunity for you to provide what they need through your business: a discount or free product, a special offer for social media users; something to inspire them to hitch their wagon to yours.
Transparency—this is key for building trust. You want your readers to see your genuine concern. Dealing with people honestly and with integrity, in social media’s ever-public setting, can showcase trustworthiness.
Responsiveness—your customers, whether individuals or other businesses, need to feel heard. Knowing their concerns matter to you leads to their loyalty to your brand. This is another area where social media’s real-time involvement can make or break your long-term customer relationships.
Starting a social media campaign—much less a thought leadership initiative—may seem overwhelming to the uninitiated. But the proven return on investments from social media can’t be ignored. Scary or not, social media should be an integral part of every thought leadership campaign.
Up Next: Selling Thought Leadership to Your Team, featuring an exclusive interview with Brian Solis, Principal Analyst with Altimeter, a Prophet company.
Creating a steady stream of informative, engaging materials to fuel a content marketing program takes a great deal of time and effort. However, you can get more out of that resource investment by repurposing content.
Some observers might consider that “cheating,” and if you simply swap out a few words or rewrite a few sentences and call the piece “new,” that characterization seems accurate. However, with a little creativity and effort, you can find many legitimate ways to extend the life, and the value, of your content.
Refreshed and Ready
Business changes rapidly. A piece you wrote a few years back may now seem outdated. Don’t pull it from your content inventory. Instead, update your copy and include a new introduction explaining what has transpired since you created the original item. For example, you can add details on new features to a product review, the latest best practices to a previous list, updated stats to a case study, etc. Now you have a piece that provides both current information and a fascinating look back, and you have produced it in a fraction of the time required to develop the original.
Divide and Conquer
White papers, case studies and other long-form content typically contain elements that can be used as standalone pieces or combined with others. Testimonials from a case study can find a broader audience when prominently displayed on your website. Flowcharts, photos and other visual elements can be incorporated into an infographic. There may be ideas or statements in text passages that would work well as the basis of a blog post.
Compelling Compilations
The flip side of the divide and conquer approach is to assemble a larger work out of multiple small ones. As the saying goes, you will often find that the whole is greater (i.e. more impactful) than the sum of its parts. Look for concepts that are repeated in the content you produce and use them as a foundation for combining previously separate pieces.
A Tip of the Hat
Mentioning that some of the information in a new piece originated in an older one serves as a great way to pull the original item back into the spotlight, giving it new life.
On Second Thought
In the same way that business practices and technology change, your perspective on a topic around which you previously created materials might evolve as well. Explaining your change of heart not only lets you blow the dust off an old piece, it earns you points for being honest.
Changing Channels
Every few years, a new social media platform springs up – Instagram and SlideShare are a few relatively recent examples. Often, items you created in some other format would be a perfect fit for the new medium with only a small amount of “retrofitting.”
Your marketing content, like any valuable asset your company possesses, should be utilized to its fullest. While you don’t want to overuse your materials, making pieces available to new audiences in new ways is not only acceptable, it’s smart business.
