7 reasons you need to stop making whitepapers

Do you remember what the Internet was like in 2001? Maybe you remember Netscape Navigator…

…or Apple’s site in 2001:

That same year, Mailchimp offered a free downloadable PDF on their site, which explained how to create HTML emails.

Documents like this go by different names — guidebooks, whitepapers, ebooks (which appeared on the scene later) — but the point is they’re documents that contain useful content that’s directly or indirectly related to a company’s product. They usually have to be downloaded before reading.

Seventeen years have passed, but still we see sections like this on a great deal of websites:

These whitepapers are a bit different from those that existed 17 years ago: the design has improved, and sometimes they prompt readers for their email addresses. But these differences are minimal compared to the changes in technology over the years. Whitepapers are virtually still the same downloadable PDFs they’ve always been.

But what can replace whitepapers?

The answer is simple. Many companies have already created special areas on their sites where visitors (or customers) can complete an educational course and obtain knowledge about a product, an industry, or some problem-solving methods — all in a simple and convenient format.

These sections are typically called universities or academies.

Hubspot academy:

Unbounce Academy:

Or Reply Academy:

Some companies have their own names for them. For example, Salesforce named their section Trailhead:

What’s more, the majority of academies not only contain information about how to use a product, but they also explain a product’s value, describing the industry and explaining use cases. In other words, academies not only serve an educational purpose, but they also inspire readers and make them more loyal over time.

Let’s take a look at a list of reasons why whitepapers should be abandoned in favor of more modern academies:

1. Whitepapers offer no statistics or analytics. You know nothing about what happens after users download your PDF. Maybe they never open it once, or maybe they spend hours poring over it — a standard PDF whitepaper can’t provide you with that data.

Academies, on the other hand, give you complete statistics about each user. You can also see which parts of the content are popular among readers and which parts would benefit from improvement.

2. The content in a whitepaper is static. When creating a whitepaper, you’re limiting yourself. You can’t use videos, animations, or slides, and that means that you have fewer ways to engage readers. As it happens, the functionality of an academy often allows you to add all different kinds of content. One kind of content that whitepapers don’t have is in-course questionnaires. In an academy, you can use these questionnaires to ask how often a reader encounters a problem or whether or not they’ve tried to solve it before.

3. Whitepapers are difficult to create. If you want to create a whitepaper that will look good, you’ll inevitably need to get a designer involved.

In academies, the built-in editor allows you to create an attractive layout yourself.

4. Whitepapers are difficult to edit. Sooner or later, you’ll need to update your whitepaper. If your changes are substantial, you’ll have to bring in the designer again. But even if you need to change just a few words, the people who have already downloaded your PDF will still be left with an outdated version.

Making changes to an academy, on the other hand, is very easy, and readers (both new and returning) will always see the most recent version of your content.

5. Whitepapers aren’t interesting. It’s highly unlikely that a new whitepaper will be announced anywhere other than your company’s social media pages. In contrast, a new course in an academy is considerably more noteworthy. If the topics covered in your course are interesting to your target audience, you can easily share a link to the course on the sites that this audience frequents. Courses can even be made in partnership with other companies to create synergy.

6. Whitepapers don’t offer integration or automation. You’re not able to take a sample of people who read only the first half of your whitepaper and write them an email saying, “Hey, you didn’t read the second half, and you missed out on X, Y, and Z.” Academies give you that capability. This is on par with the ability to see at a glance in your CRM the percentage of content read by a given reader.

7. Whitepaper readers get bored. People don’t want to read long PDfs. It’s generally difficult for people to learn from large volumes of content. One important task is to properly engage readers in their learning experience.

Whitepapers lose out to academies here. Whitepapers can’t encourage readers by showing them their progress. They can’t award certificates or any kind of bonuses for learning content. Whitepapers lack even the most basic gamification, which is easy to add to an academy.

Those are the key reasons why you need to stop making whitepapers right now and switch to a far more modern tool.

Good luck to you in creating your academies! : )