How to Write a WhitePaper?

If you’ve never written a whitepaper before, it seems like the hardest thing to do. How do you write this content that is neither a blog post nor an E-book and requires intensive research? You’ve come to the right place.

After years of experience writing whitepapers ourselves, we’ve had our expert whitepaper writers curate an easy-to-follow strategy to help you write one. The steps outlined in this article have helped both old and new writers write whitepapers stress-free. At the end of this article, so would you.

But before we dive into the deep end, what is a Whitepaper?

What is a WhitePaper?

A whitepaper is a well researched, data-backed informational document made by businesses and issued to other professionals. Whitepapers differ from E-books and blogs because they are targeted towards an audience that is already knowledgeable about the subject matter. The purpose of a WhitePaper is to educate further and position the company as an authority in a given niche.

Businesses use whitepapers to:

• Highlight the features of a new product or service
• Discuss the problems potential customers face in a particular business niche and proceed data-driven reasons why a product or service can solve those problems
• Educate and position themselves as an authority in a given business niche
• Generate leads
• Increase sales

If whitepapers differ so much from e-books and long form articles, what do they look like?

Format of a WhitePaper

The format of a whitepaper is more similar to the format of an academic publication than an article.

The basic outline for a whitepaper is;

• Title
• Abstract / Summary
• Introduction
• Section Subheadings
• Footnotes / Sources
• Conclusion

You may choose to add other things such as an author blurb depending on what whitepaper template you have.

Now that you know what a whitepaper is and what it looks like, how can you write one?

How to Write a Whitepaper in 5 Short Steps

As complicated as a whitepaper may look from the outside, it isn’t as challenging to write one as you would think. In these five steps, we’ll be showing you how to write an excellent whitepaper.

1. Know your Target Audience

Every good content creator knows that there is no content without a target audience. When writing a whitepaper, it is very important that you start with your target audience or you’ll end up with a whitepaper written for no one.

To do this, you need to know who your target audience is. Here are some questions to get you started:

• Who is my target audience?
• What do they want to read about?
• Why do they want to read about it?
• How do I best satisfy their search intent and answer their questions?

To make it easy on yourself, you might want to open a document where you provide the answers to these questions. You’ll need it later on. Your whitepaper should answer these questions correctly. If they don’t, then you haven’t written a whitepaper for your target audience.

When you have the answers to these questions, the next step is to create a profile for your target audience persona. Ideally this should contain demographical data, strengths, weaknesses, motivation, personality, etc. If it’ll help you better, you can go one better by creating a visual persona.

2. Choose a Topic

Next up is choosing a topic. There are very few rules for this step. You can choose any topic in your niche as long as the topic is relevant to your target audience. Remember that you’re writing for an audience.

Some tips for choosing a good topic are:

1. Topic should be relevant to target audience
2. Topic should answer questions of target audience
3. If possible, choose a topic in your niche where there is little information
4. Choose an interesting topic

3. Do Your Research

A whitepaper is a data-driven research paper so it goes without saying that you need to conduct extensive research to write one.

The research process for a white paper is very different from the research process for an article or an e-book. It is more intensive and would require a lot of fact-checking. Outside of using search engines, there are other ways of getting credible information.

A. Read Similar WhitePapers, Reports and Journals: Read as many similar WhitePapers, reports and Journals to give you a good idea on what your whitepaper should look like. This is especially important if you’ve never written a whitepaper before.

Reading similar WhitePapers would help you;

• Know the salient points to cover
• Pinpoint content gaps that you can fill in your own whitepaper
• Know the style of writing to use and how to present similar topics

B. Interview Industry Experts: It’s always a good idea to interview Industry Experts. They’ll lend more credibility to your work and even some free publicity. You can include their contributions as quotes or even views to discuss. To find an industry expert, Google the top podcasts, articles and videos created in the niche or topic of your choice.

Reach out to the top content creators by e-mail or social media messages asking for an interview. A pro tip for sourcing for interviews is to carefully craft your message from the subject line to the very last word before you have to send it.

C. Use Credible and Verifiable Resources: The easiest way to discredit a whitepaper is to discredit its sources so only use credible and verifiable sources especially for your facts and statistics.

4. Start Writing

Every other step has been a preparation for the bulk part of writing a whitepaper which is writing. At this point, you’ve done all the necessary research and you have your information put together in a file and properly arranged.

Great! But before you can start writing, you’ll need to create an outline first. We’ve already seen the outline for a whitepaper so begin by replicating that outline in whatever writing software you use. If you want to use fancy designs, then now’s the time to download a template.

There are a few things to look out for while doing the writing. They include the following;

A. Use a Catchy Title: You either lose or grab the attention of your reader at the title of your whitepaper. If your title isn’t good enough, readers would dismiss the entire whitepaper as boring and many would not bother to read it. Your title should be;

• Clear and Concise
• Have a subtitle
• Be plain enough for readers to know what they’re getting from it

A good example of an attention-grabbing whitepaper title is “The Rising Trend in the Use of Marketing Automation Software — and if B2B SaaS Companies should Use them”

Note that this title is clear, concise, contains a subtitle (and If B2B SaaS Companies Should Use Them), and lets the reader know exactly what they’re going to get from the whitepaper.

B. Craft an Engaging Introduction: After the title, the introduction is the next essential part of a whitepaper and it has to be engaging enough to make readers want to keep reading.

There are no bullet points for what to write in your introduction. Just know that a good introduction is a captivating summary of what the reader expects to find in the work. The introduction in a whitepaper often follows the pattern of an abstract.

What makes your introduction excellent is that readers are excited and curious about the rest of the work when they’re done with it.

C. Don’t Leave any Chunky Blocks of Text: In other words, break up your text with subheadings and paragraphs.

A good rule of thumb for breaking your content into subheadings is to create a structure. Outline the main sections of your work using the format above as a guide. Then use subheadings to break up the text under the larger sections into small readable bits.

Using subheadings and paragraphs make your work more readable and help readers take notes and better organise the ideas in your work.

D. Liberally Use Data, Facts and Statistics: A whitepaper is a type of research paper that requires data, facts and statistics to prove an idea or to back up a claim. They lend more credence to any whitepaper.

While writing, don’t forget to use facts and statistics to corroborate your ideas. Just be sure that any data you use is from a credible source that can be verified. There are websites that let you verify statistics. You can use them to verify yours or restrict yourself to using only highly credible sites.

Use data visualization tools to improve how your data looks. You can present it in widgets, charts and graphs. Lastly, always remember to credit, cite, annotate and quote your sources properly.

5. Proofread and Edit

Congratulations, you’re done with the bulk of the work! What’s left is to tidy it up by proofreading and editing.

Many companies have an in-house editor so proofreading and editing isn’t really part of their job. If your company can’t spring for one, they may be open to hiring a freelance editor to look it over. On the other hand, you can edit your work in sections to be sure you didn’t miss a thing.

Some people don’t like to edit their work and if that’s you, there are always options for you. You can give them out to a coworker to look over for you or hire a freelance editor.

Either way, your work should be error free and ready for publishing.

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! To finalise, a whitepaper is one of the best tools businesses can use to build credibility and authority in a specific business niche. It is one educational write up that can be daunting to start. With the simplified steps above, you can whip up a great whitepaper in no time at all.