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White papers and reports

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White papers and reports help convince your audiences using insights…

How can you change the whole context of your sales conversations to boost success? And how will you show that your products and services offer the brightest possible future for your customers?

You need credible factual evidence and expert opinion. That makes reports, based on demonstrable facts from the past, and white papers, providing an expert view of the future, powerful marketing tools.

Nobody knows what tomorrow holds for sure. Your customers certainly don’t, especially when it comes to your area of expertise, no matter how well informed they are. So you therefore have an opportunity to show leadership as part of your offer.

And that vision for the future can be highly compelling in its own right, especially for high-tech products and services. Being clear on what you think is going to happen can inspire strong confidence in buyers.

But your vision must be based on expert advice and reliable facts that customers can trust.

Put insights that you already have to good use…

So how do you get hold of such concrete facts? Well, the chances are that you already have data, internally, that you can use as the basis of a report.

Because presumably, in developing your current strategy, your leadership team had some kind of vision that was led by insight. So find out what that was.

Indeed, it might have been led by whatever new products, services, features or capabilities your customers are asking you for. And so you may already have data from your sales, operational or customer support teams that back the vision up.

Commission independent research…

If you’re not sure that you have anything that’s compelling enough, then consider reaching out to a research organisation. There are legions of market research businesses that can target and interview relevant people at organisations that are right for the products and services you offer.

As well as looking at the market, you can also commission independent research into the performance of your products and solutions. For example, a favourable comparison of the relative lifetime cost or efficiency of your overall solution, versus the market leader, would be highly persuasive.

And such technical reports will also produce powerful quotes from impartial experts.

Get your R&D team involved…

Another option is to quote your own experts. OK, so it’s not as impartial as an independent analyst, but the opinion of senior members of your research and development organisation can still go a long way.

That’s especially true for white papers that are aimed at a technical or operational audience already engaged in the buying process. Explaining the details of how your product or solution works, and why that’s the best way, can be enormously persuasive. Indeed, for technical products, it can be an essential point of differentiation.

Adapt existing thought leadership…

Alternatively, you can build white papers from publicly-available research and expert opinions. Unless your product or service is truly far ahead of the rest of the market, it’s likely that elements of your message can be built on something that has gone before.

So you can bring together the best expert voices from existing sources and use them to support your argument. This is common practice, but requires some finesse to avoid common pitfalls.

Don’t end up playing telephone, and other hazards…

For example, not all expert quotes are what they appear to be. It’s so common to quote other people on the internet, nowadays, that original sources get lost. Often, when you trace expert quotes back properly, you’ll discover they’re unacceptably out of date.

Also, you need to take care that you’re not quoting research that’s been commissioned by one of your competitors. When so many reports are fronted by supposedly impartial research companies, it can be easy to miss the tiny, back page copyright notice for the holding company of your biggest rival.

In fact, there are many more traps to look out for to safeguard credibility.

Produce white papers and reports worth reading…

Up-Word can help you transform your success by producing white papers and reports that are both interesting to read and make compelling sales arguments.

White papers that offer an inspired vision of an unexpected future – where your customers’ costs collapse, say, or efficiencies soar – can help you change the conversation. Or how about a report that explains how, on current trend, your customers’ production technology will make them uncompetitive?

In any case, your reports and white papers must have credible substance. They need to get to the point quickly and clearly explain the value of what you’re going to demonstrate. Then they have to present the evidence you have as impartially as possible. And finally make recommendations.

The more targeted to a specific audience you can be, the better. Indeed, your reports and white papers should be utterly convincing to the specialist decision makers, who can then confidently approve your purchase to all others.

Finally, white papers and reports that share leading-edge knowledge are high-value assets and great targets for other websites to create so-called ‘back links’ to. Those links are crucial for establishing authority among search engines and so getting your website featured in results.

Schedule a free, no-obligation call…

Have an informal chat about your objectives and find out more about how you can benefit.

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