Jon's Network

Don’t misunderstand the point of a whitepaper.

One of the jobs of marketing is to promote the ideas and strategies of the company. Once prospects agree with company’s ideas and strategy, they are likely to become customers. A common strategic approach is to write several “thought pieces” to explain the pressing industry problems and the vendor’s strategy to solve those problems. If the reader agrees with the strategy, he can contact the vendor and become a customer. Since the name of the game is persuasion, it seems likely that a vendor would want as many people as possible to read their papers. The more people read, the greater the propagation of their ideas. It seems like vendors would even offer incentives to read their whitepapers.

Sadly, this isn’t the case. Most vendors use their whitepapers as bait to get some contact information from the prospect. On the surface, this seems logical. If you get the downloaders’ contact information, you can follow-up with them and sell them your product. This misses the point of a whitepaper. A whitepaper is (our ought to be) designed to convince, persuade, sell your ideas, and ultimately gain mind-share. You won’t have any problems finding customers when you have people calling you that already agree with you.

The name of the game is persuasion

When you are trying to get people to read your ideas, you need to minimize the barriers and maximize accessibility. Requiring registration to download a PDF is a huge barrier to promoting your ideas. Another one is the PDF format itself. They are handy in some cases, but not all readers like them. Why not increase the readership of your ideas by publishing your whitepapers as text on your website. This makes it easier to invite convinced readers to register and join your community too.

Vendors, remember that your whitepapers are supposed to promote your ideas. They should be compelling enough for a reader to pass them along. Put your whitepapers to good use by letting everyone and anyone read them.