“A white paper is an authoritative report or guide informing readers in a concise manner about a complex issue and presenting the issuing body’s philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.” Wikipedia
White papers are regularly produced by large corporates (and smaller businesses) by their marketing departments. As part of the sales and marketing arena, the satisfy the need for long-form content documents designed to promote products or services by using selected facts and logical arguments that put them in a favourable light.
They have a wide variety of uses including sales lead generation, establishing thought leadership, and making a business case or purely to inform.
I guess that would make it part of your content marketing strategy.
They can take a lot of time and effort to produce, so what happens once you’ve created the document and emailed it out to your customers and stakeholders?
Some will read it; others will skim it and most will ignore it.
A waste of resources then?
Not necessarily.
White papers are a rich source of information. That means they are prime fodder for a spot of content repurposing.
Feed your corporate blog
Your corporate blog is a voracious beast.
It demands content on a weekly basis to help it drive traffic to your site and generate enquiries.
It would therefore make sense to utilise all that wonderful content you have trapped within your white papers, wouldn’t it?
With a bit of carefully planning and a professional writer on board, your white paper content can be dissected and repurposed.
From each source document you should be able to easily extract 5 blog posts. All you need is someone with a bit of flair to rework the content into a lighter, more accessible format.
Changing the tone from ‘corporate’ to ‘approachable yet professional’ will open up the information to a whole new audience.
Before you know it, you’ve got an endless stream of content with which to feed your corporate blog.
If you’ve already invested in a lot of content, surely it makes sense to use it has much as possible.
Although I’ve concentrated on creating blogs, you could also use the information as a basis for a video, podcast or even infographic – the possibilities are endless.
What are you waiting for? Go and dig out those white papers and get started.