White Papers - now seen as a key tool for IT and B2B marketers

Published 2004

If you are in IT or B2B marketing wouldn’t you want to use a communications technique that you know 60% of buyers use to evaluate technology products and services? And that 95% of buyers think reflects positively on your company’s image!

That’s the status accorded White Papers - a long standing PR tool that fell out of favour for a few years because of the undue influence of sales people in the process.

A White Paper is a document outlining a company’s position on a certain topic or explaining how a product or service ‘uniquely’ meets the needs of a particular market. It is meant to educate and inform, be devoid of hyperbole and not overly commercial. It should not be a selling document.

Unfortunately in the late 1980s, sales and marketing folk began hyping-up White Papers to sell exotic visions and the media and customers soon became skeptical about them, so marketing people stopped writing them.

Over the last few years though, professionally written White Papers have started being sought by media and customers again. And this time around, they’re being written by PR people and are also being read outside the traditional IT management field.

The growing importance of White Papers in the IT and B2B marketing mix was confirmed in a recent US survey undertaken by Forbes.com and Bitpipe. The survey was into the role that White Papers and Case Studies play in the evaluation of new products and services, the influence they have on purchases and the perception of the companies distributing them.

According to Bitpipe, the main findings were:

• Over 60% of respondents used White Papers and Case Studies to evaluate technology products and services

• Nearly 80% of those who used them, passed them on to colleagues

• Nearly 95% of respondents felt that a high quality White Paper reflected positively on the issuing company’s image

Note: The author of this article is a Sydney based senior independent corporate PR consultant who works exclusively with PR Managers helping them with management of the PR Department or their relationship with their PR agency. In addition he provides specialist corporate PR and communications advice where issues or change are impacting on an organisation. He also blogs regularly on PR and communications topics similar to those in this article.