Note this sentence: This latest vintage from our Niagara Escarpment winery tastes wonderful.

Now have a look at a diagram of the same sentence:

You may not have heard of sentence diagramming (do they still teach it in grammar classes in school?), but I loved it. What it did was help you find the different components of a sentence so you knew what the subject was, what the verb was, what the object of the verb was, and what all their modifiers were. That would help you with things like proper subject-verb agreement (e.g., plural subjects took plural verbs), and it would also help you figure out where you went wrong if the sentence was a mess.

That’s just one of the writing mechanics that I excelled at in school, and have been good at ever since. To write well, of course you have to have inspiration too; it’s not all mechanics. The best writers straddle the two; they get good ideas and have an attractive way with words, but they can also write properly, so people will understand. The mechanics of writing are like the frame of your house. Once that’s solid and secure, that’s when you get creative and decorate the building in whatever fun, interesting, or elegant way that inspires you.

A Happy Customer

This is essential! Write about a person who you genuinely helped, and who is genuinely very happy with the results. The person should be happy to allow his or her story to be told, so be sure you get permission before putting anything out there into the public.

And by the way, the case study should indeed focus around a person rather than on a company. The happy client may be speaking on behalf of the company, but a case study is a personal thing. It’s designed to answer a reader’s question, “What’s in it for me (personally)?”

Write a short (50-100 words) background of this person, to allow the reader to get acquainted. The case study is meant to be something of a story, rather than a dry report. So this person is the main actor in that story.

A Problem and Your Solution

How did you Fix Things? (Photo courtesy Flickr user periwinklekog)

What was going wrong for your main character? What was happening in their business that was preventing them from being effective, getting work done, or doing what their business was supposed to do? That was the problem you were asked to help them solve. Maybe use 100 to 150 words to describe what it was.

You might want to include a quote from your customer here, but don’t overdo it. The person describing their frustration or difficulty in their own words can have a powerful impact. But as always, keep it as short as you can. Perhaps put the quote in a sidebar in this section.

Make your description of the problem as interesting as you can. Remember that this is a “story,” so if you can make it seem dramatic or even suspenseful, you will keep your readers interested.

Then use another 100-150 words to describe your solution to that problem. Great tool, procedure, service, or software saves the day! Well…maybe not quite that melodramatic. Be sure the customer is kept in the spotlight, with you and your solution as supporting characters.

A Great Result and Good Future

How did it all work out? Was there a great return on investment (ROI) for your customer? Did he or she whittle a regular four-hour job down to two hours, thanks to your way of streamlining the work? Is that person or company better able to serve their own clients, thanks to you?

Here’s where you can use another quote or two. Now your readers can see the tangible results of your intervention, in the real life of a real client. This is what your product or service exists for. Let the reader see, in the most interesting way possible, exactly how good it really is.

Make this section about 200-250 words. Don’t sink into market-speak or dry facts and figures, though. Remember, this is a story, and the result of your coming into the client’s life is a happy ending.

Things to Keep in Mind

1. Remember that this is not just one big advertisement. You are telling a story, and highlighting your customer. You will automatically look good (and your services attractive) in the success of that customer. So talk about him or her — not about yourself — except as your product or service produced the result that made them happy and more productive.
2. Remember that you need this customer’s permission to use their story. Do not just assume that they want their name and reputation put out there in this way.
3. Don’t use a lot of industry jargon. Again, you are writing a story and not a technical report. If someone enjoys the story and feels encouraged to contact you for information, that’s the appropriate time to get a bit more technical.
4. If you can do a few case studies from different industries, showcasing different problems you’ve helped solve, that will be a plus for you. You don’t have to have a lot of case studies, but the chance to show some versatility won’t be a bad thing.

Keep your case study lighter and more personal than other types of reports. That way, you’ve got a real human element that lifts your service out of dry technicality or blaring advertising. If you can write the case study so a potential customer feels like you’ve just pulled up a chair and chatted about a story, it will be very effective. It could be the best customer testimonial you’ll ever have.

15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly

Like this infographic? Get more copywriting tips from Copyblogger.

Want to make them go, “Hm, that sounds like something we could use”? Write a white paper. Or a case study. These types of writing get your point across impressively, even when they’re less pushy than outright advertising. But what’s the difference between a white paper and a case study? And doesn’t a customer testimonial on your website work just as well as a case study?

Don’t “customer testimonials” already do the job?

Marketing experts talk a lot about how “customer testimonials” add credibility and attractiveness to the public image of a business. You now see a lot of these testimonials on company web pages: customers apparently raving about how helpful the staff were or how the product or service made a big difference to them. Some sites have whole pages dedicated to such blurbs.

But there’s a problem. Many businesses are well aware of the way these endorsements are supposed to boost their image (and hopefully lead to bigger profits). So they’ve hired writers to write fake “testimonials” to put on their websites. Now a savvy visitor to any business site is faced with the question: “Are these real people, sending in real endorsements of this business? Or are these testimonials created in the mind of some copywriter?” In other words — just more advertising, relying on a potential customer’s gullibility?

Unfortunately, the latter is becoming the case, more and more often. Eventually, I suspect, having these “testimonials” on a page, with just a person’s name and no way to check if the story is fake or not, will begin to backfire. People will assume the blurbs are false. And a great deal of the time — they’ll be right.

A Case Study: a Genuine Customer Story

A case study is much more likely to be genuine (though I imagine people are trying to fake even these). Usually the story you tell about a customer allows you to name the company or person involved. With permission, of course! This makes the story potentially checkable. (And if you tried to fake the story, it could open you up to “cease and desist” orders if that person or company wasn’t really your client, or this problem never happened, or it happened but you never solved it.)

A case study is where you get to talk about frustrations and glitches that led to solutions and happiness and success. Naturally you don’t want to get melodramatic, but in a case study, you’re not simply examining statistics and figures and test results, as you are in a white paper. Here, you demonstrate how you approached real people about real problems and how they got real help from you.

There’s simply nothing more credible than this.

White Paper versus Case Study

As we learned in earlier posts, a white paper uses facts, figures, and analysis in examining a problem or feature in your industry. It’s more of an objective technical report than anything else, if it’s done well. It can be used for marketing purposes, but its primary goal is to put helpful information out there.

But when a case study tackles the same problem, or highlights the same industry feature, it takes things up close and personal. It shows how your solution helped an actual person doing their actual job, in a real company that benefited from this. This is why case studies are often used as sub-sections in white papers: they can serve as practical evidence to go along with the facts and figures.

But case studies can stand on their own too. They can be personal, cheerful, and upbeat. And nothing serves you better than a real customer testimonial, showing exactly how you’ve helped someone who needed it.

(Next time: How to create a Case Study)

Au contraire!

Don’t Waste All That White Paper Research!

After all, everyone else does it (Photo courtesy Flickr user Arlington County)

Remember, if your white paper is of good quality, you’ve got a lot of research and information there. You may have test results and case studies too. Whether the paper is five pages long or fifty, you’ve collected a lot of facts on your subject, and made a lot of connections between those facts and the state of your industry or business. Why would you then let that information just sit there?

A white paper is a gold mine for you. Take a cue from the environmental and conservation world, where objects are recycled to new uses once their original use is finished. If the same objects can be re-used in several ways in a recycling program, why can’t the information in your white paper? And you don’t even have to retire the white paper to recycle!

Or, as it’s called more properly in the information world: repurpose.

Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

Some businesses “repurpose” their white papers simply by adding them to an archive on their website, from which customers can download them when needed. Or the business keeps all its white papers on a site from which people can continue to buy them. And all the while, older papers fall down the list, and may not get much notice after the first flurry of purchasing.

But that’s not really repurposing. That’s using different ways to get the exact same white paper into people’s hands. That’s valuable, too, but you can make far more use of your white paper than that.

Case Studies

You may have have used case studies in the white paper. These can be pulled out and used separately as well. Did you use data from your own satisfied customers to demonstrate the good results your product or service can achieve? Collect the data from each separate customer, do more interviews with the customer so you have some good quotations and perhaps further information to use, and write up a case study.

Presentations

If you used graphics in your white paper, you can pull these out and reframe the paper into a presentation. Add just a caption or short line to each graphic, and as each one comes up when you’re doing the presentation, talk to your audience about the rest of the information connected with that graphic. Or you could use that information and find other graphics to use with it.

And remember, the presentation doesn’t necessarily just have to be a repeat of what was said in the white paper. You can make presentations based on some of the information in the paper, but don’t need to use everything. You can pull out different bits of information for presentations in different contexts.

Blogs, Social Media, & Websites

Use the white paper on social media (Photo courtesy Flickr user ryanvanetten)

You can use information or even small sections of the white paper in your business blog posts. Or you could do the process in reverse: serialize your information in several blog posts, and then collect them all into a white paper.

Meanwhile, smaller discrete chunks might be updates in social media like Twitter, Google Plus, or Facebook. You could post bits of information about results, and ask your followers to tell their own stories. As you get a response from your readers and followers, you could end up with even more data about the success of your product or service! And some of what you hear in response to your posts and updates could provide the seeds of other white papers in the future.

And don’t forget that you can pull out material from your white paper to use as separate pages on your own website. They could be information pages, but might also lead to more. If your product has been especially useful in school contexts, even though it’s not explicitly a school-related product, create a separate page that talks about schools. This could open up a whole new marketing niche.

Podcasts & Videos

These might be an extension of the presentations mentioned above. As long as what you said in the presentation will allow a listener to understand what’s going on, recording the presentation for a podcast on your website would work. Or you could videotape the entire presentation.

You might create several shorter videos or podcasts as “how tos,” if the information in your white paper lends itself to that sort of approach. Or you could use different sections of the white paper for other short videos; e.g., if you touch on the safety of your product, you could use the information to create a safety video.

Other Sellable or Marketing Materials

It might be that you’ve just given readers a snapshot of your industry in your white paper. Do you have enough research and extra information to expand into an e-book? Perhaps the white paper was a kind of “survey” of things, and you can go into more detail in a larger work. You could also condense the most interesting points in the white paper and create brochures or ads for your business or individual products.

Give Your White Paper Renewed Life

New projects from old! (Photo courtesy Flickr user ingridtaylar)

When you’ve created a white paper, that doesn’t have to be the end of things. You can repurpose the material in the paper to use in countless different ways. And you won’t necessarily be just handing readers the same information over and over again. Some readers really will want to concentrate on only one aspect of your paper topic, while other topics from your paper can be expanded so readers get even more information.

A white paper is very valuable in its own right. But think of it as the foundation document for a multitude of other creative materials and projects. When used in this way, it can multiply its value many, many times over.

So here’s where you can spice things up a little. Include things that relieve the monotony of big chunks of text on a white page. Present your information with variety. Here are a few suggestions for doing that:

Use Graphics and Charts

A detailed flow chart (Photo courtesy Scott Keatley)

You’ve got so many different ways to present data these days. And you know that graphic displays and images can help people understand how a pile of data relates to something in the real world. There are Venn Diagrams and Spider Maps and Line, Bar, and Pie Charts, Network Trees, Flow Charts…well, you get the picture. So insert that picture into your white paper!

Photographs are another way of making things stick in the reader’s mind. You can spend pages describing how to set up a piece of equipment, but with a couple of photographs that show how the equipment looks when it’s set up properly, you can save a lot of words. So use a few photographs.

Of course, don’t overdo it. Yes, a very long block of text on a white page can get boring. But if the reader has to spend the whole white paper jumping from photo to chart to photo, with only sporadic bits of text between them to tie them together, you won’t have a unified paper at all. You’ll have something more like, oh, a scrapbook.

Case Studies and Partnerships

Help your readers find beneficial partnerships (photo courtesy Flickr user Aidan Jones)

These are sections of text too (though they can also contain graphics), but they add a personal element to your white paper. This is a chance for your readers to learn the stories of others — individuals or companies just like them, perhaps — who have benefited from the information you’re presenting. You tell these stories in as objective and factual a way as you can. And yet you can bring in personal elements, by quoting the people themselves.

This will really draw other potential customers to you. Case studies catch their interest, because they can see themselves in those other shoes. And notice that you’re not doing any pressure marketing here. You don’t need to.

Another way to appeal to your readers is by telling stories of others they can partner with, to solve their particular problem. Sometimes you’re just presenting information, and aren’t trying to push an actual product or service. You can still keep these people on your side by helping them benefit even when you’re not making a sale.

White Paper Formatting

You know the basic sections you need in your white paper, but you can create extra interest by varying your formatting. Is your subject something that lends itself to a two-column format? Do you have “pull quotes” from within your text that you can set apart in a sidebar? How about an extra sidebar itself, containing interesting tidbits or factual trivia connected to your topic?

Have some corner, perhaps the top right or bottom right, where you position a small version of your logo along with the paper page number. You might add a border line, say, down one margin or across the top of each page, in a color related to your logo colors.

As with your graphics and photographs, do not overdo your formatting tweaks. But you can add visual interest, and guide your reader’s eyes to parts of the page that you consider most important, in subtle ways. Once you have all the material you want to include in your white paper, experiment a bit with the layout, to see if you can add a subtle but effective extra touch to spice things up and keep the reader reading.

Next time: How do we use a white paper once we’ve got one?

Whatever the purpose of the paper, these goals mean you’d better produce something that looks absolutely professional. A white paper is not supposed to be an outright sales pitch. The criteria it conforms to are much closer to academic standards than to marketing standards. So let’s have a look at the recommended sections to include in a professional white paper.

1) Title Page

A title perhaps less ...obscure? (Photo Yale Law Library, via Flickr)

Make sure the white paper has an interesting title that indicates your topic. And if you can work a benefit into the title, readers may be more likely to read the paper than they would otherwise. For example, you may be trying to promote the merits of a certain type of engine to run a customer’s processes. You could title your paper, The XYZ Engine, or you could add interest with a title like, Lowering One’s Carbon Footprint with the XYZ Engine. Readers interested in greener production processes will suddenly sit up and take notice.

Some white paper experts recommend that you don’t write a title until after you’ve written the paper itself and drawn your conclusions. As with any writing, you’ll find that the content or even the emphasis of your paper can change as you research and write it. A title written after the paper is done is completely fresh, and will reflect the true contents of the white paper.

2) Abstract or Introduction (optional)

The abstract or introduction may or may not be needed. This section is both a brief introduction to the problem you’re addressing and a summary of your main points and conclusion. You don’t need to go into a lot of detail about those points (that’s what the rest of the paper does), but a reader who doesn’t have time to read the entire white paper can still get your main thrust from scanning an introduction like this. Consider including one, especially if the white paper is long.

If you’re planning to put your white paper in an online repository, these generally require abstracts. People will first see the title and the abstract, and that’s what will be the basis of their decision to buy/read the paper or not. So while having an abstract is optional, it really isn’t, if you’re going to use an online repository.

3) Statement of the Need or Problem

This is where you really get down to work. This statement should probably be about one page in length, or less. It gives a general background for the problem or issue the white paper addresses, and also shows how this issue may be holding back the readers or their work. It also begins to show that you know what you’re talking about, and have some idea of how to solve the problem.

Remember that a white paper doesn’t simply have to address a marketing or sales issue. If you have customers who deal with border crossing (either as people who travel back and forth or those who ship over borders a lot), you could write about laws and requirements. Whatever problem or complex process your readers face, if you know how to help them fix it, you can write a white paper for them.

4) Details About the Problem

Details, Stats, Data, etc. (Photo courtesy Flickr user Cuito Cuanavale)

In this section, you bring in your test results, statistics, facts, and figures. You are not only demonstrating what the problem is, but you’re showing that it really does exist. And you’re showing what impact it really has, and even demonstrating some secondary problems that come up if the primary issue is not dealt with.

Your readers may not even have realized they had this particular problem. Or they might not have felt it had much of an impact on them. But what they read in this section can be very educational, making them want to read more and find out what the solution is.

Notice that you’re not doing any outright marketing. If you’ve got good evidence, you won’t need to. Your readers will be eager and waiting to hear your answers.

5) The General Type of Solution

The word “general” is very important here. You still aren’t marketing yourself at this point, but instead you describe the types of solutions available to help your readers. Again, you are trying to educate and inform, and not just sell. This paper has to be useful to the reader to have any value.

That’s more and more the trend right now: providing value of some sort to people, earning their respect because of it, and having them come to you. It isn’t as necessary as it once was, to yell “Buy mine! Buy mine!” at people. In fact, that strategy turns more and more people off, after they’ve spent years living with that kind of assault. This means that your white paper can not just be one big advertisement, or your potential customers are likely to run the other way in a hurry.

6) Your Own Solution

All right — now you can talk about your own product or other solution that will help your readers address their important issue. Up to this point, you’ve been demonstrating “good faith” by giving the readers some useful information. If they’ve read this far, they are probably feeling pretty mellow toward you, and will be more likely to read about your version of the general solution from the previous section.

So yes, write about your product or service. Point out the benefits the customer would receive, and how your solution will address the problems you talked about in Section 4, above. You still don’t want to yell and create pressure, and undo all that good will. But you certainly can give a one-page summary of how you can help, and then issue a Call to Action by directing them to your website or calling or emailing.

7) Summary/Conclusion

This can be similar to the introduction. Here is where you summarize the problem, and then the general solution. Restate your main points. And again, though perhaps in a milder way than in the previous section, issue a Call to Action.

There are other things you can include in a white paper, but we’ll look at them next time: Spicing Up Your White Paper

So let’s have a look at the three main types of white papers, to see how they differ, and how each one would be used. The type you choose will depend partly on the needs your readers and potential customers have, but it will also depend on your own goals. And remember that you’re never “locked in” to one specific kind of paper. You can use different types at different times.

Technical White Papers

Report test results and statistics (Photo courtesy Flickr user lynetter)

These white papers, not surprisingly, will contain quite a few technical details. If your readers have problems you’re able to solve, back up your claim with this information. Show how the problem can be defined and explained with scientific data and test results, and give technical specifications and further data to support the types of solutions that exist.

This is not a sales pitch for your particular solution, though. You will mention your own product later in the paper, but it’s not the focus. The purpose of a technical white paper is to make sure your reader really understands what’s going on when they encounter their problem or face some obstacle or need.

This type of paper is a general information paper. You don’t simply want customers who buy your product or solution. You will also benefit from readers who are well informed about your entire industry. These are likely to become long-term customers because they’re not focused on a “press this button to solve this problem” answer. They’re looking for what works best in the context of the whole industry, and when they find it, they’ll stick with it.

Marketing White Papers

Don't overdo the advertising (Photo courtesy Flickr user indi.ca)

These are the papers where you get to pitch your own business a lot more. In a paper like this, you would tout your solution to a problem, and would try to persuade the reader why yours is the best solution of all. But use this sort of white paper with care and caution; you still need to maintain at least some attitude of objectivity.

For example, you should still present the whole gamut of available solutions to the reader’s problem or need. You can assess the ones that others offer, perhaps with a “pros” and “cons” type of approach. Naturally, since you’re promoting one solution in particular, you can try to persuade the reader that yours is the most ideal. But if you don’t provide at least some information about alternatives, the paper will turn into a five-page advertisement that is more likely to turn people off than to get them to buy your product.

Technical/Marketing White Paper

If you’re really itching to make a sales pitch, this may be the best type of white paper to use. In fact, even the “Marketing” white paper discussed above should probably be more like this than anything else. Here you can combine the statistics, test results, and scientific data with an effort to persuade.

This will serve to give your readers the wider view of the industry that we mentioned earlier. The white paper will show that you know what you’re talking about, and have looked at things from every angle. It will also demonstrate your respect for the reader, and your belief that they don’t need to be shielded from information. You are treating them as equals, capable of seeing all the facts and making a responsible decision.

A Technical/Marketing white paper doesn’t swing too far toward tech-speak, nor does it try to overpower potential customers with market-speak. It walks a line down the middle, providing valuable information while simultaneously saying, “So this is why we believe our solution or product can meet that need or solve that problem.”

Remember that the reader or potential customer is the primary focus of the white paper. If this reader gets the feeling he or she is being “marketed at” with a vengeance, that could be the end of the relationship. But being given intelligent and useful information, in a respectful and interesting way, does half the marketing legwork for you.

Next time: Structuring a White Paper

There’s a lot of talk lately about how valuable white papers are to businesses. But does everyone even know what this document is? And if you’ve got one — what on earth do you do with it? The basic definition is that a white paper is a report that contains information that is factual, sometimes technical, always well researched, and as objective as possible. The information should be useful and interesting to a company’s customers. And when the business has a white paper, they can use it for marketing and sales purposes.

But really, don’t make the mistake of thinking that a white paper is just a big advertisement, longer than usual. The “marketing and sales” side is only part of the story. In fact, if the white paper gets too “salesy,” it could turn customers off. People already try to avoid being advertised to: nobody will want to read five full pages of sales pitch.

White Papers Geared to Customers

The primary purpose of a white paper should be to think of the needs of a potential customer rather than your own sales and income needs. The two are related, naturally, but in this document, put the customer first. A white paper first of all asks what the customer needs or wants to know, that you can provide (and, by happy coincidence, provide better than anyone else, especially your competitors).

You will first need to ask these sorts of questions:

• what do my potential customers need that I can provide?
• what is a problem my customers have, that I can fix?
• can I improve my customers’ lives, make their own work easier, or resolve a dilemma for them?

So say you have a customer who wants to engage in greener living. Do you provide your service in a way that will help them switch to a greener lifestyle? Or can they buy your product or use your solution knowing that you yourself are using greener, sustainable methods of providing it?

Your white paper, giving the details about your methods in contrast to less sustainable ones, could make your customers say, “I’m so glad I found out about this, and now I can use this solution or product with a clear conscience!” Even keeping any “sales pitch” aspect in the white paper very muted, customers who value the information it contains will feel much less pressure to buy, yet are much more likely to buy anyway.

White Paper as Foundation Document

A white paper can serve almost as a “Frequently Asked Questions” document. If there are things your customers keep asking about, these are things they are obviously interested in. So you might consider providing a report that answers or clears up the questions that are most on your customers’ minds.

And this highlights another immense value of a white paper. When it contains factual, important, and interesting information about certain aspects of your business, it can be “repurposed” and used in countless other ways. Here are just a few ideas:

• reshape the same information into a slideshow on your website, or a presentation you can give to an audience
• set up an information section on your website, with each major point you made in the white paper having its own page
• expand the most interesting parts of the white paper into an e-book or booklet your customers can buy
• use the white paper content as material for blog posts
• adapt parts of the white paper into brochures or other sales materials

Think of a white paper as a multi-purpose foundation document for your business. It primarily serves your customers, but it can provide information you use for your own marketing needs. Creating one or more white papers on just the right topics related to your business can go a long way to showing your customers that you really do understand them, and have worked hard to give them the solution they’ve been looking for.

Next time: What type of white paper works best?

However, I recently created a slide presentation for school kids about different types of essays, and had to be careful to define the word “argue.” No, in the context of a Persuasive Essay, that word does not mean “yell and disagree.” It means, “Make your case with logic and reasoning.” Rather the opposite of the ordinary, everyday type of arguing.

When we are trying to convey important information to someone, we either have to use language that is very clear to our readers or listeners — or we’d better define our terms very explicitly. Science writer Phil Plait makes this point in his article, Scientists are from Mars, the public is from Earth. He uses the following chart (originally used in a Physics Today article entitled Communicating the Science of Climate Change) to illustrate what scientists mean by certain terms, compared to how the general public understands the same terms.

(Table originated by Richard Sommerville at Scripps and Susan Joy Hassol, director of Climate Communication)

In the case of scientific terminology, sometimes the use of a word doesn’t just involve issues of clarity. Sometimes there are political implications too, as Plait points out.  He explains, for example, why he changed to using the word “denier” in certain circumstances, rather than “skeptic.” Skepticism just means you’re not likely to be persuaded without more proof. Denial means you’re not going to listen to any proof, period, if it’s not convenient to you.

So yet again — words matter. We need to think before we write, and choose our words carefully. And, as it happens, this is why people whose main work is not writing shouldn’t assume they can just toss off a written piece on the side when they need to. What they really need is to hire a professional writer to craft that important communication for them and ensure that their readers understand what they actually mean.