Why White Papers Are Particularly Effective Tools for Startups (Six Reasons)
You might think white papers are only for the corporate behemoths. For the companies that live on expansive campuses with even more expansive marketing budgets.
Believe it or not, though, the white paper is a better tool for David than Goliath.
With a sophisticated piece of content marketing, small, startup companies can punch above their weight. Like Rocky winning the hearts of the pro-Drago, Soviet crowd in Rocky IV, they can pilfer the plaudits of their larger competitor’s audience. Startups may trail in revenue, employee count, and the length of their client rosters, but they need not trail in thought leadership.
What is a white paper?
As outlined in our exploration of the different types of thought leadership content:
When a thought leader has deep research to share on a topic, comprised of numerous salient takeaways supported by rich data and important context, a white paper is often the vehicle of choice. A white paper is a report-style piece of content that leverages thorough research to provide an audience of knowledgeable readers with compelling and original insights on specific subject matter. Typically shared in PDF format, well-executed white papers may be long, but they take care to ease the reader’s fatigue through the heavy use of graphics, an appealing format, and consistent amplification of key takeaways both at the beginning of the paper and with eye-catching headings throughout. Downloading these materials may require a reader to provide contact information, generating leads for the author; as such, they may be referred to as “lead magnets.” The mere selection of a white paper as the preferred medium for a topic conveys a sense of sophistication that alerts the reader to the idea that they’ll be consuming valuable thought leadership rather than a pedestrian blog post.
Note that the intended readership for white papers is already knowledgeable in the field concerned. For startups, this raises the stakes of producing a whitepaper. Surface-level content will have little impact, and more intensive content must be bulletproof to ensure its acceptance and admiration by a sophisticated audience. However, the payoff - and therefore the risk - is asymmetric for startups. Because they have built little credibility to date, startups have little credibility to lose. On the other hand, they have everything to gain.
That asymmetry opens our discussion on why startups should consider writing white papers. If you haven’t yet explored why all businesses should consider them, please read all about it. But as we’ll soon learn, there are additional factors that make white papers disproportionately impactful tools for companies early in their lives.
Startups can use white papers to build momentum before acquiring customers.
Customer acquisition takes time. While you’re building great momentum by serving your clients and accumulating referrals, it’s not easy to get that word-of-mouth snowball rolling downhill…at first.
The good news: you don’t need a lengthy list of clients and years of experience serving them to make a big splash in your market. With only a handful of unique and impactful insights, you can begin to make the kind of waves one might expect to originate from a much larger competitor.
Whether you have insights to share from your modest cohort of customers or you've identified striking takeaways from secondary market research, the key is to present the market with ideas it hasn’t seen before. With ideas that will make people reconsider the way they’re doing business. Promise the reader insights their business can’t afford to overlook, and then deliver on that promise.
In doing so, you’ll cast the shadow of a company much larger than yours on the market, and a pace of customer acquisition more befitting of that size will follow.
Startups can use white papers to demonstrate expertise well beyond their age.
The stakeholders in any given market may feel they have little to learn from a company younger than most toddlers. But the reasons for your company’s existence are much older than the company itself. Whether that’s the personal experience of the founding team or the problems perennially plaguing the industry and its customers, something prompted your company’s creation. Rooted in that origin story is a unique and valuable perspective worth sharing.
However, that perspective is only worth sharing if it’s rigorously supported by research and data. Because your company is a newcomer, simply telling isn’t enough. We need to show the audience, to convince them beyond repudiation. We do that in white papers, and if we do so successfully, we demand a seat at the table of industry discourse - and not the kid’s table.
If you can add something valuable to the conversation, you’ve significantly expedited your path to credibility; your company will no longer be perceived as a naïve newcomer, but rather as an established voice worth listening to.
Through white papers, startups can offer thoughtful critiques of the status quo and incumbent competition.
You or your company’s founders started your business because there was a gap in the market. Or because you could improve upon existing services or products that fell short in their solution of an industry problem. With a white paper, you can highlight those shortcomings and make potential customers reconsider their existing approach without making an overt sales pitch.
This is your opportunity to state the case that inspired your company’s creation. Don’t waste it. Gather the relevant data. Interview and survey the right voices. If your product or software saves customers money or time, explain how much customers lose annually in the status quo setup. There’s room to be both quantitative and qualitative.
You saw a gap that nobody else did. Now that you’re up and running, it’s time to broadcast that gap to your industry - not just that it exists, but its impact and cost. Raise eyebrows and get the audience asking if there’s a better way.
Startups can attain a greater level of clarity about their market through the development of a white paper.
You (and others) may have several opinions on an industry issue based on a hunch or anecdotal evidence. Instinct is valuable, and anecdotal evidence can be accurate, but building true expertise requires doing the work. In some cases, that might mean years of hands-on experience. But doing the work can also mean conducting the research and executing the analysis to understand the subject matter better than anybody else.
In actually pursuing that process, your company will develop an intimate understanding of an issue held by few others, very quickly bridging the experience gap to other, more tenured companies. Being a startup means battling the skepticism of prospective customers who wonder why they should listen to or work with you. Pointing to the huge volume of research and the conclusions drawn (neatly and articulately packaged in a white paper) is the antidote to that skepticism. The work you’ve done will reveal itself in conversations as well as a depth of knowledge that can’t be faked.
Your white paper efforts stand not only as an evergreen PDF resource but as an evergreen source of knowledge ready to be tapped in your daily client and prospect dialogues. You can speak clearly and articulately about your industry because you took the time to organize and write those thoughts.
A white paper could be your startup’s path to press and media attention long before you would’ve attained it by other means.
The journalists following your industry are always looking for things to write about. By preparing something that shares unique and original insights, you’re doing them a massive favor, and they will likely not only be willing but grateful to use the takeaways from your whitepaper as the basis for their next piece.
It’s worth considering as you develop your white paper: what are the newsworthy pieces of this work? Where are the statistics and data points begging to be cited by The Wall Street Journal? Are you saying something that will pique a journalist’s interest?
Find a way to answer those questions thoughtfully, and you’ll earn the media exposure that might have taken years to attain otherwise. That exposure will amplify the reach of your white paper, and, therefore, the reach of your company. Suddenly, the impact of your humble white paper is expanding at a more exponential rate.
A white paper can be a valuable tool for startups to build their email lists.
This is perhaps the most tangible and practical benefit of producing a white paper for startups: if you accomplish several or all of the benefits described above, you’ve built a formidable lead magnet.
When you provide valuable insight that garners attention, readers will happily provide their email address or other contact info to download your white paper. Not by accident, those very same readers are the ones most likely to purchase your product or service, or at the very least refer those who might, because their interest in your subject matter means they’re engaged members of the audience you’re trying to serve. For a startup business in its early days, a tool like this that can fill the top of the sales funnel is invaluable.
Ready to get started on the white paper that will transform your business from plucky upstart to respected statesman? ThoughtLede works with you to transform your unique insights into leading white papers, so your startup can benefit in many of the same ways we just discussed. Get in touch today to get started.
Wondering when to use a white paper instead of an eBook or a how-to guide? Find the answers you’re looking for here.