Teach Your White Papers to Walk

I've spent much of my career writing, beginning with advertising and direct response copy for print in the early years (including those wonderful, four-page direct mail letters that were so much fun to write), and transitioning to digital copy that empowers the writer to produce anything from highly constrained tweets (I think of them as ugly haiku) to point-of-view white papers. Now that digital publishing has broken the restraints of publication length, shoving production considerations into the back seat, communications have become much more message-driven. And that's a great thing.

But there are still functional considerations. Is the communication being created active or passive, for example? An active communication has legs of its own. It's a message coupled with its own delivery mechanism. Passive communications, on the other hand, will sit at a quiet URL and gather dust until some external action drives an audience to them. For example, an email message is active as it's pushed directly into someone's inbox (if all goes well). But if a white paper offer is incorporated into that message, the white paper will receive no traffic without the email. It's passive.

Not every active channel is digital, either. An example is your sales force. If, like me, you're driving demand for a complex sales process supported by tele-qualifiers, inside sales, account managers, solution engineers and channel partners, then you've got many potential legs for your communications. But getting them engaged is often easier said than done; they're certainly among the least predictable and manageable of your campaign stakeholders. Still, arming them with practical communications should be a linchpin of your campaign strategy.

Hence the white paper linked here. I wrote this recently, drawing content from a number of internal and external sources; and it's designed for use by our sales team as well as through direct response tactics. It describes five approaches that will help IT professionals in healthcare better strike the balance between the demand for information security and the need to enable clinical care givers for better quality patient care. These five approaches are each high-level use cases for our software, so the paper is designed for use by sales people in the qualification process. They can introduce those five topics as a means of igniting a discovery dialog that can lead to a profitable conversation.

White papers are potent weapons in the campaigner's arsenal. They're even more potent with legs. So craft them wisely and well!