Know your audience for a white paper
by Gordon Graham, That White Paper Guy
Comedians know it. Politicians know it.
And white paper writers must know it, too:
The first key to success is to understand your audience.
"Understanding your audience will help you write the content they need in the words and the way they need it," says industry veteran Ginny Redish in her excellent book,
This can also help you select and organize your content to be useful and appealing.
That's why you really must start every white paper project with an audience analysis. This doesn't have to take very long or cost a great deal.
But it's a step no white paper writer can afford to skip.
Knowing your audience helps you decide:
- What problems they experience
- What terms and acronyms they know
- How much technical detail they can understand
- What proof points and sources resonate best with them
- What to put in and what to leave out.
Assuming your white paper is a pre-sales document aimed at likely prospects, you need to find the answers to these three questions...
#1: Who is the ideal prospect for the client's offering?
This includes demographic data such as age, sex, education, location; anything you can state as facts or numbers. It can also include psychographic information on the attitudes or opinions of those prospects.
#2: What do they do on the job?
This includes their job title, responsibilities and where they fit in the pecking order: Are they a decision-maker, technical recommender, or member of a selection committee?
#3: Where do they work?
This includes the size, type, sector and location of the organization.
Ideally the client has developed a set of personas (typical customer character sketches) that spell all this out.
If not, consider this your first research job.
Ask anyone who talks to prospects: people from marketing, sales, or customer service. A customer advisory board can be an ideal source.
Then use your research to develop a brief description of your intended reader. The closer you can get to an actual person you can visualize, the better.
♦ Some real-world examples
Here's the format I generally use:
"Our intended reader is a [sex] [age] [job title] in a [size of company] [sector of company] in [location of company] [anything else important]."
Here's what this looked like for one white paper project I did recently:
"Our intended reader is a male 40- to 60-year-old IT director in a mid-sized manufacturing company with headquarters in North America and manufacturing outsourced to Asia."
Sometimes the demographics are less important than the concerns driving your audience.
Here's another example I developed for a white paper:
"Our target reader is a seasoned project manager working in a federal government agency or with a prime contractor for a major stimulus project. This project manager is responsible for coordinating many subcontractors to bring in the project on time and on budget."
As you draft your white paper, you may have dilemmas or differences of opinion about what to put in and what to leave out.
Asking, "Does our audience need to know this? Would they understand this? Do they care about this?" quickly gives you the answer.
What if you have more than one audience for the same document?
In that case, call one the primary reader and the other secondary.
And if you need to, layer the information for the secondary audience, as I discussed in a previous article.
Written by Gordon Graham, this article appeared in the January 2010 edition of the WhitePaperSource Newsletter.
To repost this article on your Web site, please e-mail a request to Gordon@ThatWhitePaperGuy.com.
