There has been a literal smorgasbord of recent studies on the power of white papers in the last few months.

This one is fresh from MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide.

There is SO much gold in this report that i’ll be making multiple posts related to it.

But first, a little gem: Do readers respond better to specifically targeted white papers?

The answer: a big YES.

Content is most valuable when it is targeted to one of the following categories:

• Specific industry (82% found this significantly or somewhat more valuable)
• Job function (67% found this significantly or somewhat more valuable)
• Company size (59% found this significantly or somewhat more valuable)

Take home lesson: If you want to engage readers, focus on an industry AND a job function (and why not get down to a specific company size while you are at it!).

How do Techies Use White Papers?

Here are some interesting findings related to engineers and how they use white papers:

• Negotiating?  Then give them a white paper: When negotiating a deal, white papers are one of the most important things you can give an engineer.  Engineers placed them just below search engines and ranked them as the 2nd most important thing they turn to.
• White papers important for evaluation stage as well: Engineers turn to vendor white papers before analyst reports, newsletters, case studies, social networks and vendor webinars, with 44% reporting they like to review vendor white papers.
• How do engineers primarily find white papers?  They look on search engines (61%), email newsletters (48%), vendor website (45%) and industry search engine (36%).
• What do engineers typically do after reading white papers? They visit the vendor’s website (70%), shop the competition (46%), contact the vendor (45%) or pass the white paper to a peer (37%).

There’s some really awesome findings here.  I hope they help you make the case for white paper.

Let me know if these findings match your experiences??

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.