Lesson 3: How to Write Your White Paper

Great to see you again! Welcome to today's lesson where we really get down to the nitty-gritty.

This lesson will cover:

• What a White Paper is, and what it does
• Ideal length for a healthcare White Paper
• What to include in a White Paper
• Making your White Paper look great
• Questions to think about
• Looking ahead to Lesson 4

Let’s dive in!

A White Paper is a piece of long-form content that makes a persuasive argument based on facts and analysis. They’re typically aimed at business and professional audiences. 

This is not a commonly held view, but I'm about to say that a White Paper should also include some emotional appeal. I don't think anyone is truly won over by a purely intellectual argument. If you want people to buy or take action, you have to appeal to their hearts as well as their heads. 

In marketing, White Papers are used to establish authority, positioning your expert or company as someone who can solve a specific problem for customers. It’s also a great lead magnet, a tool for your sales team, and the foundation for an entire campaign of content marketing (more on that in Lesson 4). 

What if you're not trying to sell something? Non-profits and think tanks use White Papers to make a case for change and inspire action. 

The length of your white paper depends on your purpose, the depth of your content, and most of all your audience. 

Traditionally, White Papers could be as long as 50 pages. Today, I would say about 1,500 - 2,500 words is the right length most of the time. I didn’t just make that number up. Here are a couple of examples from two of the top medical journals in the world:

• The New England Journal of Medicine guidelines for authors recommend articles as short as 750 words (for editorials) to a maximum of 3,000 words (for a full-on report of original research)
• In The BMJ, editorials are 800 words. There is no word limit on original research manuscripts but the journal does ask authors to “make your article concise and make every word count.”

If that’s the range for the most serious communications in medicine, you don’t want to go overboard with your own White Paper. People are busy. Everyone working in health care is really, really busy. Keep it tight and make it highly visual – more on that below. 

The challenge with a White Paper is to pack lots of valuable information into this short space, offer a strong analysis, and make a persuasive case for your position. Your White Paper might be short on words, but it can’t be short on substance. 

The format is flexible. It depends on your audience and whether you want to:

• Establish the author as a thought leader
• Make an argument for a technical solution
• Share original data about your product or service
• Solve a customer problem.

Here is a typical White Paper structure for a problem-solving White Paper, which you can use as a template or outline for your own piece. This type of White Paper might include:

• A summary or abstract at the top. You can set this apart visually, as a box with the key facts and conclusions in a set of bullet points. Some readers will never go past this section so it’s prime real estate. 
• Introduction. This sets the scene and defines the problem from the reader’s point of view.
• Exploring the problem. This is the meat of your argument, where you take a deeper look. Present and analyze your facts and data. 
• Exploring solutions. Here is where you present a few different answers to the problem, and critique them. To make this section strong, cover the same ground for each solution, whether you’ve stated your criteria explicitly or structured your writing to cover this implicitly (which can be a powerful tactic). Of course, you want your solution to come out on top! 
• Conclusion. Recap what you’ve said, concisely. Make your recommendations, which should come out as a logical result of your argument. In addition to the summary or abstract, this is the other part that readers are most likely to look at. 
• Call to action (CTA). What do you want your reader to do next? Request a discovery call or demo? Visit your website?
• References. Reference citations are critical to make your White Paper authoritative, and it’s a big part of the added value you’re providing for your readers. 

Along the way, don’t be afraid to inject some emotion. This should be subtle in a White Paper, but it should be there. 

If resources allow, involve a professional designer. If you’re good at Canva or other design software, you might get away with a DIY job.

This is so important because if your White Paper is poorly presented, it doesn’t matter how good the writing is. It will project an unprofessional image, and may not engage readers at all. How it looks is just as important as what it says. Here are a few design tips for White Papers:

• Make sure your White Paper is aligned with your organization’s brand in terms of fonts, colors, and visuals
• Use infographics and charts to present data, highlighting the most important numbers this way
• Use tables to summarize comparisons
• If you include photos, use images that include people working in your customer’s environment. Try to avoid the worst stock photos that look horribly trite. Make sure they have copyright clearance and model releases. Personally, I think you’re usually better off without photos in this context – use visuals to tell your data story, instead
• Please, please, please don’t use images that are obviously AI-generated. They look amateur, they date quickly, and they’re creepy!

Most of all, give your copy (the text) plenty of room to breathe. Empty space is your friend. 

1.  What’s your hypothesis? That is, how do you see the problem and what solutions can you discuss? What’s your final recommendation?

2.  What’s your CTA? When they’ve seen your White Paper, what do you want your readers to do?

3.  How much time do you have to create your White Paper? (Researching and writing a first draft of 2,500 words takes me about a week full-time, depending on the topic).

4.  How can you make your White Paper visually appealing, especially when presenting numbers, data, or statistics?

Looking ahead, Lesson 4 will explain how you can use parts of your White Paper like Lego, to build different types of content across an entire campaign.

Barney, Nick. What is a White Paper? TechTarget. April 18, 2023. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/white-paper

George Mason University. White Papers. https://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/different-genres/white-papers

The BMJ. Article Types and Preparation. https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-types

The New England Journal of Medicine. Author Center: Article Types. https://www.nejm.org/author-center/article-types

Feel free to drop me an email with any questions. You'll also find some White Paper FAQs here.