White Papers are an important part of a content marketing toolkit for any financial technology provider. Well-targeted and effectively written white papers can be powerful lead generation and lead conversion tools. But to be effective, they must be highly relevant to your target market, address their specific business concerns, and provide educational value.  Not every white paper achieves this.

Here is a list of 8 reasons why your white paper is not generating the leads you were hoping for, and how to fix it.

1. It doesn’t address a  compelling business need. 
   Many of the white papers we see don’t spell out the business drivers, or if they do, the driver is either not compelling enough or not clearly fleshed out. Make sure your paper does not leave the reader asking “so what?”
2. It’s not coming from a consistent point of view.
   I recently read a paper that shifted back and forth between the needs of exchanges, sell-sides, and buy-sides with little clarity into the intended target market segment. The needs of these different types of organizations are different, so don’t try to cover them all with one paper. Write from the perspective of the exchange for one report, then shift the point of view and provide similar content targeted to a sell-side, and so on.
3. It’s not directed to a specific reader.
   Heads of trading have very different needs than heads of compliance, and CIOs are interested in different information than CEOs. So decide in advance who should read the document, and plan your content based on what interests that audience.  If you’re writing for traders or CXOs, then avoid using technical jargon. If you’re writing for an IT team, be prepared to clearly spell out how your products or services solve their specific technical problem. But even a technical white paper needs to address a compelling business need (see Reason 1.)
4. It’s not customer-centric.
   Make sure your white paper is about the customer, not your company.  A white paper is not a brochure. It’s an educational piece that helps a prospect gain a vision of how they can solve a challenging business or technical problem.
5. It’s too technical.
   Again, consider your target audience. If they are not technical, then be very careful about how you incorporate technical information. Sometimes, you’ll need to educate a business audience about why a particular type of technology is a better approach for solving their business problem. But be careful to not lose your reader with a lot of technical jargon.
6. It’s not technical enough.
   If your target audience is technical, then your white paper can be written from their point of view. For example, if you’re writing to heads of trading technology, then you might need to dig into issues around how your technology reduces latency. If you’re writing about hardware acceleration, you may need to cover the technical aspects around that technology. But use extreme caution. If you go too technical, you may lose your reader; and if you’re not technical enough, you may lose credibility.
7. It tries to cover too much ground.
   A white paper should not attempt to cover your entire product. It should address a specific topic. For example, if you’ve recently implemented hardware acceleration to speed up your system, you might write about what client problems drove that development; how you approached incorporating this technology; and what benefits clients can reap.
8. It’s too long.
   Buyer research shows that the ideal length for a white paper is 6-8 pages including graphics. If you go much longer, your audience probably won’t have time to read the paper. We recommend breaking up your content into several shorter documents rather than publishing one 30-page treatise.

Warm regards,

Candyce