It is barely possible to imagine the significance or the sheer boldness of this event, yet, Will knew what he was doing. Will's plan was that before his coronation, the bishop would commission a tapestry to recount the details of the invasion and Will's subsequent ascendance to the throne.
The tapestry was a 230-foot-long comic strip, with detailed and thrilling action scenes. Will knew if he wanted the people to accept him as the next king, people would have to understand the legitimacy of his claim.
You see, William the Conqueror, a.k.a. William the Bastard, had a legitimacy issue, so he created the Bayeux Tapestry to convince the people of England that from then on he was the real McCoy, the first Norman king.
If you sell business to business, and your products, services and solutions are sophisticated, expensive and have complex buying processes, you too may have noticed that acquiring qualified prospects has become pretty hard over the last 10-20 years. With the proliferation of the Internet, this situation has become even worse.
If you're in this type of business, one of the most effective marketing weapons you can have in your arsenal is your very own custom-made tapestry. Well, maybe smaller than 200-feet long. We can also call it a white paper.
I know this page is long, but as you read this article to the end, it can bring a new dimension to your marketing programme.
A white paper is 8-12-page detailed written diagnosis of a market- or niche-specific problem and a presentation of a proposed solution. Its purpose is to educate, inform, and persuade decision-makers through the accurate identification of existing problems and the presentation of beneficial solutions that solve specific problems.
It's a cross-breed of a brochure's persuasion and an article's objectivity.
Sponsored by a company that barely mentions its own products and services.
It reads like an article based on objectivity, and be persuasive only in the "call to action" section, asking the reader to take a specific to advance the reader's status quo.
A white paper educates (soft selling), inform (fact-based) and persuade (Call to action).
Are they important?
No one buys faster servers to have faster servers. Businesses buy faster servers to have higher responsiveness to clients and prospects, thus to acquire more clients and reduce client attrition.
That is, businesses don't buy technical solutions. They have business problems and they need business solutions. Your technology is the means to the end.
If you write a white paper on a business problem and a business solution, like insufficient client acquisition and high clients attrition, and link them to your technology, like faster servers, then you stand out from the ocean of competing IT companies like a genuine Bavarian lederhosen-wearing yodeller in a heavy metal band.
So, instead of sporting the features and benefits of your products and services, offer valuable information that relates to business problems/solutions which your target market struggles with and your products and services provide.
And once you have a white paper, you can build your whole client acquisition process on that so effectively that you never have to engage in old-fashioned dirty, filthy, bone-jarring cold-prospecting drudgery.
Finally, let's consider some research from KnowledgeStorm, Inc and its white paper, "What Technology Buyers Want You to Know About Online Content"...
The survey question was...
"When researching IT solutions online, what is your level of confidence and trust in the technical accuracy of the following types of content."
If we consider third party white papers and research reports as 100%, the most trusted sources, then vendor produced white papers and research reports come in at 83%, demos at 82%, webinars and vendor decryption sheets at 78%.