You’re reading this because you want your white paper to get media coverage.

But stop. Not a lot of white papers are newsworthy and even those that are need to be pitched in the right way to get coverage.

Before you even think about a PR plan for your white paper, ask these questions:

Can we connect our white paper to a news issue or trend, to make it relevant?
What does our white paper mean to our customers, industry, and wider society?
Does it confirm what our audience already knows or are we adding original value?
What will the average person think of our paper – good and bad?
Who cares? And why should they care?

You can just as easily apply these questions to a research report or e-book, if that’s the content you’re working with.

So, if you’ve got the right answers, you can prepare a written pitch for your in-house PR. If it’s just you or a colleague managing your PR right now, you can use these same steps to prepare a written pitch to media.

Your pitch serves as a good, plainly-worded summary that makes your white paper’s news value crystal clear. Get it ready weeks before your white paper’s release date. Busy media people like advance notice. So does your in-house PR. Advance notice gives them time to target the most well-suited media contact.

What about the writing itself? You’ll need to help a wider public grasp the white paper’s main finding or argument, quickly. So spell things out. Say why the work is important.

Explain why people should care

Why? Well, media don’t care who you are. You must convince them that the actual contents of your paper – not just the fact that that you’ve produced one – is news. If you can’t convince your PR, they can’t convince the media for you.

Your white paper just might be news if it has:

a new ‘fact’ about customer behaviour;
a fresh perspective on an industry or societal problem;
a research finding which challenges perceptions;
or significant survey data, or credible forecasts.

Your written pitch needs to be direct, too. It needs to be specific. In its Pulse of Fintech report, KPMG write that “investments in Fintech companies in Asia hit $16.8 billion in the first half of 2018”. That’s a lot better than saying “People continued to invest in fintech in the first half of the year”. Credible, specific and factual content strengthens a pitch.

Get to the point and drop the jargon

What about the structure of your pitch? That’s important too. Put the central point in the first paragraph. Why? Well, if your reader gets interrupted by a text message or a coffee craving, they’ll still have come away with the main gist.

Use the rest of your summary to explain why the white paper was produced, how research was done, and what your findings means to your audience. Cut out jargon. Limit acronyms. And write it in a way that a 12-year-old can understand.

And try to keep it short – a page will do. As a founder, you’ll be especially glad of the short copy when you run a journalist or editor through it on the phone. But you’ll need to cover every step above before you even think about doing that.

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Photo by Chris Moore on Unsplash

This article was first published on November 29, 2018.

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