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Some time ago, I was helping a consulting firm write a whitepaper. I asked the consultants I was working with to send me an example of a previous whitepaper written by their firm that they liked, so that I could get a sense of the kind of writing style and presentation that they preferred.

The next meeting I had with the consultants didn’t go so well.

“I’d be surprised if anyone read that paper all the way through,” I told them.

Now a marketer wouldn’t be shocked to hear that, but these consultants were. And they had some reason to be. The whitepaper—it looked more like a coffee-table magazine, actually—was gorgeous. Four-color, thick paper stock, elegant design, and high-budget photography. And it was well written: stripped of marketing and consulting jargon, focused on educating and informing the reader rather than pitching any specific services. It was organized as well as any special issue of a business magazine, with an overall theme that had universal appeal and four articles packed with useful and unique information (including survey data) that each related to the theme and to each other.

But there was a fatal flaw.

First They Skim, Then (Maybe) They Read
Now, before I tell you what that fatal flaw was, I need to tell you how people read whitepapers. The first thing they do is skim. They read the headline, then they scan the rest of the opening page for similarly digestible content—e.g., a secondary headline or “kicker” that explains the point of the story in slightly more detail, pictures (and captions), etc. Often, readers will make a decision about whether to continue at that point, without having read any of the actual text of the article itself. For B2B readers, this is especially true; they aren’t curling up on the couch with this stuff. They do it to become better informed or because they have been asked (i.e., ordered) to research the topic. Whether it’s a printed whitepaper landing in their mailbox, a link in an e-mail newsletter, or an organic search on Google, this whitepaper is either standing in the way of getting other work done, or is part of a pile of similar content that they are wading through to glean some new insight.

The Curse of the Big, Gray Slab
Can you guess the fatal flaw in the whitepaper? When you stripped away all the beautiful surroundings and just looked at the text of the articles, each was one long, gray slab. There was nothing to break it up, nothing to give the busy reader’s eye and brain a break. Not a single subhead, not a single informational graphic (a cardinal sin when you have survey data, as this company did) or a bullet-list sidebar-not even a drop-cap to break up the sections of the text.

That whitepaper was a beautiful, five-figure waste of money and talent.

Good B2B Thought Leadership Has to Be Loooong…
I’m still waiting to read a good B2B technology whitepaper that really breaks new ground and is fewer than 1000 words. I just don’t think it’s possible. We sell very complex products to highly educated people who expect at least some degree of intellectual rigor in their reading materials. That’s not a formula for brevity. So we need to find ways to make readers more comfortable on their long journeys through our content.

…But Formatting Makes It Seem Shorter
Formatting is the best tool we have to do this. I used it to make this 7000-word tutorial on ERP software navigable—to the point where as of last year it was still getting 20,000 web hits per month. I set it up like a tech FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). I tried to think of all the questions that someone new to ERP might ask (as well as those they might not know to ask, but should) and we listed them all at the top of the first page (and each page thereafter). Every weary researcher clicking through to it from Google can see at a glance what he or she is in for. Don’t have time to read it all now? Come back and click on the questions you didn’t read yet. The piece became so popular that college IT programs began creating permanent links to it on their websites (which partly explains why the traffic is so consistently high-professors are assigning it every term).

Of course, the web makes the need to format well even more important. However, unlike print, where the natural tendency is to make everything long and unbroken, on the web the tendency is to clutter the page with as many options as possible. The goal for both types of media should be to present readers with a clean, thematically unified page with unified elements.

Formatting That Shortens the Story
Here are some formatting elements to consider online and in print:

• Write headlines that instruct and inform. When I joined the staff of one magazine, our impressively educated editors tried to outdo one another with clever puns and literary references to the point that the headlines were unintelligible. They were writing for each other, not the readers. Every headline has to answer the question: why should I spend any time reading this? And remember to get keywords in there for the Google monster.
• Tease the point of view with kickers. Just beneath the headline, there should be a couple of sentences that explain what they can expect to learn (also good for feeding Google). Most readers still haven’t decided whether to read the story after reading the headline. Use the kicker to hook them.
• Tell a story with sub-heads (as I’ve done in this post). Every few paragraphs, there needs to be a sub-head to give the reader a visual break. Use those sub-heads to tell the story of the text in shorthand. They may be the only things that anyone reads all the way through.
• Highlight your stars with call outs. Call outs (or pull quotes) are indispensable because they add a nice graphic element to the piece. It’s also a great way to sell your practitioners and subject matter experts to the audience by quoting them. But as with subheads, they need to tell a coherent story within the story.
• Break up the text with bullet lists (like the one you’re reading). Okay, how many of you skimmed this post down to this bullet list before starting to read in earnest? Lists give the reader value without making them plod through the whole piece. Lead each bullet with a short, highlighted introductory sentence to pull the reader in. Use action verbs and make calls to action wherever possible.
• Keep sidebars short and self-contained. Thought leadership needs to be long, but sidebars really do need to short, without exception-never longer than 500 words, but more like 200 or less. Sidebars should be self-contained. No one should have to read the main story to understand the sidebar.

The Formatting Should Tell Its Own Story
Before sending your next whitepaper to the copy editor, check your work by reading just the formatting around the story. It should tell a story, offer facts and statistics, and outline calls to action. In other words, the formatting should offer some of the same value to readers that they would get if they actually sat down and read the piece from beginning to end. It should offer so many points of entry to the main story that skimmers go back to the beginning and become readers.

We can’t expect people to read all that we write in B2B. But we have to impart a sense of value with everything we do. That’s why formatting is so important. Don’t let the skimmers turn the page without giving them something to remember you by.