
White Paper World 54: February 4, 2025
- Quick tip: Turn the tables on your competitors
- This just in: How marketers use AI [survey]
- Preview: My hunt for the earliest white paper
Read in 5 minutes. Listen in 13:30 minutes:
Quick tip: Turn the tables on your competitors
2.5-minute read.
When you’re up against stiff competition, how can you make your product’s unique value stand out?
One simple tactic in any problem/solution white paper: Create a table to sum up all the traditional solutions aka competitors.
You can count on anyone scanning through your paper to stop at a table.
A good table can replace—or sum up—pages of discussion. It’s easy to absorb and hard to forget.
And you can even repeat the same table:
- First, with all the alternatives or competitors and their drawbacks
- Again, with your recommended solution added.
That way, you can cast lots of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) on all the competing solutions.
Here are two examples where I did that in white papers in the past.
Real-life example #1: Document management system
My client was a small business facing name-brand competitors like Microsoft SharePoint and OpenText.
But my client could outdo the big guys when it came to getting a project up and running. And they weren’t afraid to name names.
So in the traditional solutions, I summed up all the competitors in this table.
Looks like it takes about 60 days to set up the platform, costs about $100K, and takes 18 months to populate the database, right?
After introducing my client’s platform, I repeated the same table with their product highlighted in yellow.
(Since this is from a few years ago, I blocked out the client’s name.)
Looks like they could get started instantly, do a project for $50,000 less, and save 4 to 11 months over the competition. Those eye-popping numbers really helped my client get noticed.
The final kicker: My client wasn’t the source for these numbers.
A prospect did all this research independently, and then shared it with my client when they won the project. Noice.
Advanced tip: Use generic characters to show rankings
While the table above quotes specific times and dollars, you can also use more fuzzy qualities like Quality, Reliability, Service, or User Ratings.
And even if you can’t give specifics, you can use generic characters as placeholders. This may sound weird, but I guarantee you have seen this before.
Think about how sources like Yelp sum up restaurant prices:
- $ = low-cost, fast food
- $$ = medium-priced, mom-and-pop independent
- $$$ = expensive, a fancy place
And restaurants use the same approach on their menus:
- = mildly spicy
- = medium hot
- = hot!
Now let’s look at some tables where I used the most suggestive character of all: a question mark (?).
Real-life example #2: White paper for windshield replacement
Every windshield now includes built-in cameras for safety features like collision avoidance and lane keeping.
But not every repair shop knows how to calibrate those cameras properly.
If you have a broken windshield, you have three main options for replacing it:
- Do it yourself as a DIYer
- Go to an independent garage or mechanic
- Go to the OEM dealer for your model.
I used this visual table to wrap up the discussion of these three options.
Notice how this table creates FUD by using a question mark (?) in certain cells.
I repeated the same table later, with our recommended solution added at the bottom. Notice how “likely” is far more reassuring than “not likely” or “?”
Clearly, the best solution is to go to a specialty auto glass outlet. They likely have the awareness, resources, tools, and training to do a better job.
And those two tables summed up almost 5 pages of text in the white paper.
Conclusions
Next time you’re drafting a white paper, challenge yourself to turn the tables on the competition with a head-to-head comparison.
Use specifics where you can. And if you can’t, try suggestive characters like $ or ?
This can be a powerful way to make your product emerge as the clear winner.
This just in: How marketers use AI [survey]
1.5-minute report.
I’ve just come across an intriguing survey on marketers and AI.
Mike Stelzner of the Social Media Examiner surveyed 1,250 marketers on how they’re using generative AI, the benefits and concerns they see, and what they believe lies ahead.
The survey appeared in Q4 2024. Since B2B marketers hire white paper writers, I believe the findings touch on everyone who reads this newsletter.
Here are some highlights.
How many marketers use AI
Nearly 2 out of 3 marketers (65%) use AI at least once a week. More than a third (37%) use it every day.
And 3 out of 4 marketers (74%) plan to use AI more in 2025.
What platform do marketers use?
ChatGPT is by far the most popular platform among those surveyed (90%).
This confirms what I’ve thought for some time. ChatGPT is the industry standard, the Microsoft Word of AI for most business people.
My personal favorite for editorial tasks, Claude, trails at 24% usage.
Benefits of AI
Marketers agree AI saves them time (86%) and increases their productivity (79%).
And most (86%) believe AI will change the way marketing is done.
Concerns about AI
Most marketers (80%) are concerned about the quality and reliability of any content generated by AI.
And 7 out of 10 are concerned about copyright.
But a third (32%) worry about losing their jobs to AI. I’ve heard anecdotes about marketing people being laid off. Have you?
As for whether AI will wipe out humanity, the survey didn’t ask about that.

Source: 2024 Generative AI Marketing Industry Report
How B2B marketers use AI for content
The most common tasks include:
- Brainstorming ideas for content (74%)
- Editing content (64%)
- Recommending titles, headlines, taglines (62%)
- Summarizing existing content (57%)
What’s more, a whopping 70% of B2B marketers surveyed are using AI to create first drafts of content. I only hope they’re talking about social media posts, not white papers.
As B2B writers and marketers, we need to be aware of these trends.
Writers, don’t be afraid to mention AI when you’re talking with a client. Most of them are likely curious how you plan to use it on their project.
Preview: My hunt for the earliest white paper
1.5-minute read.
My hands trembled as I opened another weighty volume and began to leaf through the yellowing pages.
A glance at my phone told me the library would soon be closed.
There would be no time to ask the librarians to fetch me another five volumes from the stacks deep underground. That would take an hour I didn’t have.
The four volumes I’d already rejected sat in a pile on the metal trolly by my desk.
If I didn’t find what I needed in this book, I didn’t know when I could ever visit the British Library in London again. After all, it took me 11 hours on two airplanes to get here.
Hardly daring to breathe, I reached page 205 and glanced at the text.
THE SELECT COMMITTEE Appointed to consider of the Laws relating to WATCHMAKERS, and to report their Observation and Opinion thereupon …
What do I care about watchmakers?
I skipped down a paragraph.
YOUR committee find, that the Laws which relate to, or affect, the manufacture of Watches and Clocks … are very much dispersed in the statute books …
What do I care about the messy legal code of the United Kingdom? I sighed and skipped down some more.
… and intermixed with other matters, so that it has become very difficult to apply them in remedy of abuses complained of …
Wait a minute: Abuses? Complaints?
I scanned a few more lines with growing excitement.
Your Committee most deeply lament, that a manufacture so peculiar in its nature … especially in its relation to navigation, astronomy, and mechanical arts, should be depressed, and that the persons engaged therein should have remained so long … in a state of distress and pauperism, as exhibited in the Evidence …
I jolted up in my chair. Watchmakers were going broke in the 1800s?
And this report had the evidence to prove it? And it proposed a remedy?
Could this be it?
Could this be what I’d been searching for?
Could this document—buried for two centuries—be the long-lost ancestor of the B2B white papers we know today?
In a coming issue, I’ll reveal the fascinating details of this 200-year-old document—the earliest known precursor to the modern white paper—and uncover what it can still teach us about creating B2B content today.
If you like this newsletter…
Here are three ways to support it.
Thank you to all the people who have—that’s always a pleasant surprise.
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Gordon Graham
That White Paper Guy
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