Background: Although some have noted that combining technical and marketing content is precarious, technical communication professionals are increasingly involved in content marketing, which includes the creation of white papers. Literature review: The little existing literature on white papers provides conflicting guidance about managing the combination of technical and marketing content. Both soft-sell and hard-sell marketing approaches have been recommended. One source of such inconsistent guidance may be the lack of agreement about definitions. Research on print advertisements has described hard and soft selling as multidimensional rather than binary aspects of persuasive appeals. Research question: Which dimensions of hard- and soft-sell appeals are predominant in white papers? Research methodology: To complete our descriptive study, we collected a corpus of documents labeled as white papers in TechRepublic, and then selected and trained three raters to complete a series of judgments about dimensions of persuasive appeals in the corpus. We aggregated those ratings, calculating the mean and standard deviation for the dimensions to describe their distribution across the corpus. Results/discussion: Overall, hard-sell dimensions were more prevalent than soft-sell dimensions. However, the soft-sell category of “implicitness” was also dominant. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate the value of treating hard and soft selling as multidimensional, complementary, and combinatory marketing appeals that allow, for example, a single white paper to be both “subjective” (soft sell), and “precise” (hard sell), or both “creative” (soft sell) and “informative” (hard sell).

中文翻译：

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硬销售还是软销售？将白皮书理解为内容营销


背景：尽管有些人指出，将技术和营销内容相结合是不稳定的，但技术传播专业人员越来越多地参与内容营销，其中包括创建白皮书。文献综述：有关白皮书的现有文献很少，对于管理技术和营销内容的组合提供了相互矛盾的指导。软销售和硬销售营销方法都被推荐。这种不一致的指导的根源之一可能是对定义缺乏共识。对印刷广告的研究将硬销售和软销售描述为说服性吸引力的多维而非二元方面。研究问题：白皮书中硬推销和软推销诉求的哪些维度占主导地位？研究方法：为了完成我们的描述性研究，我们在TechRepublic上收集了一个被标记为白皮书的文档语料库，然后选择并培训了三位评估者来完成对语料库中说服力维度的一系列判断。我们汇总了这些评分，计算维度的平均值和标准差，以描述它们在语料库中的分布。结果/讨论：总体而言，硬推销维度比软推销维度更为普遍。然而，“隐性”的软推销类别也占主导地位。结论：我们的结果证明了将硬销售和软销售视为多维、互补和组合的营销诉求的价值，例如，允许单个白皮书既“主观”（软销售）又“精确”（硬销售） ），或同时具有“创意”（软销售）和“信息丰富”（硬销售）。