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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硬卖还是软卖？将白皮书理解为内容营销

背景：尽管有人指出将技术和营销内容结合起来是不稳定的，但技术传播专业人士越来越多地参与内容营销，其中包括创建白皮书。文献综述：关于白皮书的现有文献很少，在管理技术和营销内容的组合方面提供了相互矛盾的指导。已推荐软销售和硬销售营销方法。这种不一致指导的一个来源可能是对定义缺乏共识。对印刷广告的研究将硬性和软性销售描述为说服力的多维而非二元方面。研究问题：在白皮书中，硬性销售和软性销售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 中收集了一个标记为白皮书的文档语料库，然后选择并训练了三个评分者来完成对语料库中说服诉求维度的一系列判断。我们汇总了这些评分，计算了维度的均值和标准差，以描述它们在整个语料库中的分布。结果/讨论：总体而言，硬销售维度比软销售维度更普遍。然而，“隐性”的软销售类别也占主导地位。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“创意”（软销售）和“信息性”（硬销售）。