Altana AI: Make Your Supply Chain Shock-Proof (White Paper)
I worked as a freelance content writer at the tech start-up, Altana AI, which eventually led to an in-house role. There, I developed, promoted, and repurposed written content for top and middle-funnel marketing.
Here’s a taste of how I did it — and how I’d approach it differently if I did it again today.
Brief: Work with a subject-matter expert to co-write, edit and distribute a white paper on the 2021 shortage of semiconductors in the auto industry. Promote how the Altana product could have helped mitigate risks to the supply chain. Design the entire layout and design in Figma.
My Approach:
Rough Draft Review
When I came on board at Altana, there was already a rough draft of this white paper for my review. It read very technically, written by a supply chain subject matter expert and an analyst who pulled the data. Yet, senior management asked for this white paper rewrite to read as captivatingly as a spy novel — while targeting all of Altana’s target customers, which were personnel across national security and compliance, global trade, logistics, and Fortune 100 enterprises.
Filling in the Gaps with SME Interviews
Before this assignment, I was familiar with supply chains and all the things that could go wrong in our globalized world, given all the news during the pandemic and my time working to redistribute PPE to underserved groups at Get Us PPE — but this topic was very dense.
To synthesize the topic, I interviewed and maintained contact with SMEs in supply chain, cross-border compliance, and analysts from the customer solutions team to parse out the important details from the rest and understand the supply chain’s current grapples and its origins.
Rewrites, Edits & Gathering Consensus
If you’ve worked for a quickly-growing start-up, you’ll know that time is always limited.
I rewrote the piece to still pack a punch with in-depth content, but followed the brief by catering to all audiences by explaining or limiting jargon whenever possible.
It also did not overly focus on how the Altana product could have soothed the pains of the supply chain during its most bottlenecked era during the COVID lockdown since this piece was intended for top and middle-of-funnel marketing, providing a way for our team to engage with prospects.
Gathering consensus on the shape of the white paper involved getting buy-in from the top of the organization—to the day-to-day, customer-facing staff. Since the roles of each stakeholder weren’t defined, some were in the Google doc with line edits, whereas others required scheduled meetings to go over the piece in broad strokes.
💡 In a perfect world, if I could do it again:
Definitions of how to qualify leads lead derived from marketing or sales.
Have a client who represented one of our ideal, targeted customers review the whitepaper and weigh in on things like: Did the piece 1) get your attention 2) make you want to keep reading and visit our website 3) make you want to share it with others 4) explain the topic clearly and interestingly and preempt your questions
Close contact with each team that engaged with prospects and customers to more clearly understand how the content was used and received by the audience.
Design
I designed this whitepaper, working from company design templates on Figma (my first time using it!), which involved creating my own digital collages, page layout, and editing templated pages to suit this content that was longer-form than the other content pieces that had been created.
Distribution
I led the distribution of this white paper by:
Distributing it to all of Altana’s internal teams, to share with their prospects and customers
Creating more channels for promotion and building up the cadence of posts, including:
The company’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
Creating and designing an e-newsletter.
Having the white paper printed and available by QR code at conferences and expos.
Creating a more prominent place on the company’s evergreen homepage to highlight new content.
Results
Most-downloaded resource on the company's website
