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White papers, e-books, and other types of long-form content are becoming more and more popular as a marketing tool across numerous industries. But they also take a great deal of effort to produce—and aren’t always worth it. Here are a few things you should ask yourself before making the commitment.

Is your audience looking for this sort of thing? Generally speaking, white papers are usually marketed to business audiences—so a white paper targeting buyers of commercial insurance will probably do better than those targeting consumers. That said, consumers are interested in e-books—and an e-book that presents a definitive, easy-to-understand guide to a major problem many people face—such as getting the best price on a type of mandatory insurance in an expensive market—could potentially do well.

It would take some market research to see if there’s a large, intractable problem facing your prospects that you could help them solve this way.

Do you have new information to add? A great e-book or white paper should offer detailed advice that prospects can’t find elsewhere—and that can’t be completely covered in a series of blog posts. Ideally, this information should be unavailable in other parts of the industry. If you’re just offering common knowledge or information the customer could find easily with a basic Google search, you’re probably not going to generate a lot of leads.

Do you have a promotional plan in place? Writing a white paper or e-book and posting it on your website isn’t enough—even if it’s great content. You also have to promote it fairly aggressively to really generate leads. It takes a strong, multi-platform promotional plan that could include email marketing, multiple plugs on your blog and across social media, subscription to a distribution service, and more to generate interest.

Have you done the research? You’ll need to know exactly who you’re talking to with this piece of content—and speak their language. If the person making the insurance buying decision at the companies you’re targeting is in a technical or engineering position, you may need to go in-depth into the types of problems they face to discuss insurance solutions and how they apply. That requires specialized expertise.

White papers and e-books can both be highly effective tools in generating leads. However, they aren’t right for every situation. Do some research and gauge whether your target audience—the people making the purchasing decision with regard to insurance—are facing the kind of challenges you can help them solve in this type of long form content. If so, an e-book or white paper might be highly successful in your next lead generation campaign.